Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It is not impossible that a virtual university could do for education what Face-
book and Twitter have done for social networks: make learning so easy and enjoy-
able that attendance would reach into the millions.
Because of the lack of expenses for physical buildings and infrastructure, the
virtual university would be much less expensive to operate than a real physical
university. The main cost drivers would be instructional compensation, licenses
for software, and network access fees.
A live one-day seminar that costs $895 per student might be profitable at $200
per student if offered through a virtual university. Student loads could be much
higher in a virtual university than in normal live instruction.
For live professional training, the class sizes range from ten to perhaps 50 at-
tendees. For virtual training via webinars and other online methods, class sizes
could range from about 200 up to more than 1,500. Thus, lower costs per student
are offset by higher numbers of students.
The concepts of the virtual university could also be used for other forms of edu-
cation, such as medicine and law. (For medicine, it is obvious that real physicians
would be needed for surgery and conditions involving examination of actual pa-
tients.)
It is even possible to apply the same ideas to primary and secondary education.
Even today, it would be much cheaper to build a virtual school for the deaf than it
is to build such schools in real life.
For primary and secondary education, there are already rather sophisticated e-
learning tools on the market, such as IStation, Mindplay, Adobe, Riverdeep, Fol-
lett, and others, that use various dynamic and animated approaches to help hold
the attention of students while imparting information. The same ideas can be ap-
plied to many other learning situations. There are also e-learning tools for faculty
such as those by Virtual Education Software (VESi), which are congruent with the
themes of this report.
Currently, it costs between about $75,000 and $100,000 per student per year to
operate schools for the deaf and blind. If the virtual learning tools and methods
discussed here were applied to teaching the deaf and blind, the annual costs would
probably be in the range of $3,000 to $10,000 per student per year. The main bar-
rier to applying the concepts from the virtual university to training the deaf and
blind would probably be opposition from various educational unions and resist-
ance from state assemblies and school boards.
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