Online Education 

An International Analysis of Web based Education and 

Strategic Recommendations for Decision Makers 

    2000 Morten Flate Paulsen 

http://home.nettskolen.nki.no/~morten/ 

Executive Abstract 

This report presents an international analysis of courses on the Internet, and it provides 

strategic recommendations about issues of importance to online education. The results and 

discussions are based on literature reviews, catalogue entries submitted by 130 institutions in 

26 countries, and 72 interviews with key persons at these institutions. The catalogue data were 

collected from March 98 to February 99 and the interviews were conducted in the spring of 

1999. 

The research has been conducted within the CISAER project which is supported by the 

European Leonardo da Vinci program. The project aims to provide a comprehensive, state of 

the art survey of course provision on the web with professional analysis, balanced evaluation 

and far reaching recommendations which will provide the field of vocational education and 

training in the EU with a tool for dealing with this new training dimension. 

Global Issues 

The CISAER catalogue includes entries from institutions in all continents. In addition to four 

transnational institutions, the catalogue includes entries from institutions in 26 countries. It is 

likely that there is an overrepresentation of institution from countries that have English as an 

official language since the primary research language was English. Still, it would be quite easy 

to include many more entries from North America, since the listing from this area is 

intentionally partial. Among the 130 catalogue entries, 45.4% were from the English language 

countries: USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. 

There is a steady growth of institutions that offer online courses to students in other countries, 

and the analysis presents many examples of international collaboration and thinking. 

However, most of the global initiatives seem to be experiments and ambitions rather than 

main priorities. Most institutions or consortia have not identified international markets as an 

initial priority. 

Competitiveness 

The survey indicates that institutions in Europe (60.8%), North America (21.5%), and 

Australia with New Zealand (7.7%) overwhelmingly outnumbers institutions in South 

America (3.1%), Asia (3.1%), and Africa (0.8%). Even though the researchers have a better 

knowledge of Europe, North America, and Australia than they have of the rest of the world, 

the survey testifies that these continents overwhelmingly dominate web based education. 

North America dominates the world of online education. Some of the reasons for this 

dominance are the well developed Internet infrastructure, the economic strength of the 

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