Online education expanding, awaits innovation

"We're still at a pretty rudimentary stage," Garrett said, noting educators rarely employ video, unique links, or other technological innovations.

"Will it be games? Will it be simulations? Will it be social networking? Will it be something we haven't yet come across?" he said.

No one has yet figured out how nursing students can practice drawing blood online, Conlon said. But there have been enhancements such as virtual laboratories where budding chemists can conduct experiments that might be too dangerous or too costly in the real world.

Most online course offerings tend toward vocational subjects like business, legal and health care training. Students needing hands-on experience go to Kaplan's campuses or its partners.

Most Kaplan classes are capped at 25 students because faculty can be subjected to communication overload. Students who might have been intimidated to speak up in classrooms often find their voice online.

Professors, most with doctorates, are hired for their teaching ability and not for their research, Conlon said.

The cost at Kaplan for a four-year college degree is around $65,000, compared to up to $150,000 or more at a private college. Online library access is provided by the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

By studying online, Barnwell saved on the time and travel to the university nearest her New Jersey home. Online tuition was less than $30,000, one-third the cost of the university.

Roughly half of the 4,500 U.S. brick-and-mortar colleges and universities now have online programs. Some have proven so popular that schools have had to restrict enrollment by on-campus students because they were taking slots away from off-campus students, said Jeff Seaman, who led a survey on the topic for the Sloan Consortium.

Online education is also making inroads in schools, with one million U.S. elementary and high school students, or some 4 percent of the total, learning online.

Some take remedial or advanced placement courses not available at their schools, and some are being home-schooled or live in isolated rural areas.

"You're able to learn at your own pace and you also can have help whenever you need it from the teacher," said Christopher Cox, 12, a child actor in Columbia, Maryland.

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted half of kindergarten through high school students will attend school online within the next decade.

This worries people like Laurie Fendrich who wrote a response to a Washington Post article on the subject.

"If we want our kids to end up sitting alone in isolated little rooms when they're 18 and 20, staring at computer screens instead of facing other real human beings, thinking in a way that turns thought into nothing but bits of information ... we could insert them into comfortable little cocoons in their homes from the age of, oh, say, seven."

(Editing by Alan Elsner)