John is right, and the doomsayers are (mostly) mistaken. Colleges and universities do not exist just to teach; they also do research, coordinate a host of agencies, institutes and educational projects, administer Extension and Ag Research agencies, and serve other functions.

Aside from all of these additional agendas and functions which the doomsayers ignore, campuses serve as important sites for the socialization of young adults, and those who can afford that experience - and there are many who can - will continue to pursue that campus experience.

As far as teaching, I work in distance ed, but I freely admit that not all topics can be taught 100% online. Also, many faculty resist online and distance ed, and many departments want nothing to do with it. These attitudes will persist until those faculty members have retired or passed on...end even then, there will be a place for hands-on education in many courses and fields.

I see a different kind of campus 30 years from now with a considerable enhanced online curriculum, but I don't see any reason for students who can afford it to even consider abandoning the campus setting. It offers a great deal of value to them in a most pleasant setting.

I suspect that technology will accelerate the class divisions in higher ed. If you can afford it, you get to sit in the room with the professor and engage in conversation. If not, you sign up for on-line courses from your community college and work with your friends.

Then, as now, the student's willingness to work will have more effect than anything the professor says.

I have taught online for over ten years at universities as well as two year colleges, and I can say without the least doubt that college campuses are not going away. There is a real need and desire for the experience of leaving home and going away to univeristy. We faculty sometimes forget that going to college isn't all about the classes.

Online education works great for some students. Many of mine are already employed full time, are parents, student athletes with scheduling problems, in the military, or are high school students looking to add some credits and perhaps graduate from high school with all of their college GEs finished. These aren't people who are looking for the full college experience. They just want the classes.

In the meantime, it is useless to discuss whether or not online courses are a viable way to meet the students' needs. That's already been proven, and those who are stuck on that end of the debate are arguing in an empty room. Online courses are simply one more option for students who might not be able to take college courses any other way.

The class system in education already exists, and in many places it is the online student who must pay additional fees. What happens from here on out is up to us.

Sorry for the typos.

Interestingly, those predicting a future in which the internet rules absolutely are people whose personal interests would be served by such a development, viz. "online-education consultant". It is not just that they see universities simply as places of teaching, ignoring everything else universities do. Furthermore, their understanding of teaching is seriously warped. They believe teaching amounts to "sharing information." I wonder what kind of teaching experience people draw on when they claim that university education is equivalent to reading the newspaper.

If traditional-aged students went to college with learning as the primary goal, Teachout might be right. As long as students think they need and deserve the rite of passage called college, dorms and keggers will rule supreme centuries from now.

Is his name really Teachout?

-CronkNews.com

The new, new educational paradigm
By Patrick Aievoli, BS, MALS,
There is a change coming in the world of academic structure. With the current article in U.S. News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/k-12/2009/08/25/a-kindle-for-every-student.html) the world of textbook publishing and its usage in the classroom is going to change for good. The report goes on to say that the experience of learning will also be different and it should be because the user base (student) has changed. Now students of this new Generation-i are looking for a greater experience. The New York Times recently ran an article on a study that found that students learn greater with the advantage of the online experience (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-online-education-beats-the-classroom/).
I have been trying to say this for the last ten years. So instead of trying to convince my colleagues I went ahead and developed my own company and product line.
DigiEd Incorporated is an educational technology company that is focused on developing seven Web 2.0 products for the educational/literary community.
Please visit my blog and read about it http://patrickaievoli.wordpress.com

When I attended Haverford College in the late 1960s the yearly tuition, room and board was around $3,500 if memory serves. This was approximately 1/4th of my father's salary as a foreman in an oil refinery. My son's education at the University of Chicago (class of '07) was over $40,000 per year, nearly half my salary as a university library administrator. Bricks and mortar universities now doubt will persist, but for whom? At some point "goling to college" will be a deluxe experience out of reach for all but the wealthiest Americans. It doesn't matter how enriching the experience may be-- nobody will be able to afford it.

Considering the portion of most higher education institutions' budgets allocated to personnel, and looking at the number of classroom hours already taught by grad assistants and adjuncts, it seems to me we are very close to a tipping point when the whole house of cards falls down. Something's got to give.

Physical universities will withstand the test of time because teenagers need a place to go to become adults. However, lecture halls and tenured professors are becoming obsolete because orating is an expensive and ineffective way to impart knowledge on other human beings, especially when compared to self-paced computer-based and learning laboratory environments. Consider a computer-based program that offers recordings of the five best lecturers in a given field combined in a documentary style format. Already you would have a better, more engaging source for learning. But then combine those lectures with interactive diagrams, snippets of audio and video from related experts, links to supporting material, and as-you-go learning evaluation tools, you simply blow away the learned professor at the lectern. Not only is the material more engaging, but when a student doesn't understand a given concept, she can simply hit the go-back button to hear it all over again. Or she can listen to another professor explain the subject from a different perspective. Or she can click links to on-line supporting materials that do a better job explaining things in a way she can understand.

No need to remove all human interaction. Learning guides can still provide forums for students to interact and ask questions. However, the value of the teaching staff in this environment will now be focused on helping students learn and engage, rather than brining the content to the classroom.

For a peek at where we are headed take a look at story in NY Times from January of this year. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html.

