The following is an excerpt of a story published by WCIA-TV 3 on Feb. 28, 2023.
"University of Illinois Springfield is celebrating 25 years of offering online education.
The university was among the first higher education institutions to offer online education in the country.
'UIS led in many ways,' said Ray Schroeder, an emeritus professor who helped start UIS’ first online programs. 'Individual faculty members had experimented with online segments in their classes in the years before we launched fully online classes and degrees.'
UIS’s Director for the Center of Online Learning, Research & Service Michelle Gribbins said their online program was part of the reason she started teaching at UIS in 2005.
'One of the things that attracted me to work here at UIS is that they were offering online programs,' Gribbins said. 'And I knew that at that time, that was our future in higher education is having more and more online offerings for our students.”