A Look Back at How Online Schools Started

Nowadays, online degree programs are so commonplace that people tend to forget that they haven't always been around. In actuality, online degree programs have only began to flourish in the last fifteen years or so.

There are already a lot of nursing students who are either enrolled in or have successfully completed an online continued nursing education (e.g. LPN to RN). But did any of them even bother to learn just how online education got its promising start?

Dr. John Sperling, a Cambridge-educated professor who later became an entrepreneur and is now a billionaire, was one of the pioneers in the field of online education who founded the University of Phoenix in 1976. Established as a private for-profit college, the university was designed specifically to cater to non-traditional students.

Sperling saw that regular colleges were already serving the needs of all those students who just graduated from high school and were going to college with the help of their parents - but who was addressing the needs of working professionals who might already have a degree but wanted a career change, or who had day jobs and needed a career-oriented education with classes at times they could actually attend?

To fill this need of working adults, night classes and other non-traditional educational solutions were made available at the University of Phoenix. And with the advent and eventually, the growing popularity of the internet and the advancement of its technology, Sperling discovered an added way of bringing education to individuals who needed to work and advance their careers at the same time.

And in 1989 one of the very first online campuses in the world was created through the University of Phoenix; in 1991, the Online Campus graduated its first class.

Now, there are literally hundreds of thousands of students attending the University of Phoenix online, and they have programs for Licensed Vocational (or Practical) Nurse to Registered Nurse, LPN to BSN, RN to BSN, and many other healthcare classes.

In the same way, there are already many other online schools offering various degrees in nursing.

But these schools, and online students for that matter, should not forget that it was the visionary Dr. John Sperling that made all this possible for them.