Online programs comprise the fastest growing segment of further education, with brick-and-mortar varsities - many hurting from budget cuts - seeing online as a method to earn cash and expand their footprints.

In the meantime , some officeholders are ardent for public establishments to embrace online education as a method to educate more folks at a lower cost. These movements have much invested in online education being equal or superior to the old school kind. And since a Dept of Education meta-analysis last summer concluded that "normally scholars in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face to face instruction," many recommends now consider the problem closed. Not so fast, say analysts at the nation's Bureau of Business Research. The Education Dept's study was terribly defective and its implications have been overblown, say the writers of a working paper released this month by the bureau. "None of the studies cited in the widely-publicized meta-analysis released by the US Dept of Education included randomly-assigned scholars taking a full-term course, with live vs online delivery mechanisms, in settings that may be without delay compared ( i.e, similar instructional materials delivered by the same instructor )," they write. "The proof base on the relative advantages of live vs online education is thus flimsy at best." Mark Rush, an economics teacher at the School of Florida and one of the study's 3 co-authors, announces he believes the Education Dept was under huge pressure to reassure online education's many shareholders, especially cash-strapped state higher-education systems, that online education is as good, or even better than the study room kind. But the proven fact that it "didn't compare apples to apples" and seriously lacked experimental information means to treat the meta-study as a definitive vote of confidence for online education would be scientifically unreliable. "the realization that Internet-based and live classes are analogous should have been reached a little hastily," Rush says.