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Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did. What was originally a distancelearning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America's education system by serving as the backbone of a system that offers more personalized learning approaches for all students.

Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent-and that rate is accelerating.

""Todays students are technologically savvy and spend hours a day online. Why are we still trying to teach them with textbooks when we have a wealth of digital options? These are teachers' responses after being asked to gauge the effectiveness of various forms of education materials.""

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

Whether you like it or not, infographics are becoming a powerful e-learning tool. There is a whole lot of them around the web and we as teachers should build our own ones, and take them to the classroom. But in the meantime, we have to accept that social media as it is, it's changing the way we communicate.

The Internet is full of free and open educational resources, from courses to academic journals, and with so many education providers getting in on the movement to offer free educational content online, there's likely to be even more in the future. Yale, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley are just a few of the high-profile universities that share some of their best courses with the world for the low, low price of zero dollars. While there are a lot of great resources out there, there are some online education resources that truly stand out as inspiring, for their vast collections, unique perks, and incredibly supportive organizations. We've picked out 15 open education resources that we find to be the most impressive and inspiring out there, and we encourage you to take advantage of what they have to offer.

"Online education is quickly becoming a prominent and important piece of the education pie in the United States. The explosive growth of this segment of education, even during a recession, is nothing short of spectacular. It is becoming clear that there is a fundamental shift in how Americans are being educated after high school. The flexibility, lower cost, and variety of choice are just some of the reasons that online education is growing at its current pace. The following infographic will give you a better idea of the scope, impact, and future of online education. Enjoy!"