What does the future look like for online college students? With the explosion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) — including today’s announcement of U.C. Berkeley joining edX, and Coursera adding courses from 12 universities, including CalTech and Duke — the one fact we can say for certain is that online higher education is here to stay. These are not just big names being added together: the numbers also tell the story. More than 6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, according to a Babson survey [PDF] for the Sloan Consortium. While some wonder whether this is the end of traditional higher education, others are considering what an average college student’s life will be like in the future. In his Atlantic article Selling the College Experience to Students Who Take Classes Online, Conor Friedersdorf imagines a future in which savvy colleges and universities take advantage of new technologies to expand their operations across the country through virtual branches. Theoretically, these branches would offer some physical locations, where elite colleges could “leverage a respected brand into a profitable events business.”
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-future-online-college-student/
