Online career and professional development courses are becoming increasingly popular as students enter their senior years of college and prepare to compete in the entry-level job market. Typically, career-development programs were conducted in face-to-face seminars and meetings, but today can be delivered through online video platforms and online courseware platforms offered on the Internet. Online career development also offers a consistency in messaging that can often be hard to deliver through face-to-face career-development programs.
Innovations in distance education are another popular trend in higher education. Today, students can receive degrees from accredited colleges located across the country from the comfort of their own home by taking online classes and attending lectures by viewing them from live video streams. Students who cannot be physically present at a college are still able to reap the benefits of an on-campus education by using distance education, or distance-learning software, that colleges might deploy to help widen their potential student base.
Long gone are the days when students have to register in-person, or over the phone, for classes they wish to take in a following semester. Using online course-scheduling software, colleges can administer unique log-in credentials to each student and give students unique permission sets that allow them to register for certain courses and prevent them from registering from others. For example, at many colleges, senior-year students are the first group to be able to register for classes. An online course-scheduling system allows the college to allow any senior-year student with the proper credentials to register, and iteratively open up scheduling permissions for underclassmen as needed.
One way that college instructors are making better use of class time is administering quizzes using online software platforms. Students typically sign in using a unique set of log-in credentials provided. Instead of administering the quiz during lecture hours, the quiz can be taken at the students' leisure (by a specified deadline). This allow the instructor to spend more class-time teaching fundamentals and educating the students to better prepare them for quizzes and tests.