Education and the Net

Citation

Peters, J. (1998), "Education and the Net", Internet Research, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.1998.17208aaa.001

Education and the Net

Education and the Net

A useful contribution on one of the more immediate applications of the Internet comes in this issue, Vol. 8 No. 1, from Eric Sandelands of International Management Centres. IMC is an institution I know well and one which is making great strides in harnessing the capability of the Net to deliver educational offerings.

How are our institutions of scholarship going to be reshaped in future years? Will there still be such a thing as a campus? A library? Will universities start to source tutorial support globally from countries where expertise is high and labour rates are low (or currencies are weak) like a carmaker moving its manufacturing capabilities around?

Much food for thought, and we would as ever welcome thoughts on these and other issues.

My own feeling is that the campus will remain a useful asset to a university ­ although if I were designing one as of now, I would be buying bricks and mortar on a much smaller scale than universities have in the past. Learning is, for all the advances of the distance study schools, still largely a social process, and the "virtual universities" of which Sandelands paints a picture, will no doubt be looking to regain the skills of designing personal interactions, student to student and student to tutor.

The library will surely be superseded by some kind of electronic collection. While most people would agree that a good library is a wonderful place to be in, the mechanics of finding, borrowing and returning textbooks (from the customer's perspective), and buying, storing, sorting and tracking books (from the institution's) will surely be replaced by the simplicity of virtual access. While people still find paper attractive as a medium to annotate and read, there are presumably further breakthroughs ahead in downloading and printing speeds.

Global sourcing is an interesting thought. When Ford choose to establish in Brazil, or Samsung in Wales, they must invest heavily in land, buildings, recruitment and training, in return for favourable trade conditions, taxation and labour rates. If a British university chooses to recruit its tele-tutors from South Africa, where the rand is weak but expertise is relatively high, it needs no real estate investment. Indeed, a student of a virtual university need never know where his or her assignments are being marked. Good opportunities await the Internet-literate academic who can choose to sell his or her labour from, say, Tahiti in the winter and the Italian Alps in the summer, rather than face congestion, snow, heat, traffic jams and sky-high housing costs in Chicago, London or Rome.

Welcome to a new volume of the Internet Research journal. My sincere thanks to all among our authors, editorial team and not least subscribers who have contributed to the re-making of this publication over the past couple of years. Please continue to write, read and think about the implications of the Internet, and document your thoughts carefully for our community around this publication. I and the rest of my team look forward to serving you in 1998.

John Peters