" Growing by Degrees: A Report on Online Education in the United States, 2005,'' a recent study of online learning technology and trends at more than 1,000 universities and colleges, has revealed its results.

Among the findings: online education opportunities are growing immensely, ' traditional' institutions are finally opening up to the idea of distance learning, and perhaps most important, that students have a ' harder' time passing an online course than a ' classroom' course.

Though online education offers terrific opportunities, there are drawbacks that students need to be aware of. As a professor, this is the weakness I see most often in my online courses: students not realizing that more discipline and motivation will be needed to succeed in an online course, compared to the same course taught in a traditional classroom setting.

The Kalamazoo Gazette reports:

Taking an online course, educators say, usually requires a student to be more disciplined than an on-campus class might require.

``I warn the students at the very beginning they are going to do more,'' said Ashlyn Kuersten, associate professor of political science at Western, who teaches an online course to non-majors.

``They're going to have to be consistent and self-motivated. I'm not going to motivate them,'' she said.

``I would say 30 percent of a class will just stop participating. ... That's why I think the best students are the nontraditional students,'' she said.

For this reason, some universities offer online tests to help students assess whether they are good candidates for learning online.