By John Timmer
January 04, 2009 - 05:00PM CT

This week's edition of Science contains a series of perspectives on how computer technology is changing the education system. Some of them focus on the purely hypothetical, such as the use of MMOs for educational purposes or the development of immersive artificial environments for education purposes.

Two of the papers, however, review a real trend in education: the growing access to everything from educational materials to entire degree programs via the Internet. The trend showed up throughout the articles. For example, the need to get educational material online was highlighted in the MMO article, which pointed out that the World of Warcraft subscriber base was over 20 times larger than the number of science, technology, engineering, and math degrees awarded annually in the US; even Lineage, which was released in 1999, still has a subscriber base that's more than twice as large.

Formal online education - If everyone's online anyway, it's no surprise that education is moving there as well. Many aspects of education are moving there formally, as a variety of online degree-granting programs have developed over the last decade. Some of these are commercial, online-only ventures, but those have been joined by programs developed by universities with a traditional, physical campus.

For the most part, the online programs remain a fraction of the size of traditional student bodies, although, in some rare cases, schools are maintaining equal mixes of online and on-ground students. The perspective that focuses on this topic suggests that the majority of those enrolled in online-only classes are doing so at the community college level, and that most take this route because they already have significant time commitments, like jobs.