As the young adult population increases and the need for continuing education by older adults increases the physical structure of current educational facilities will become strained. The cost of constructing and maintaining physical buildings simply for the purpose of having people sit in rows of chairs facing the front of the room to listen to a lecturer will continue to become more costly and unnecessary. The Internet has fostered the ability for many more workers to perform their work from home. Through the use of computer software and telecommunications it is possible for a professor to conduct classes without ever stepping into a classroom. As audio-visual media become cheaper and easier to produce there is no need for anyone to sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture done on PowerPoint or on a whiteboard when they can watch a presentation that is the same or of higher quality on their computer or television. The availability and ease of use of portable video cameras and multimedia production software will give individuals and small groups the means of production to create high quality instructional materials. Classroom interaction will take place through chatrooms, email, instant messenger, or live audio/visual teleconferencing.
Buckminster Fuller foresaw in his speech, “Education Automation,” that educators would someday come together to produce television media for teaching specific subjects. The production would continue to be perfected over time until it becomes the perfect presentation of the material. This would then free teachers from giving the same lecture over again year after year and increase the quality of learning. By freeing the teacher of this task it gives them more time to spend with students individually as well as work on new discoveries in their field of specialization. Introductory material will be relegated to more automated forms of learning freeing professors’ time to be more personally involved with students learning cutting edge material.
As human knowledge continues to increase at an exponential rate it will be important for people in the Information Age to be in a continuous state of learning. As new knowledge is acquired it will be recorded in computer systems to be accessed by students on demand. This will change the traditional model of education. Attaining a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degree will not be sufficient in the future. Due to the ever-increasing amounts of human knowledge it will be necessary for people to gain specialized knowledge in their area of expertise or knowledge outside of their area if needed to perform a certain task. There will be no definite cutoff to say when a person has reached a level of mastery. Education will become more modularized and a person’s education will become more customized to suit the needs and desires of the individual.
The education of the future will not force a person to commit to a particular program or school to prove mastery of a subject area. People will customize their education and their resume/transcript will be available on the Internet. People are becoming less dependent on permanent employment and are becoming consultants and contractors. They will also become less dependent on a place of learning that is geographically fixed or on a particular degree program. Instead, they will take courses from well-known instructors who may be independent professors or be affiliated with a company or university. Therefore, people will be judged not by where they learned at but by who they learned from. Well-known teachers will become Internet celebrities. Degrees of the future will be a collection of courses taught by different teachers from different institutions. The school giving credit for these classes will be a virtual institution that will get paid though affiliate programs from the professors or organizations that produce the educational material. The virtual schools, though, will not only be placed under scrutiny of the existing accrediting agencies, but they will also be reviewed on third-party sites that will host reputation systems. Reputation systems are democratic sites where individuals are allowed to post their opinion. These reputation systems will ensure the quality of the education received through the virtual universities and independent professors.
As the new educational system comes online human knowledge will continue to accelerate at an increasing rate. The ability to produce distance learning materials will become a skill that will be in demand. In the past, it was typically introductory courses that were available through distance learning. In these courses correspondence was through the mail. With the rapid communications methods available through the Internet more advanced classes will be the norm. In fact, universities, companies, and professors will be racing to get new information into circulation as soon as it becomes available. In the Information Age profit is derived by being the first to market with new quality information. People will pay for these new courses to increase their own value in the market place as consultants and specialists.
The virtual university is only now in its infancy. In the not-so-distant future educational opportunities will increase for adult learners. The quality of online education will improve as the technology and human expertise in online teaching techniques improves. Advanced high school students will benefit as well and will not be limited to the education provided to them by schools only within driving distance. The changes in education that are ahead will provide more independence, diversity, and exposure to new ideas that will increase human intelligence throughout the Information Age and into the age to come.
