In a recent Washington Post article, A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges, Zephyr Teachout paints a bleak picture for brick-and-mortar education due to the burgeoning popularity and relative cheapness of online education. In response, ZDNet's Christopher Dawson asked, Will Online Education Kill the University?
The gist of Teachout's article is that while it's great that e-learning has made education and college degrees infinitely more accessible, it threatens to wipe out universities that won't be able to compete cost-wise; the business model on which traditional universities have operated will no longer work, she argues. Teachout expresses concern that a boom in, and, ultimately, a reliance upon, e-learning threatens notions such as tenured professors and well-funded academic research — by 2030, Teachout says, typical faculty will be adjunct professors working from home grading multiple choice quizzes. She also purports that within the next 40 years, most brick-and-mortar schools will either need to partner with other services or shut down completely.
This all sounds a bit too Henny-Penny for me, though. Some viable comparisons were made, yes. She likens e-learning to the news industry of 10 years ago — an industry with redundancies that was revolutionized (some say destroyed) by the Internet — people aren't confined to getting all their news from one source; we're more likely to read news online, article by article from many papers. But how does this apply to education, exactly? If learning is everywhere and accessible by anyone, is it less special? Maybe, more than anything, this is more predictive of a movement toward degrees, especially bachelor's degrees, mattering less; in 40 years, I can see bachelor's degrees having such ubiquity that graduate education will be the new standard, but IMO brick-and-mortar institutions and the whole college campus experience are so intrinsic to American culture, I just don't see them disappearing. I feel the traditional schools will be able to adequately adapt their business models and continue to make e-learning more effective and efficient.
What do you guys think?