Starting in 2013, the school expects to significantly expand its small graduate program, charge tuition for those students while creating online classes and adding more continuing-education courses.
But in order to remain competitive in the 21st century, a college has to support wireless networking, provide ultra-high-speed connections to classrooms, and even allow students to take classes online.
Maroe expresses some lofty ideas about democratizing the hiring process, comparing Evisors to massive open online courses where students can take free classes from top-flight professors at schools like MIT and Princeton.
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Nor was it to be solely a research facility. (Stanford has one at Peking University, in Beijing.) Faculty members across the country would share videoconference screens, and students in New York would be able to take online classes based in Palo Alto.
The intellectual and developmental impact on students who live and learn together cannot be replicated by online classes, even if they solve the problems of scale.
Duke Provost Peter Lange said his school won't award credit to its own students or to others who enroll in its Bioelectricity and Genetics classes online, two of the Coursera options that ACE has recommended for credit.
Online classes have already become part of an extended curriculum for many students.
More than three-quarters of Class.com's 7, 000 high school students are homeschoolers, says Blair, and total registration for the company's online classes now exceeds 15, 000, an increase of more than fivefold since July 1999.
Levine predicted that there would continue to be traditional campuses in the future where students live and attend classes, but that they would compete with virtual universities that only exist online.
Chegg recently acquired college-centric online social platform, CourseRank, which allows students to rank and comment on institutions, professors and classes.
Enrolled Penn students who complete the online option can take a departmental exam to prove their knowledge and pass into higher-level math classes, just as they can after finishing an AP class.
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