With Internet use so pervasive in higher education, we asked our Web readers to answer this question:

How has the Internet changed your life in college or trade school?

Here are some of their answers, edited for publication. Readers are invited to add their own responses by e-mailing postscript@post-gazette.com. Be sure to include your full name and address.

David A. Hornyak, 41, of Greenfield, director of advising, University Honors College, University of Pittsburgh, completed master's and doctorate at Pitt.For me, the biggest change was in how I did research. For my master's degree (awarded in 1993), I spent hours in libraries searching for printed journal articles, making photo copies of them, etc. But when I was working on my PhD (awarded this past April), the journals were online and I downloaded articles directly to my computer as a PDF, so I was able to do my research anyplace-- at home, at a coffee shop.

Rick Stanley, 43, of Leechburg, Armstrong County.

I am 43 years old and will be completing my BS degree in Project Management in the next year at Devry University.

I finished an associate's about 10 years ago in a traditional "brick-and-mortar" and thought I would never be able to return for my bachelor's. Because the more advanced classes have fewer students, they are typically offered only during "classic" school hours.

About a year ago I began looking into advancing my degree through an online program. After months of research I decided on Devry's program, primarily due to its accreditation and acceptance. This has opened a world of possibilities for me.

Because I am able to work my normal 50-plus-hour week, spend time with my wife and kids, and attend classes at my convenience, the Internet has become an invaluable tool. I now have access to libraries around the country, instructors from virtually every field, and can interact with fellow students around the globe, thanks to the Internet.

Chris Thomas, 30, formerly of Johnstown, Cambria County, and a 1999 Juniata College graduate, now a lecturer in Earth sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

My senior year of high school in Johnstown (Westmont Hilltop)in 1995, we were introduced to the "Internet" computers in the library as a networked search engine to do research for our Advanced Placement history class. I couldn't find anything, and didn't see the value, and the school soon restricted access to the "Internet" computers when too many students used it to view pornography.

Now I teach only online courses in earth sciences for the IUPUI campus. This semester I'm teaching from North Carolina, to my students in Indiana, and I require my students to read some articles on post-gazette.com in Pennsylvania, so examples that support my teaching curriculum are not limited to what I read in the local newspaper (which isn't very good, hence I use the Post-Gazette and New York Times for some readings).

I've developed online "lectures" and laboratories. It's changed how my students can receive an education, I have two to three students a semester who give birth, one is on work release in a halfway house, one is a full time truck driver, and they can now their education can fit around their lives.

It has made education more portable to fit around student lives.

Kenneth Maiorana, 50, director of medical records, Waccamaw Community Hospital, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

I am a former resident of West View who left Pittsburgh many years ago looking for work. I spent 16 years working my way to the top as a department manager within a healthcare organization. After several years at this top department position, I decided that I wanted to climb further on the corporate ladder.

I checked out going to traditional colleges; however where I lived and worked would have detracted greatly from trying the traditional brick and mortar college experience. I was easily 60 miles from a college of higher education where I could have studied and received a master's degree. Some of these colleges offered several classes in an online format where I could have gone through the Internet to participate in class and received and responded to questions and homework.

After doing some research and checking out what colleges had to offer for master's degrees, I settled on the University of Phoenix. The program was well set up and UOP had years of experience working in an online setting. I found the classes rewarding and challenging and have spent the past three plus years working toward my master's degree. I have a class scheduled in October 2007 and then two more early next year and I will be finished with my MBA- Healthcare Administration degree.

I have worked full time at a middle management position and been able to pay for and fit into my life about four classes per year. These six-week intensive classes require a lot of dedication and hard work but that is part of the test to be able to earn this type of degree.

The internet has allowed me to:

Work online toward a master's degree

Skip the need to travel several hours for classes and to prepare homework at a college library

Allowed me to perform research and participate in classes

Allowed me to submit homework online

The Internet has made it convenient and possible for me to earn my master's degree, and I appreciate every opportunity it has given me so far and will in the future.

When I started taking the classes, there were some people who did not believe that UOP was providing the education that was necessary to obtain a master's degree. However, nothing could be further from the truth. I have compared my classes and what I have learned to many friends who have attended traditional brick-and-mortar colleges, and the classes are easily as hard or harder than the ones they went through.

The first obvious factor is that they spent 15 or 16 weeks learning what they learned while our class was done in six weeks. That requires a lot of effort and work in a short period of time and requires organization and dedication to learning that many others did not experience.

UOP also stresses teamwork by requiring many of the assignments to be completed as a team. While dividing up the work seems like an easy process, it is hindered by having to use e-mail and working with different time zones and in many cases working with people from different countries.

UOP has provided me with information and experiences from people all over this country and from all over the world. It has helped me understand the global nature of marketing and manufacturing and how important cultural diversity is going to be for American companies.

The world is shrinking and UOP's format is teaching their students the importance of learning from others and not letting time differences interfere with what needs to be accomplished.

I would not change anything about my education over the past three years.

Christopher Corso, 25, a 2000 graduate of North Allegheny High School, and a current graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology.

I am currently living in Atlanta working on my PhD at Georgia Tech in Biomedical Engineering. The internet has profoundly affected my education at Georgia Tech simply because of the availability of hundreds of thousands of journals and journal articles at my fingertips. Looking for information from peer-reviewed journals is as easy as a google search. I can not only find out which journals and articles focus on my topic of interest, but I can also access all of the articles without ever needing to physically pick up a journal. It is so easy to obtain information on practically any topic I need to know about that I can't even imagine trying to complete a Ph.D. without the internet.

Jamie Leonardi, 21, of Oakland, a 2007 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, currently a graduate student in the arts management program in the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University.

For me, as a graduate student, the Internet is pervasive: my friends and I make party plans on Facebook. I research digitized journal articles from the 1970s through JSTOR. My test grades are posted on Blackboard along with course PowerPoints. I register for networking events, conferences and workshops via monstertrak.com.

But perhaps the most unique experience I had with the Internet occurred during my senior year at Pitt, when I registered or a course called "Media and Consumer Culture" that was entirely Web-based. The professor, Jody Baker, successfully taught an entire course from somewhere in Canada; instead of attending lectures, students downloaded Dr. Baker's weekly podcasts and listened to them from their home computers, probably at 2:00 a.m. Dr. Baker managed a core Web site for the course (optimized for Firefox, not Internet Explorer!) that provided links to articles, podcasts, video clips of ads and photo galleries of early 20th-century print advertisements, and was supplemented by Blackboard and a class blog on Blogger.com. Throughout the term, we listed to e-lectures, read e-articles, and watched e-advertisements.

We wrote papers on our home computers and submitted them to Dr. Baker via Blackboard's Digital Drop Box. They were never really "papers" at all. The class even managed to do group projects without ever meeting one anther in person or even speaking over the phone. I worked with a two male classmates whom I only ever knew by their online screen names, and with a few dozen e-mails and an IM chat or two, we successfully managed to put together a class presentation (via the class blog, of course) on alienation in advertising.

While most adults would probably find the course in and of itself alienating, I found it all highly enjoyable; it was novel and exciting, I was able to fit the class in on my own time schedule and work at my own pace, and I didn't have to have group meetings with students who were late or never showed at all.

Unfortunately, professors as dynamic and technologically literate are few and far between!