|Traditional Study – negatives:
||ACS online or CD study – planet friendly points:
|Travel to college uses fuel, requires a vehicle and creates pollutants
||Study from home or wherever you are –no additional costs
|Time is lost when you travel to college
||No travel time
|Traditional colleges require many physical resources – classrooms, laboratories, workshops, student amenities etc... which require money and physical resources to build and maintain
||Far less physical resources are needed to sustain and support a large number of distance education students – just a small amount of office space and a small number of computers
|Printed notes and books use lots of resources being transported from place of origin to the end user (courier costs, postage, planes, trucks etc are all involved in moving a book from the author to the printing press and on to the student)
||The written notes are conveyed from the author to the student electronically; requiring far less use of postal or courier services, trucks, planes, rail etc.
|Paper is needed for books, study notes etc. Ink is a pollutant. Energy hungry printing presses are required to print study materials.
||Paperless study, on a computer.
|Courses developed by large bureaucracies often require many committees, audits & other bureaucratic processes. Lots of time and other resources are used to create, review, and accredit. Sometimes more than 50% of the cost of providing education is eaten up by bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy requires desks, pens, offices, cars, air conditioners and more, just to sustain it.
||Relatively small, lean organizations, run by highly qualified educators (such as ACS & affiliates) can vastly reduce these bureaucratic costs and in doing so, reduce the load on the environment (and on the economy). The net result is more value for the money spent on education