"The Virtual University: Alternatives to Traditional Structures "

Since the time of Aristotle, teaching methods, for most educators, have remained unchanged. But just as many other aspects of life have been transformed by globalization and technology, higher education, in the next few decades, will face dramatic changes. Higher education will be transformed in that period into an activity that contains major global and technology-driven components.

Changes in both the educational and research activities of the university will create winners and losers within the academic enterprise. Distance learning has already begun to make some inroads into the academic world. The quality of the best distance-based courses has improved to the point that smaller schools can reasonably purchase distance courses to supplement the offerings they can provide. The long-term impact of such activities will be dramatic, and who the biggest winners will be depends strongly on the outcome of an intellectual property dispute that has already begun between faculty and their institutions.

A similarly substantial change is coming in the research arena. In the last decade, university-based research centers have become major research contributors. However, those teams required a large allocation of faculty by the host institution. We are beginning an era where research teams can be selected from multiple institutions worldwide, with no reduction in efficiency compared to the single-institution based teams of the past. This will allow smaller institutions, if they are agile, to play a larger role in the research process.