Online classes, Can it be
Essay
on
[ future of Tomorrow
Answers
Answer:
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.
New Technology
The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning. While on the one hand, new technology allows schools and instructors to offer learning in new ways, educators nonetheless continue to face limitations imposed by technology, and sometimes the lack of technology. While access to the internet has increased greatly over the last decade, some schools continue to experience bandwidth shortages and most schools do not have enough computers for every student. Yet, this is changing, and the pace of this change will continue to accelerate.
Bandwidth
As administrators struggle against the demands video streaming and bit torrent networks place on backbones, it is hard to imagine saying that bandwidth will be unlimited. But from a certain perspective, from the point of view of most users, bandwidth is already unlimited, as they are able to share text, images and video with ease. The limit of 28K from ten years ago now appears laughable to most urban internet users, as broadband access allows downloads almost a hundred times faster. Applets are now commonplace, a video sharing site (YouTube) is the most popular destination on the internet, and video conferencing (through services such as Skype) is mainstream.
And access to bandwidth continues to improve. The employment of data compression technologies has almost been superseded by fibre-optics technology such as lightpath management. (van der Pol, 2007) Companies like Verizon are offering fibre-optics to the home. (Verizon, 2008) And while satellite internet did not revolutionize internet access, the spread of Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies created an essentially mobile internet, with Wi-Max, a long-range broadband wireless internet standard, poised to greatly extend that in the future. Bandwidth is in the process of becoming ubiquitous, and though we may complain about the price, it is already, relatively speaking, cheap.
Despite set-backs – for example, the lobbies by private corporations to prevent the deployment of municipal Wi-Fi – it is not unreasonable to expect that inexpensive wireless broadband will be ubiquitous in most populated areas. We can think of it as a service analogous to the deployment of mobile phone services today (and indeed, the providers of tomorrow’s broadband wireless may well be today’s mobile service providers.