international education
campusreview.com.au
Will global online education
ever take off ?
In the wake of the
dot.com bubble and the
MOOC revolution, why
haven’t more students taken
up global online learning?
By Christopher Ziguras
T
wenty years ago, at the beginning of the dot.com bubble,
it seemed as though the advent of the internet would
quickly lead to the rise of unstoppable new global online
education providers, able to enrol hundreds of thousands of
students in courses led by the biggest names in each discipline.
We saw another wave of hysteria around 2012 – the year of the
MOOC – with more dire warnings that universities as we know
them were on borrowed time.
8
In the late 1990s, the Australian and British governments funded
major research projects on the rise of ‘borderless’ education, as it
came to be known. It would use technology to transcend national
boundaries, bridge the gulf between industry and academia, and
integrate the public and private sectors.
In 2001, the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education
(OBHE) was founded in London to study disruptive innovations
worldwide, and at its recent global forum in London it pondered
the question: Whatever happened to the promise of global online
learning?
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE CLASSROOM
Clearly, digital transformation is having profound effects on every
aspect of education, as the proponents of borderless education
envisaged. Are there any aspects of teaching and educational
administration that have remained untouched? Even the shape
of furniture in classrooms has changed. Blackboards, overhead