What we already see playing out is low SES students being relegated to online education, which is the new "hot" answer to access in state legislatures. In reality it makes more since to have our best students utilize online education, because they already have many of the skills to necessary to succeed. Of course, that will never happen because that would rob them of the best four (six) years of their lives. While graduate programs show promise in working with experienced learners at the 13-20 level, the for profit "go to college in your pajamas" programs have showed disappointing results in student retention. Online undergraduate education remains a grand experiment and should be treated as such.

I don't have a good opinion on whether or not the doomsayers are being futurist blowhards or realists. Zephyr Teachout (yes, her real name), for one, is definitely leaving out some major features in her WaPo article. She says, "This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened." What she doesn't address at all is, where do the professors come from to teach in this future system? Profs almost always need to have PhDs. Education is more than just about "selling hard-to-come-by information" as she says. To teach, you not only have the information, you need to understand the subject so that you can help make sense of the information which will often seem quite raw to students. To reach that level of understanding, you need to work with the relevant information for a long time. (Not that that makes you into a good teacher, but that's another question.) To dedicate the years of life necessary to earn a PhD, people need to have some hopeful expectation that they might be able to have a career afterwards. That's one of the values of tenure, for all its other drawbacks. Tenure is one of the carrots you hold out to low-paid graduate students who are working their way through years of hard work. If you eliminate the traditional college system, you eliminate much of the reason why a significant fraction of students bother with graduate school. But then if you lose all those graduate students, what is your pool of talent from which to staff your online schools? Especially at the rates online schools often pay their teachers. I have a friend teaching graduate level psychology courses for an online school. He's paid a shocking pittance, not just in absolute terms, but also in terms of what the school's revenues. He is responsible for something like 30 students yet is paid less than the tuition charged to a single one of those students. Not surprisingly, he'll quit the day he can find a better job. If that's the "market" model that is supposed to supplant universities, it threatens to undermine itself quite badly. Maybe Teachout has in mind a dual revolution--both in the structure of universities as well as in artificial intelligence. Perhaps the race to the market bottom in terms of the cost of education will be empowered by computers capable of leading online courses. They might be cheaper than live human instructors, and such computers can be kept up-to-date on all the latest theorizing in the academic journals at effectively no extra cost. But absent some alternative to the well-educated instructor, the distance-only college system is a two-legged stool.

This isn't all about the money, though that certainly will drive change. Here is what I am thinking :

Point 1 - Students have access to as much and in many cases more relevant information then teachers. Sadly some teachers, perhaps secure with tenure, are not as aware of the wealth of information students have available. You can imagine how this might influence a student's perception of delivered class materials not to mention instructors.

Point 2 - While I am not certain this has happended yet I can imagine that univerities, in order to create additional cash flow may sell education in smaller increments (course content and credits) to an online aggregator and certifing agency able to compile numerous online offerings from many institutions and bundle them. The certifying agency would offer legitimate degree fo a fee and pay contributing institutions content fees. (this may be happening already but if not I do not suspect it will be long before it does.

Point 3 - The significance of the 'Campus Experience' while impossible to dismiss altogether may be minimized to some degree by 'Virtual Environments' where students with similar interests, along with instructors, even potential employers, may collaborate on learning. This actually addresses Point 1, perhaps shifting methodology from lecture to experience and collaboration. The legions of users found on line in secondlife and the number of institutions that have created learning centers and are using secondlife as a teaching platform already says the change isn't just coming, it is upon us.

As asked upon entry "Whats Next?"

Rick

What on-line education and resources offer has always been available to people who are capable of being self-starters, it just makes being a self-starter much easier. I don't think there is any argument that on-line education can deliver content at least as well as most classes (there are a number of obvious exceptions). I'm quite sure some students are served better face to face and some better on-line. The strength of on-line education is its efficiency. It's weakness is its poor support for spontaneous peer to peer interaction, which technology may indeed remedy some day, but hasn't yet. I learned at least as much from the engineering peer group I hung out with outside of the class context, although I was a science rather than an engineering major (and it strengthened me academically in ways I benefit from to this day). I don't see that critical aspect of education in any of the current paradigms for on-line education, but it is endemic to being on a campus, even if you are a commuter (which I was). Another evident reason academic institutions will be with us for a long time to come is the value of having a community of scholars, although the tendency of academics to hide in their disciplinary "silos" undermines this value. Universities need to work harder at keeping faculty engaged across disciplines, something the current tenure system definitely discourages. Pundits like Drucker and Sener make over the top statements to grab attention, but should not be taken at face value. Higher education needs to evolve with technological innovation, and I'm quite sure it will, but the on-line paradigm as presently presented is only a means to encourage that evolution, and is not a replacement.

There is something being lost here:

We shouldn't still be needing to talk about pedagogy and active learning. Sometimes online classes are more engaging because faculty have been mindful about creating opportunities for engagement. Those same opportunities for engagement are needed in classroom settings, as well.

If the only thing that happens in a class is that the professor stands in front of the room and "performs" by delivering a lecture, then there really is no need to come to class. Listen to (or watch) a recording of the lecture. Try to piece out the important bits on her own. This form of "classroom" should have been retired long ago; if it takes the threat of digital competition to do it, so be it.

It's all hype according to the 20,000 student faces seen around my university every day.