09 October 2011
Issue: 192

For more than a decade educators have been expecting the internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university, writes Bill Keller for The New York Times. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and 'distributed' learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame.

It's true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by MIT. But the internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world.

Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilise despots across the Middle East.
Full report on The New York Times site