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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Lessons in learning online UNIVERSITY students in America spend about $100 billion (£63 billion) each year on everything from books, food, clothes and beer to rent and computers. Last year about $1 billion was spent online, and at the present rate of growth this will reach $10 billion by about 2005. What are they buying online? Beyond basic access, websites provide everything from pizza and Coke, through to crib notes, full lecture series and other study materials. Characteristic of America, this new sector is taking on industrial proportions. One new enterprise pays student note-takers $10 an hour to supply their detailed notes so they can be sold on a website to the student population at large. There are also sites for students to buy and sell used books and other materials. Commercial enterprises are investing tens of millions in making these facilities available everywhere. This encroachment of computing into education is also promoting a turn-around in the student enrolment process, with the best students selecting the university instead of the university selecting them. Students are now grading universities on basis of computing facilities, and the best of the best now have more than 1,000 on-campus PCs, available to anyone who happens to walk by. PCs are available in cafeterias, dormitories, lecture halls and public spaces. Some universities are also providing campus-wide wireless access, and students purchase $250 radio PC-cards to get online. This online revolution is transforming the old teaching and tutorial system. Everything has to be online and available, or students just walk away from course and campus. This is not just the radical transformation of the education environment, it is also the start of a new and very big business. According to Yahoo, the wired universities are ranked in a league table as follows: Kase Western, MIT, Wake Forest, NJIT, Rensselaer Polly, Carnegie Melon, WSU, Gettysburg, Indiana, Dakota and UCLA. This is the new Ivy League and is not based on bricks and mortar and years of heritage. At the best of the best students arrive with their own laptops and expect a workstation in their bedrooms and in the lecture halls. Perhaps the most interesting aspect, though, is the spread of the influence of these universities beyond their own campus, state, and shores. The number of virtual students is rising exponentially. Just 10 years ago it was obvious that all of this was going to happen, it was always a question of when and where, and not if. And it was also obvious that the cost constraints and self-selecting students with the necessary money would be negated by the continuing fall of computing costs. American students are providing their own laptops purchased on the back of holiday employment for around $1,000. Those institutions that have woken up to all this are most likely to survive. Those that haven't will feel the draught. For sure, you cannot do everything on a PC, but it seems that you can probably do the majority. The $64,000 question is: will this new Ivy League extend its reach beyond the United States and into the rest of the world? I suspect it will, and it is not just its electronic presence and availability that will win it students, but the online multimedia and interactive lectures and experiences being constructed by the students themselves. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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