(Early) Signs of (Modest) Online Saturation - Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Bold pronouncements about trends in the fast-moving, and somewhat data-poor, landscape of online learning should be approached with great skepticism -- which is why this isn't one. What it is is a high-level view of some data in an analysis published last month by Public Insight, which collects and makes available public data in accessible formats. The blog post by the company's CEO, Dan Quigg, carried the provocative title of "Has Distance Education Hit Its Peak?" -- a question inspired by federal data showing that the proportion of all academic programs that were offered via distance education declined to 10.5 percent in 2016 from 10.8 percent in 2017. It was the first such decline since the federal government's main higher education database, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, began collecting data on online education in 2013. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/09/are-we-seeing-early-signs-saturation-online-academic-programs