Endicott College

We hope to determine whether industry believes that online education is as acceptable as a traditional degree.

Our research will hopefully be able to determine this. The literature review for this project was started in June of 2002 and the results will be known on February 18, 2003. We will be focusing our efforts on two industries (Banking and Medical Devices) to determine if the degrees are held in the same regard. We define an online degree as being any degree that is received as a result of all courses being done from a distance in a web-based setting. We focused on two separate industries in order to draw some type of comparison between the two.
To do the research we focused on three variables within the online education that we believe leads to acceptance. These three variables are satisfaction, quality, and effectiveness. To get these three variables we focus on the perceptions of three groups. These three groups are students, educators (faculty and administration), and industry. There is a lot of literature from the student's and educator's perspectives, and with our research we hope to gain some insight into the perception of the Industry.