Marcia Seay has moved steadily up the career ladder in her 21 years at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and is now system manager for case management.
She knew she had the experience, knowledge and enthusiasm for the job; what she didn’t have was a bachelor’s degree. She changed that by graduating from the University of Phoenix with her bachelor of nursing degree in May 2010.
“I graduated from a diploma nursing school. Today, the hospital requires brand-new employees in my unit to have their RN/BSN. I didn’t feel like I should be managing people who had earned a degree without demanding it of myself,” said Seay.
Her commute and work schedule made attending traditional classes nearly impossible, so Seay chose online learning for its flexibility.
“Before I started, I thought going to an online school seemed like just paying for a degree,” said Seay, “but I’ve learned it’s no cakewalk. It was a good program, and you had to work hard for your grades.”
Her employer encouraged her with partial tuition reimbursement and promoted her while she was working on her degree. Now Seay is enrolled in a master’s degree in health care administration online. “Learning more about IT, management, budgeting and data analysis is really helping me on the job,” she said.
“In this economy, we’re seeing more workers go back to school for traditional or online degrees,” said Megan Graham, vice president of workforce strategy and planning for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Does it land them a job or a promotion? “I don’t know, but I think it’s better to be in that dogfight with a degree,” she said. “We’re behind anyone advancing in their learning.”
Nurses who have earned an MBA have benefited by being considered for management positions. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has supported patient care techs to become nurses with tuition reimbursement.
“We value people who have gone back to get a degree,” she said. “We know the programs at Georgia State, Emory or Georgia Tech. Those programs have been around so long, and we know that someone comes out of them prepared. But we’d never look at someone’s degree and say, ‘Oh, it was online.’ We’d be more apt to say, ‘Wow, you got your bachelor’s.’”
Program content and school accreditation are more important than the delivery method to Graham.
“We do require the degree come from an accredited institution, and we verify that, as well as look at what the school offers,” said Graham. “We know that more and more colleges are offering courses online -- and I think online education is upping its game. I believe we’ll see more online degrees in the future.”
A recent survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management and commissioned by eLearners.com agrees. It found that 87 percent of 449 randomly selected HR professionals viewed online degrees more favorably than they did five years ago. Seventy-nine percent said that they had hired a job applicant with an online degree in the past 12 months.
There’s been an explosion in virtual education in the past decade; and a more recent shift in the debate about online learning, according to Jason B. Huett, associate dean of online development and USG eCore at the University of West Georgia.
“The jury is no longer out,” he said. Research has found online learning to be just as effective as face-to-face education. Now that the delivery method has credibility, the debate has moved to comparing the quality between online educational programs. “Online degrees are not all equal,” he said.
Huett has seen more traditional institutions incorporate online learning into their mission statements and invest in faculty training -- making for a dynamic, competitive online environment. The University of West Georgia has doubled (from eight to 16) its online degrees in the past six months. “We view delivering quality-designed online programs as reaching a new and underserved audience,” said Huett.
Programs that are well-designed, cost-effective and fill a workplace need will meet a ready demand, he finds. West Georgia just launched an online doctorate in school improvement, predominantly aimed at k-12 educators. That program had 150 applications from across the country, and could take only 30 in the first cohort.
“A doctorate in education will open up opportunities in promotion and higher pay for these graduates,” said Huett. He noted that graduates of the University of West Georgia’s online master of education degrees in instructional technology or library media have already become leaders in their schools, districts and at the Department of Education.
Huett advised prospective distance learning students to look first at established brick-and-mortar institutions offering online education. You should enroll only in accredited programs and schools. A good source for Georgia online programs is www.georgiaonmyline.org.
