A Case Study On The Cost Of On-line Education

A study on the on-line education from the prospective of educational economics finds some problems with this form of education in our country, such as the contradiction between quality and scale, and waste etc. To analyze the cost of on-line education from this prospective is to enable us to make good use of resources and allocate them properly. Consumption of the resources causes the cost. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are the basic approaches to cost analysis and are the very beginning.Nowadays studies on the cost of on-line education are not enough from educational economic prospective and almost a blank with empirical study.This dissertation reviews and summarizes the studies on the cost of both the home and the abroad at the very beginning, then introduces the definition of on-line education, also the features, the components as well as the functions. Based on the knowledge of it, we have done much research work on the cost of it theoretically. Afterwards we analyze the cost of the School of On-line Education of CCNU through surveying the related accounting departments of both the university and the school as well as the facilities outside, such as Huada Network Company, which offers technical network supports for online education.Based on these efforts, we got the first-hand data for the cost and made analyses on them. As a supplement and a contrast, we matched these data with two foreign correspondents to get the right proportion for the components.The study shows the cost components of internet-based education are different from other forms of education. The ratio between fix cost and variable cost is different from traditional education, with the enlargement of the scale, the cost comes down drastically. Comparing with traditional education, online education has distinct superiority in cost consumption.This dissertation also argues that our country's online education is in its transitional stage from the first or second generation to the third one. Capital investment in the early stage is in large scale and human resource cost as well, but with no obvious benefits. Thus online education needs further development.