And speaking of said MOOCs -- the massive open online courses that have  captured the imagination of the public and turbocharged the discussion about  digitally delivered instruction in many quarters -- the Babson survey for the  first time queried institutional officials about their views about the  courses.

Given their relative newness, the answers are probably unsurprising: lots of  uncertainty about whether to embrace them, and significant skepticism about  whether the free open courses (at least as of the time when the survey was  conducted) present a "sustainable method for offering online courses."

Slowing But No Plateau

With college enrollments flattening over all, driven by the end of the baby  boom echo and the incremental improvement of the job market, online enrollments  might be expected to flatten. But as the table below shows, while the rate of  growth fell to its lowest level in at least a decade, the survey shows that  enrollment in distance courses and programs continues to be more than healthy.  (This being the survey's 10th year, the report's authors, I. Elaine Allen and  Jeff Seaman, the Babson group's co-directors, included data on changes over the  decade they've been conducting it.)

Online Enrollments,  2002-2011

Perhaps most strikingly, online enrollments continue to make up an increasing  proportion of all enrollments in higher education, as seen in the chart  below.

And as seen in this chart, more than 7 in 10 public and for-profit colleges  are now offering full academic programs (as opposed to merely freestanding  courses) online, far more than were doing so a decade ago. Nearly half of  private nonprofit colleges are offering fully online programs, about double the  number that were doing so in 2002.

Measuring MOOCs

The Babson researchers asked a series of questions about institutions' usage  of and plans for MOOCs.

A small fraction (2.6 percent) of the roughly 2,500 responding colleges said  they currently have massive open courses, and another 9.4 percent said they are  planning one.

Chief academic officers queried about the sustainability of MOOCs as a way of  offering courses were deeply divided. Nearly half were neutral, with the rest  evenly split between yes and no. There was much more widespread support for the  idea that MOOCs could help institutions learn about online pedagogy, with nearly  three in five respondents agreeing that they would serve that purpose.

Among other highlights of the survey:

• Nearly 7 in 10 chief academic leaders (69.1 percent) now say that  online learning is critical to their long-term strategy. And just 11.2 percent  say it is not.
• More than three-quarters (77.0 percent) of chief academic officers rate  the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in  face-to-face courses, up from 57.2 percent when Babson first asked the question  in 2003.
• Fewer than a third (30.2 percent) of CAOs believe that faculty members on  their campuses accept the value and legitimacy of online education -- lower than  the rate in 2004.