Online school
school that teaches students through Internet
An online school (virtual school, e-school, or cyber-school) teaches students entirely or primarily online or through the Internet. Online education exists all around the world and is used for all levels of education (K-12 High school/secondary school, college, or graduate school).
Virtual education is becoming increasingly used worldwide. There are currently more than 4,700 colleges and universities that provide online courses to their students. In 2015, more than 6 U.S. million students were taking at least one course online; this number grew by 3.9% from the previous year. In 2021, more than 53% of postgraduate students were taking at least some classes online. The total number of online students in the U.S. was 7.5 million in 2024.
Virtual education is most commonly used in high school and college. 30-year-old students or older tend to study online programs at higher rates. This group represents 41% of the online education population, while 35.5% of students ages 24–29 and 24.5% of students ages 15–23 participate in virtual education.
The public source identifies “Online school” as school that teaches students through Internet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Online, school and teaches.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Online school”, the useful work is to connect “school that teaches students through Internet” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2996789. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015, 2021 and 2024.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Online school”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Online school primary sources, Online school archive and Online research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Online school” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.