LAS VEGAS (AP) When Hilary Nagel goes to "class" at College of Southern Nevada, she powers on her iPad and listens to a lecture in her pajamas from the comfort of her home.

Nagel, 28, is among the university students across the nation taking online classes. As cash-strapped colleges contend with budget cuts, higher-education leaders and politicians have looked toward online education as a potentially cheaper way to educate students.

In Nevada, which last year saw a 14 percent decline in state funding for higher education, online classes have proliferated as demand has grown.

The first college in Southern Nevada to offer online education was CSN, in 1996. The state's largest higher education institution started out with one computer server, 37 sections of online classes and 528 online students.

By last fall, CSN's "Online Campus" had grown to 18 servers and 962 online sections with more than 13,000 online students.

"We started very small, but grew quickly," Terry Norris, director of e-learning at CSN, told the Las Vegas Sun (http://bit.ly/QC8Cdg). "It was hard to keep up with the growth."

Online courses become viable options because students may be bound by time and geographical constraints, Norris said.

Virtual classrooms allow rural students in Tonopah and Nellis Air Force Base students serving overseas to complete their degrees at CSN. Las Vegas students like Nagel who work during the day can still go to college by logging online in the evenings and weekends.

UNLV junior Yisrael Vincent, who has attended CSN for two years, said he could no longer afford the hour-long commute to campus. That's one of the reasons why he began taking online classes, he said.

"(The commute) ends up being a higher opportunity cost than logging on at home," the accounting major said.

Excerpt from:
Online classes proliferate in Nevada colleges