Information Technology Reference
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people. With a virtual university, the same speakers might easily gather virtual
audiences of 100,000 or even more.
The early versions of the university would probably offer short courses or we-
binars that lasted only an hour or less. However, it is technically possible to en-
vision the university linking to real universities and offering standard curricula in
virtual environments.
If the idea catches on, then eventually real universities such as Harvard, MIT,
the University of Florida, or the University of Nalanda in India might participate
and offer virtual courses either on their home campuses or through the facilities of
the virtual university.
At some point, the facilities of the virtual university would be sufficient to ad-
minister examinations and offer professional certification in topics such as require-
ments engineering, function point analysis, testing, project management, and per-
haps dozens of other technical disciplines where certification is available.
It is not impossible for the virtual university to eventually award actual degrees
up to the Ph.D. level, however. That could only occur if the curricula and faculty
were accredited. Actual degrees from the university might not be feasible for an-
other 20 years or thereabouts due to the novelty of the concepts and the logistics of
accreditation. The initial versions of the university would be aimed at professional
training rather than undergraduate or academic training.
Security would have to be included as part of the design of the virtual campus.
This is to keep hackers and viruses from damaging the course materials or disrupt-
ing the sessions by means of denial of service attacks. There is always a need for
cybersecurity to discourage hacking, phishing, identity theft, and other endemic
problems of the computer era.
Although it may be ten years or more before this kind of virtual university oc-
curs, it is interesting that the essential technologies to build such a university all
exist today.
Not only do the technologies exist but also the costs for constructing a virtual
campus would probably be only in the range of $250,000, which is much less ex-
pensive than building real classrooms. Assuming that companies such as IBM, Mi-
crosoft, and Google, who already have course materials and instructors, wanted to
do this, a virtual university could probably be up and running within ninety days
of starting out.
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