We’re kicking off WWB with the most commonly flogged topic in online education: are online degrees worse than, as good as, or better than traditional brick-and-mortar schools? No doubt a discussion you’ve heard once or twice before, but the parameters keep changing.

More players are entering the field, from unscrupulous diploma mills to Harvard and Stanford. Technology evolves (and is fought over). New schools gain accreditation; others lose it. Tens of thousands of new students sign up every year (up to 3.2 million in the U.S. last year, according to the Sloan Consortium), despite reports that say employers don’t trust online degrees as much as they do traditional ones.

(more…)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome one and all to WorldWideBlog, our very first foray into this “Web 2.0″ we keep hearing so much about. Why are we adding yet another voice to the crowded blogosphere, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

There are lots of opinions out there about higher education in general, and online education in particular. WorldWideBlog’s mission is to sort out the useful information from the noise–and we need your help. Got a question about education? Ask us. Got an answer you’d like to share? Post it. Want to contribute an entry? Send it along to us and we’ll take a look.

WorldWideBlog is a spot for thoughtful, reasoned discussion of the most resonant issues in higher education today. We reserve the right to remove any comments that do not serve this purpose. This means the typical online-education-forum contribution of “[insert online college here] suX0r and they dont give u a rel degree” is not at all what we’re looking for here, and won’t stay up very long.

Disclaimers aside, let’s get on with the show!