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infoneer-pulse:

At small liberal arts colleges everywhere, you’ll often hear administrators and faculty talk about the idea of learning as much from living on a residential campus as one does in the classroom. That’s just one aspect of “the college experience” that critics of online education lament losing in the imagined future where most courses are taught online and the university as we know it disappears.

That is how we imagine the future, isn’t it? During an Aspen Ideas Festival panel on the huge growth in distance learning, even among elite universities, moderator Rehema Ellis started to muse on whether her 9-year-old son would come of age in an era when online college was the norm.

“My God,” she suddenly said, “will he not leave home?”

But I can imagine an online education industry that looks a lot different than 18-year-olds streaming lectures in childhood bedrooms they seldom leave. In fact, I think selling “the college experience” to students taking their courses online is going to be a major growth industry over the next decade.

» via The Atlantic