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Then online distance learning was first proposed as a viable alternative to site-based education, many predicted the demise of traditional colleges and universities. The ability to take courses where and when students wanted would mean, these futurists said, that the traditional bricks-and-mortar classroom would cease to exist, replaced by a go-anywhere virtual institution.
Management guru Peter Drucker was one of the most prominent individuals to say that higher education as we knew it simply could not compete with the convenience and cost of online education. Others ominously predicted that the advent of “digital diploma mills” would mean the end of faculty life: faculty professionals would be replaced by automated simulacra.
While online learning (i.e., coursework students take at a distance, using the Internet, with no face-to-face meetings) has grown at an astonishing pace, it has done so in ways that no one predicted. In the middle of the 1990s, there were too few online courses to count. By 2002, 1.6 million students—approximately 20 percent of all college students—were taking at least one online course. In fall 2007, this figure stood at 3.9 million. The change in delivery of coursework in higher education could have been termed revolutionary, except that few feel that higher education has been revolutionized. What has happened instead is an absorption: most students have chosen to add online coursework onto their existing, classroom-based curriculum.
William R. Doyle is an assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University. He previously served as a senior policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, where he was project manager for the center’s first publication of Measuring Up, the state-by-state report card on higher education.
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