Customer Reviews

Barron's Guide to Distance Learning: Degrees, Certificates, Courses (Barrons Guide to Distance Learning, 1999)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is an excellent resource for someone who is looking to go to school but does not have the time or ability to attend a regular school. It gives you all the information you need about the schools to decide if they have the right program and criteria for you. It also gives you the information to contact the schools for more information. It is easy to use and has excellent index's that help you find what you want without having to read the entire book.

This is the best big-picture overview of distance learning programs available today, and is hugely better than the Bear's Guide, a popular competitor. The strength of this book is in its comprehensiveness. It lists so many programs that it can be a chore to wade through them all. Fortunately they are indexed in the main text alphabetically, but are cross-referenced in the back by state and program subject.

This book would be a hands-down five star slam dunk if it were more up to date. I realize that colleges change their programs all the time, but to me that strongly argues for less time between editions. This was last published in 2002, and much has happened since then especially where Internet learning is concerned. Despite this weakness, it is still at least as current as its competitors, and is vastly more useful and comprehensive. Another small issue that occurs occasionally are short entries like "See school website" or "Contact school" in response to required data fields. I gather from reading this that the entries here were exclusively based on the information schools sent back to the editors on a standard survey. It would have been nice if the researchers had actually called the schools and asked for the information to complete these data fields. It would have been more time consuming to write (enormously so, in fact), but the finished product would have been unbeatable.

In the end, this is my favorite guide to distance learning available, and despite its weaknesses, I still recommend it to anyone considering a distance learning option at any educational level.

I purchased this as a reference for my masters thesis. In 2007/2008 it was really out of date and can really only be referenced for the early stages of distance learning.

There is a more comprehensive book on the topic called Campus Free College Degrees: Thorsons Guide to Accredited College Degrees Through Distance Learning by Marcie K. Thorson.

If you're new to Distance Learning, this book will be a good primer. It did help me to save about $2000 by directing me to a junior college that had the classes I wanted, rather than taking classes through the out of state school that granted my degree. However, two years is a long time in the evolution of distance learning, and the information is out of date for many of the programs. A great grad program at NYU was completely overlooked, as was the acquisition of University of Sarasota by Argosy University. Wait for the third ed.

As the President for TheDistanceLearningExpo.com, we have used many different resources to guide the people coming to our website. We found Barron's guide to be the most up to date.