"Will ICTs make the traditional university obsolete?"

A session at the World Conference on Higher Education discussed cyber universities, the challenge of equal access and the growing carbon footprint of information and communication technologies. This UNESCO webpage provides a summary of that discussion, including comments from leaders from the Virtual University of the French-speaking world, Canada’s open Athabasca University, Shanghai Television University and the University of South Africa (UNISA), Institute for Open and Distance Learning. The leaders noted the radical changes that had already been made in their institutions, lending credibility to the hypothesis that schools would have to adopt the technology or fail to attract students.

It seems to me that there are lessons from the development of the book that might also inform our analysis of the future educational implications of the Information Revolution. Surely schools today depend on books, at least in societies rich enough to afford books. However, books and printing have transformed society requiring that everyone learn to read and write, and requiring more and more education of the general population.

In our future wired society, there will be requirements for forms of information literacy that go far beyond what we recognize today. I suspect that as books and printing lead to an expansion of the number of years of schooling per student, so too the wired society will demand still further learning opportunities, and indeed something approaching lifelong learning.

The Information Revolution has already started to transform our perceptions of valued skills and abilities as computers took over everything from drafting to formating documents to spell and grammar checking. Remember the classes to train people in engineering drawing and secretarial schools? As technology takes over added responsibilities the roles of humans will change, and their education will change accordingly.

The participants in the WCHE session realized that the demands students are making on institutions of higher education are changing, but I am suggesting that society is changing and with the changes in society the educational system will have to adjust; the changing technological opportunities for teach and the changing student demands on universities are only two of the many forces driving educational change in response to the Information Revolution.