Tune In Tomorrow.(Special Report; THE EDUCATION RACE)(online education )

Byline: Stefan Theil; With Andrew Bast in New YorkWith in New York

New technology and higher gas prices are driving a boom in online education across the United States.

In Aaron Walsh's course on Collaborative Computing at Boston College, students learn how to work in teams to program software. It's not an easy class, but Walsh sees his students only once at the start of the semester. After that, they work in a virtual 3-D world, which Walsh--a former videogame programmer--helped design. Logging in via their PCs or laptops, professor and students interact and work together as digital avatars--just like they would in programs like Second Life, using voice-over-Internet to talk or ask questions. The class is part of a fast-growing movement to apply state-of-the-art computer-game technology to U.S. college learning. Similar experiments have been conducted at Harvard, Amherst and MIT.

Long gone are the days when "online education" meant little more than digitized correspondence courses. Today it features videos and podcasts, blogs and live chats, Webcams and wikis, and online courses are becoming ever more popular. This fall, more than 4 million students in the United States will take at least one course online, says Frank Mayadas, an expert on education technology at the Sloan Foundation in New York. America's biggest online school, the University of Phoenix, has grown from 80,000 students in 2000 to 345,000 students today and is on track to reach 500,000 by 2010.

Already popular with universities, which see such programs a way to boost enrollment and revenue, and with students, who love the flexibility and the lower tuition costs, online learning has gotten another big boost from the high price of gas. Four out of five U.S. college students now commute to campus every day, and admissions officers say fuel costs have helped push up online enrollment by 100 percent at some colleges in the past year.

Many such programs are also shedding their second-class status. Elite U.S. colleges like MIT and Stanford have begun offering a growing number of degrees online. Stanford alone now boasts more than 50 different online master's programs, most of them in engineering and science, which have no physical classroom component but which Stanford claims are just as good as its on-campus offerings. A few schools, ...