The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2013 95 From the FSJ Education Supplement June 2010 Online Education: Unprecedented Opportunities BY KR I ST I STRE I F F ERT J ust as today’s Foreign Service families cannot imagine how their predecessors lived without the Internet, we may soon be wondering how we ever got along without online education. Distance learning, as it is sometimes called, offers an unparalleled opportunity for FS family members to target and tailor their educational needs to their circumstances. Universities offer online undergraduate degrees in nearly every possible topic—from interior design to accounting. There is no one set of programs that works best for FS families—to suggest otherwise would be to ignore the wide array of circumstances of family members (age, educational level, English-language abilities, and interests and talents, to name a few). In fact, the plethora of oppor- tunities for online students means that the buyer must beware. The online student must identify his or her educational goals clearly—A degree? A postgraduate degree? A certificate? Continuing education credits? Then he or she carefully chooses the appropriate institution and program. This is excerpted from the article of the same title by Kristi Strei- ffert, a Foreign Service spouse and freelance writer, that was published in the June 2010 Schools Supple- ment. The complete article can be accessed online at www.afsa.org/ fsj.