The Art of Possibility: Perspectives on the Future of Online Education

Challenges include defining the special interactive features of online learning and teaching, finding the best ways for blending online with traditional education, and understanding the implications of scale, costs, effective practices and changing roles for teachers and learners. In the last decade, online learning has moved to the mainstream and emerged as a core ingredient of tomorrow’s educational paradigms. In fact, we predict that given the emergence of “digital natives,” on-ground and online education can no longer stand apart. The blending of the two will be continuous and unstoppable. Expectations from different kinds of learners, including “digital natives,” adult learners, and active retirees means that blended modes of learning are growing rapidly—and educators need to discover the best pedagogies to respond to combined delivery mode.

What does it take to solve the challenges of online, blended and face-to-face education in higher education and adult learning? We hypothesize that a clear case can be made for collaboration among institutions—where collaboration greatly exceeds what is traditionally done in conferences through ad hoc exchanges. We are familiar with the emerging paradigms for online conferences that extend face-to-face conferences and with diffuse knowledge exchange mechanisms such as listservs. However, scant attention has been directed toward how to make “collaborative work” really work in our online education environment! In our now burgeoning online learning community, we have an opportunity to use what has been learned about collaborative work (from asynchronous, to synchronous) to solve problems in higher education. Educators have tended to work in silos of inquiry, yet information infrastructures that make cross-world collaboration as easy as institutional small-group collaborations can be put to much better use. Wouldn’t it be exciting to live in a world in which knowledge is organized, ordered, and characterized by continuous participation? Interaction via online knowledge organization structures can much more rapidly advance improvement.

As a consortium of researchers, educators, administrators, and corporate entities, Sloan-C seeks to advance knowledge about online education for learning on a scale never before possible through commonplace creation of “swift knowledge.”