Rapid growth in offer, demand and funding – new portal on distance learning launchedEuropean universities are increasingly opening their educational offers to the world. Following the revolutionary developments in online learning in the US, Europe is now catching up, increasing both funding and infrastructure to accommodate even more learners from around the world in their programmes. To build awareness for European online learning, a new web-portal brings transparency to the quickly growing options available.In the last decade, the US has heavily invested in online education making it readily assessable around the globe: it is projected that US online education will outgrow traditional education by 2015. Already today, renowned institutes like Stanford and MIT offer massive online courses for free – followed by up to 100,000 students worldwide. Europe now heads in the same direction. Within its upcoming ‘Erasmus For All’ programme the European Commission makes more funding available to support distance education in Europe.Traditionally, in Europe online education has been associated with commercial institutes, sometimes of doubtful quality. As distance learning however makes higher education more accessible and affordable it “has become an important answer to the current educational challenges and will significantly impact the global educational landscape”, states Piet Henderikx, Secretary General of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU).Today, about 500 European institutes provide short courses and entire degree programmes at a distance – with continuous success: last year student enrolment increased 15-20% while the offer grew with 40% as reported by universities across Europe. That opens up European quality education to the world and makes online education an increasingly serious alternative to physical studies abroad – and disproves many still widespread misconceptions.A new portal has been launched make the quickly growing European study options even more accessible for learners around the world: www.DistanceLearningPortal.eu. Funded by the European Union and developed by the European study choice platform Studyportals and EADTU, this central information source will support orienting learners worldwide to study abroad from home. On 27 September 2012 the portal was officially launched by Commissioner Vasiliou.To date, already 220 institutes participate in this initiative, the majority (88) of those based in the United Kingdom including many of the TOP institutions such as the Open University or London School of Economics. With a total of more than 1,350 Bachelors, Masters, PhDs and Short Courses listed, DistanceLearningPortal.eu now makes European education accessible around the world[Ambient Insight Market Study 2011] ------- More information on Studyportals: www.studyportals.eu. More information on www.distancelearningportal.eu: contact press@studyportals.eu or call +31402920060.