A "correspondence course" once carried the dubious distinction of providing an education based on mail-order lesson packages, the kind offered by obscure institutes that ran tiny ads in the back of magazines shouting: Become a legal secretary in the privacy of your own home! Learn to write best-selling novels in your spare time! Teach yourself how to sell anything to anybody! Presumably those courses appealed to people who could not afford time for traditional classes or who lived in remote areas far from colleges or vocational schools. Mail may have been their only alternative, but established institutions were not interested in entering the world of long-distance, packaged education. The Internet is changing that. Training and education has always been a primary strategy for career advancement, and the Internet is becoming not just a supplement to traditional academic programs, but an alternative to them as well. It brings learning to people's fingertips, without regard for how far someone may be from a school or how many other people are interested in the same class. Distance education, while not completely replacing the traditional college experience, is an excellent way to take college courses because of the time constraints facing many people today. One example is Farzad Naeim, an earthquake engineer from California. He decided to go to law school, but didn’t have time for campus meetings and classroom lectures. When he found out he could get his education through the Internet, he enrolled. Explaining the convenience he said, "I figure if I go to a standard school four nights a week, that eliminates the chance for me to see my kids grow up. I get my assignments off the computer, and I can study after the kids go to bed" (McQueen). Naeim is not the only one taking advantage of this opportunity. Many are taking advantage of this option over traditional classroom learning. Most adult learners, who e...
