There are already a lot of nursing students who are either enrolled in or have successfully completed an online continued nursing education (e.g. LPN to RN). But did any of them even bother to learn just how online education got its promising start?

There are already a lot of nursing students who are either enrolled in or have successfully completed an online continued nursing education (e.g. LPN to RN). But did any of them even bother to learn just how online education got its promising start?

Nowadays, online degree programs are so commonplace that people tend to forget that they have not always been around.

In actuality, online degree programs have only began to flourish in the last fifteen years or so.

Dr. John Sperling, a Cambridge-educated professor who later became an entrepreneur and is now a billionaire, was one of the pioneers in the field of online education who founded the University of Phoenix in 1976. It was a private for-profit college developed to serve the needs of non-traditional students.

Sperling realized that students fresh out of high school who had the financial support of their parents were already served by the regular colleges around, but what of those who were already holding jobs to support themselves or their families? Or those who already had degrees, worked full time, yet felt they still needed a career change? They would need classes that were scheduled differently than traditional schooling.

The University of Phoenix offered night classes and other educational solutions for working adults. And as the internet began to grow in popularity and sophistication, Sperling saw another way for education to be made achievable and convenient for people who were already working for a living but wanted something more.

And in 1989 one of the very first online campuses in the world was created through the University of Phoenix; in 1991, the Online Campus graduated its first class.

Presently, the University of Phoenix's online campus is catering to hundreds of thousands of students and its nursing programs include Licensed Vocational Nurse (also known as Licensed Practical Nurse) to RN, LPN to BSN, and others.

And there are, of course, dozens of other online schools that offer many of these online nursing programs these days. But they owe a lot of their current success - and so do all online students - to the innovative vision of Dr. John Sperling.