Over the past five or six years, several high-profile colleges and universities have attempted to enter the burgeoning world of online education. Just as the announcement of these efforts received intense publicity, the collapse and restructuring of these for-profit ventures have been greeted with no shortage of attention. However, as the headline of a recent New York Times article suggests, these early failures do not mean that online education has no future. Indeed, there are valuable "Lessons [to be] Learned at Dot-Com U."

Gary Matkin, Dean, Continuing Education UC Irvine

Gary Matkin, the Dean of Continuing Education at UC Irvine, has written an article that highlights some of these lessons, as well as chronicles UC's role and efforts in online education thus far. Matkin also discusses terminology associated with online education, proposes some strategic approaches that UC might adopt, and lists the elements crucial to ensuring educational quality consistent with traditional UC standards.

"Despite unhappy experiences to date, no one seriously proposes that online education will go away or even that it will not continue to grow in popularity," writes Matkin. "Every major university, including ours, therefore will be forced to set policies, allocate resources (that is, spend money), establish infrastructures, and create plans to support online education."