That is a question more and more people are asking, likely driven by a new wave of news about the next step in online learning, initiated by top US universities. Also at the TU Delft this question is on the rise. They even started an award competition to find out what students think about this and to see whether they have valuable ideas:
http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=4446e973-5f85-4c3a-b41d-d4993f01ad47&lang=nl
I recently was part of a small debate – organized by students – about the very same topic at the TU Delft campus. Most students seem to agree that within 10 years, online courses will be common practice and have a significant impact on the education system. Making the big lecture rooms obsolete. Other outcomes of the debate were that universities should try to stimulate a ‘challenging environment’ that motivates students more. In general it seemed that they expect their university to adapt to the new situation, and beyond.
Where will universities be 20 years from now? A proponent of smaller, more intense college universities argued that universities have to adapt to compete with the online learning wave. This is a little dramatic, but competitive universities should indeed be in for some change if they want to keep their glory. The most adaptive and smart universities will create a environment of inspiration, joy, communication, collaboration and intense small groups education. To realize these qualities on a ubiquitous scale, university should invest heavily in aligning both campus education environment and virtual education environment. More and more of the education of explicit knowledge, such as with lectures, can just as well be done online, perhaps with small face2face support on campus. With the function of giving students basic course knowledge going online, the value of a university as an (informal) meeting point and an infrastructure to realize great projects becomes increasingly important.
As a complex organization, you need a vision or a focus point to be adaptive and make the right decisions fast. What should be the focus point towards all these changes for a university of technology such as the TU Delft?
I believe – but i am biased ;D – the main goal should be to bring project courses and student projects to the center of education and to create a flexible open learning environment around it. Where students can pick content related courses not just for their diploma, but because they want the knowledge for their projects. ’Just-in-Time (online) content course delivery’ as fuel to power well-organized project courses where student projects are value-added contributions that bring acquired knowledge to practice. That is where we’ll be in about 20 years, if Shareworks can have anything to say about it.