Opinion Academic web

This week,Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors,Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller,have formed a company,Coursera,which offers interactive courses in the humanities,social sciences,mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford,Michigan,Penn and Princeton. What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a re-scrambling around the Web.

Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? If a few star professors can lecture to millions,what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost — gesture,mood,eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?

The doubts are justified,but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. First,online learning will give millions of students access to the world’s best teachers. Online learning could extend the influence of American universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from American schools could permeate those institutions.

Research into online learning suggests that it is as effective as classroom learning. It’s easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student’s pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.

The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens,you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis,as you try to organise what you have learned into an argument or a paper.

Online education mostly helps students with step one. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued,it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process,which is where the real value lies. In an online world,colleges have to think hard about how they are going to take communication,which comes over the Web,and turn it into learning,which is a complex social and emotional process.

The early Web radically democratised culture,but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.