"The way that people learn in the University of Everywhere will vary tremendously, because people will not be forced to conform to the outdated traditions and habits of the hybrid university. Some people will learn mostly by themselves, on computers. This isn't the ideal learning environment for many, and it's simply untenable for some. But we live in a big world with a lot of people. Some of them have jobs and families that consume most of their daily time. Some are isolated by geography or medical circumstances. Some live in societies that deny or discourage educational opportunities to members of certain genders, religions, ethnicities, and castes. Some don't have enough money for anything else. Less than ideal will still be far better than nothing at all. If time, money, family, and circumstances didn't matter, I would rather have learned about the secret of life in person in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But all of those things do matter, a lot, and I was still able to get an 87 percent.
"Moreover, no one is alone on the Internet if they don't want to be. In addition to faster connections and cheaper, more powerful computers, the last decade has seen the rise of the social Web. People form deep and lasting connections with others in virtual environments. They become part of authentic communities. And as technology improves, the nature of those interactions will more closely approximate actual face-to-face meetings. The person sitting at a chair, staring at a monitor, is a cramped and increasingly archaic vision of human-computer interaction. Right now, talking to a life-size virtual image of a real person is the kind of experience you see only in the cafeteria at MIT. In the future, as telecommunications and video technology improve, it will be commonplace, maybe even dull. The conversation might come through an image projected onto a pair of glasses or through ultra-high-definition screens that are large, flexible, and cheap. Whatever way it happens, the experiences of seeing and hearing people who are nearby and at a far distance will increasingly converge. Information will keep moving faster, and experiences once reserved for the elite will become commonplace for the many.
"The international learning communities that develop in the virtual education world will have enormous advantages of scale. They will be inexpensive and at certain levels of access, entirely free. Millions of people simultaneously enrolled in a course of study will create data that is analyzable with great sophistication. In addition to customizing the environment for each learner in a way that reacts to what they bring to the environment and how they proceed to learn, educational designers will also be able to shape the way students interact with one another, much as Minerva plans to do with its all-seminar education. In other words, the learning experience will be different but not solitary. The future of higher education is not one in which everyone sits by herself in her pajamas, pallid and goggle-eyed, being taught by a machine."
