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Up to Impact of the Internet

Distance learning initiatives could lead to dramatic changes in higher education. Here are descriptions of current iniatives and analyses of the prospects of distance learning.



Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity
William Massey and Robert Zemsky. "IT will change teaching and learning profoundly, no matter what the response of traditional higher education institutions. Just as the development of the printing press forever changed the teaching enterprise, IT represents a fundamental change in the basic technology of teaching and learning.... If traditional colleges and universities do not exploit the new technologies, other nontraditional providers of education will be quick to do so."
Electronics and the future of education
Andrew Odlyzko, AT&T Research. Extended version of On the Horizon 5(4) (July/August 1997), pp. 8-9. "Will electronics lead to a much smaller and less expensive educational establishment, as some hope and others fear? My expectation is that it will not, and that the share of the economy devoted to education will continue to grow."
The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative Vision: Implications for Systems and States
"Developments in information technology and distance learning ... challenge many of the assumptions and virtually all of the foundations upon which states and systems of higher education have built their coordinating and governance, program development, and financing policies."
Teaching at an Internet Distance
a Report from the University of Illinois, December, 1999. Results of a year-long study of online education.
U. of Washington Professors Denounce Governor's Embrace of On-Line Education
"More than 700 faculty members at the University of Washington have signed a letter to Washington's Governor, Gary Locke, protesting what they say is a 'naïve' and potentially 'disastrous' drift toward replacing instructors with computerized teaching tools."
Digital Diploma Mills, Part I: The Automation of Higher Education
by David Noble. "Quality higher education will not disappear entirely, but it will soon become the exclusive preserve of the privileged, available only to children of the rich and the powerful. For the rest of us a dismal new era of higher education has dawned. In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen. That is, unless we decide now not to let it happen."