I was contacted by Jocelyn Salada with a request to link to her work on on-line education available in Illinois. Back in 2010, I linked to Astronomy Cast, an excellent astronomy podcast. One of the hosts of the podcast, Pamela Gay, is an assistant research professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I think that is the link to Illinois education.

Jocelyn has assembled an impressive catalog of on-line education. Here is the description from the e-mail she sent to me:

This resource, is a compilation of every college program offered online in Illinois that is offered full and part time.

For the past year, we’ve been crawling through thousands of college catalogs to compile this information because many students that visit our website have requested a directory of all college programs that they can take online apart from the more well known online schools. Many of our students didn’t even know that their local colleges offer many online programs until this database was built!

This database will be updated yearly and will always remain free and open. Higher education for all students is a passion of mine, and passing knowledge to what types of programs exist out there in hopes that students will find a higher education program that excites them is our goal. I hope that your school, counselors, advisors, parents and students will find it useful.

The information can be found at:
Online Degrees in Illinois
Online Degrees Resource

Links deleted by request, see update below

Update: A scam?Not a scam!

Jocelyn followed up to this post with an offer to share more resources. I responded by asking what her connection with onlineschools.org was and if she matched the person who I found with her name in LinkedIn. I have not received any response to this point. This lack of response leads me to believe there is an element of scam to this, but I cannot find anything suspicious about the content to which I have linked. However, based on the lack of response, the links are removed.

Update 2: Jocelyn replied. All is OK and links are restored.

Update 3 — November 23, 2012: I received the following e-mail requesting I remove the links. Contrary to the statement in the e-mail, this is the first request for removing the links. There is no link trading going on here either. As far as I know, I did not get any link in return for posting this blog entry, which is just fine. I did not expect one. I now really do wonder about the credibility of this organization.

Hello,
You currently have a link on your site pointing to our OnlineSchools.org website. We have recently received warning from Google that they are suspicious of link trading schemes surrounding the link on your site.

Please ensure that you take the necessary precautionary measures. We are requesting that you remove the link back to our site:

obsballona.net

WE HAVE SENT YOU MULTIPLE REQESTS TO DO THIS – PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO COMPLY. (This statement is not true — Ed.)

Please let us know once the link has been removed. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. We appreciate your help.

Best regards,

Eric Bergstrom
email redacted
OnlineSchools.org