To what extent will online education replace brick-and-mortar education in the next 10 years?

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Peter Baskerville

Addressing the higher ed. market, I will answer the question with a related question:

"To what extent did online blogging replace bricks&mortar newspapers in the last 5 years?"​

The growing list of newspaper closures around the world and the fast shrinking pool of professional journalists employed in the bricks&mortar newspapers, suggests that the change has been life-threatening in terms of the shift from professional journalists in bricks&mortar businesses to online bloggers with virtual publishing websites.

Clearly the informal online content has become the preferred choice for users for creating and sharing news and opinions over the previously dominant formal bricks&mortar model. See LinkedIn's summary of changes that have occurred between 2007 and 2011 in the various industries with internet/e-learning at the top and newspapers at the bottom of the list. http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/03...
As I see it, the educational revolution in higher ed. will emulate the journalist/newspaper model where people will chose to learn directly from industry domain experts who use the internet to convert their vast intellectual capital into digital learning products that they then profitably share with the world.

My prediction is that within 10 years, the informal online learning of work skills directly from industry domain experts will become the learning method of choice over the formal bricks&mortar model currently in play. Just as the internet with its tools made everyone a global journalist and a publishing house, so too will it make everyone a global teacher capable of teaching a course with authority in their own area of expertise and in their own online virtual institution.

Ogilvy & Mather with their link up with SkillShare.com is a case in point of industry connecting directly with students and so by-passing the bricks&mortar institutions as they provide relevant, accessible, timely learning at a fraction of the cost of existing educational models.http://online.wsj.com/article/PR...

The education revolution in higher ed. the next 10 years will not be led by the current bricks&mortar vested interests but will rather be totally disrupted by workskillers and teacherpreneurs who will exist outside of the institutions but who use the internet to connect directly with the hungry learners of the planet as Thrun from Udacity.com and the team at Udemy.com have done.

The disruption will start with the 4.2 billion working age people on the planet who have been previously denied access to higher ed. due to cost and geographic location but who can now access this knowledge for a fraction of the cost of existing offers and from any part of the world connected to the internet. It won't be pretty in its inception which is why the existing players will dismiss it as non-threatening but the sheer weight of numbers in the new paradigm compared to the mere 300 million people on the planet who have currently attained a college education, will eventually see it attract all the key resources including the best and most passionate teachers (teacherpreneurs) and global domain experts who will profit from their experience.

Just like the industrial revolution of 150 years ago, I believe that higher ed. learners will vote with their feet and simply walk out of the institutions for something more relevant and rewarding from teacherpreneurs and industry experts online ... and just like the century's old newspapers, my view is that the impact of online learning on bricks&mortar higher ed. institutions will be similarly 'life-threatening'.

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Paul Mannet

If it’s not a revolution, online education is certainly an
upheaval that’s going to replace a big chunk of what currently exists in the
higher education world.

My view - perhaps politically incorrect - is that there are
two classes of college students in this country: those who can pursue largely
academic interests because they are wealthy or smart enough to get scholarships,
and those who are mainly in need of real-world career training. The problem is
that the vast majority of students fit into the latter group, but our college
and university system is designed primarily to serve the former.

We need philosophers, historians and writers in our society
- but we have far more school capacity to train people in those specialties than
we really need. When I attended college in the 1970’s, virtually all my friends
were English or political science majors with no career goal. After graduation,
most drifted into law school, which put them onto a fairly viable career track.
But things have changed. It’s much harder today to “drift” into a successful career.
Every specialty, including law, has become far more competitive and demanding
in terms of skill sets. I never cease to be amazed by magazine articles and
complaints from “Occupy” people that they can’t get a good job after spending
four years to get a degree that gives them no usable job skills whatever.

Online learning has become part of the solution to this
problem by making a very wide number of associates and bachelor’s degree
programs available with a sharp focus on career training and by exerting, for
the first time in decades, at least some downward pressure on higher education
costs.

A hot issue is that this category was initially served
mainly by for-profit schools that now engender a lot of debate. But the
criticism of for-profit schools overlooks two key facts:
1) A lot of the people who need online education
are not traditional college age kids, but adults returning to college, and the
traditional colleges and universities has been extremely slow to address their
needs.
2) The world of the for-profit schools is changing,
not so much due to government regulation (in my opinion) but because their
business model is being challenged by new non-profit online schools and even
some private and state schools who have finally woken up to online education.
Even within the for-profit school sector, there’s a newer group of schools who
are delivering degree programs at more affordable tuition levels than what was
the norm just a few years ago.

Schools like Western Governors University, an unusual
non-profit school, have stepped up and made a big step into online education
while keeping the price reasonable. Perhaps more importantly, we’re seeing
schools like The University of Southern New Hampshire, a heretofore little-known
state institution, get national attention quickly by launching big online
learning programs. Unlike such famous flame-outs as the U. of Illinois’ “global
campus” a few years back, Southern New Hampshire’s initiative seems to have
real legs.

There’s no way to guarantee that the quality of all online
degree programs will be equal. But frankly, the same can be said of brick and
mortar schools. Both the traditional colleges and the existing online schools
are going to see growing competition from schools that can bring a good
reputation and affordable tuition to the online degree sector - because it’s
what more and more students want. More here on affordable online degree
programs:
http://www.successdegrees.com/go...

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