Purdue University will explore its distance-learning program, university officials declared on Monday (March 7)."Our objective is to make capacity for 10,000 registrations in online courses for Purdue West Lafayette pupils by 2012-13. We require a minimum of sixty percent of those enrollments at Purdue and remaining would be accessible with the help of partner institutions within the Indiana College Network association," Mark Pagano, dean of Continuing Education and Conferences said.

Purdue pupil enrollments in online learning classes were 8,200 in 2009-2010. Continuing Education and Conferences has opened a new distance-learning centre on the ground floor of Stewart Center. It consists of a state-of-the-art testing center for pupils taking Indiana College Network courses.

The endeavor is part of the trend. Eduventures, an educational study organization, expects that by 2013 involvement in online learning will go beyond 3.5 million and that eighteen percent of all higher education pupils will be online.

"By providing variety of courses, we will offer our existing students with higher stability of classes," said Mickey Latour, associate dean of distance learning. "We also will be able to reach out to those who could possibly not be able to take courses in a college classroom, which include experts who can't come to campus because of their occupation or military personnel on assignment.