I've been interested in doing a postgraduate course for about 20 years, but have never earned enough to pay for one. It's only recently that I heard Student Finance had started funding MAs. I'm very glad that this is now the case, although I wish they also funded PG-certs and PG-dips (in which case, I might have just done this module as a PG-cert).

Although my reason is about affordability, disability comes into that too. I've left various jobs due to disability and so haven't progressed. This means I'm still earning around minimum wage, and my role isn't advanced enough that my employer feels it's worth funding a course.

None of this is specific to online learning, though. Online learning tends to be more accessible for me because I can be in my own environment, do things at my own pace, get captions and transcripts, know what to expect in advance, etc.