In a new book based on polls conducted by his international polling firm, John Zogby argues that online education will see widespread acceptance in the coming decades. He explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that online learning is suffering from “cultural lag,” where “those who define the standard [i.e. employers] haven’t caught on yet.”

In the book, titled The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, compares online learning to microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and Netflix as unlikely innovations that have been embraced by the mainstream. Nevertheless, polls conducted by his own organization in 2007 revealed that only 23 percent of individuals aged 18 to 24 believe that “online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education” as traditional schools. A different survey conducted by online learning provider Excelsior College in December 2007 showed that 43 percent of chief executives and small business owners agreed that online degrees were “as credible” as brick-and-mortar degrees.’

Zogby cited the different results of the two polls as evidence that a “paradigm shift” is occurring rapidly. As much as we’d like to agree, two polls, one conducted by an impartial organization and the other by an online school seem scarcely sufficient to prove a cultural attitude change. Nevertheless, the argument Zogby puts forth is compelling, even if it lacks the appropriate empirical backing: it is true that the global generation of 18 to 29 year-olds is more open to online learning.

As the Vault survey we blogged about earlier showed, there is an increasing amount of acceptance for online degrees, but calling it widespread, or even representative of a “paradigm shift,” is misleading. Employer opinion of online degrees may be improving, but cultural attitudes are far from the limiting factor: online schools themselves have to prove themselves worthy of respect by producing serious graduate-level scholarship—something Capella University and others have started to do.

Tags: Online Education