Yes. Because everyone will be a student. Given all the press about MOOC’s, the higher education bubble, and value of a college education, much of the discussion treats the students within narrow labels. My experience in online education over the past 10 years showed me the diversity of the student universe. Many online students are adults and outside the 18-22 year old age range typically envisioned of a college student. And the diversity doesn’t just happen at the college level.
Advanced Academics, a Chrysalis investment eventually sold to DeVry, is an online high school. It is not much of a leap to imagine that an online school could fill gaps in the K-12 system: the rural school who lost its only Spanish teacher and needed someway to teach out its students, the super tennis player or ballerina who traveled too much to attend a regular school, etc. What I did not imagine were the seemingly large numbers of students whose families moved very frequently. The new school at which they arrived taught biology to high school freshmen while their old school taught it to sophomores. As a new sophomore, the student needed some way to catch up on that biology credit required for graduation. We called this credit recovery. The biggest surprise, however, was that for many kids the social setting of school was a poor learning environment. We had numerous examples of kids who were doing poorly in school. Removed from the classroom and provided a computer, with access to a teacher if they wanted one, these kids performed remarkably better when they could control the learning environment.
And this student diversity continues to blossom at the college level. In discussions about Straighterline, or Coursera, many people view these schools through the prism of their college experience. In the United States, there are 24 million college students. Only 15% attend ‘selective’ colleges. The market is vast. The students are the typical 18-22 year-old. They are adults who must go to school around work and family demands. They are students in other countries who have no chance of attending a US college, which are clearly the best in the world. They are students who will not thrive in the residential college environment. They are students without a lot of money who should have better options for college than borrowing $10K + to see if college is right for them.
The student of the future is everyone. That students now have an expanding range of options to achieve at the college level is yet another wonder of the internet age in which we live.