Online universities were no longer going to be seen as an "alternative", outside of the mainstream, he argued.
The latest expansion in prestigious online universities in the US includes plans to charge for courses which will count towards degrees.
As the rise of online universities demonstrates over the past decade, this wisdom has largely held in the field of higher education.
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Naturally, private universities, especially for-profit online universities, will pooh-pooh this development.
You get what you pay for with these all-online universities.
Online universities were going to be "very significant, " he said.
Mr Willetts, speaking at the Guardian Higher Education Summit, told university leaders that online universities were going to be an important part of the global expansion in student numbers.
The emergence of the cost leader position will be bad news for the many for-profit online universities that have arisen in recent years and for numerous non-selective residential universities.
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Ignoring the fact that prestige may be a poor proxy in the first place, the problem for online learning (and new universities primarily offering online courses) is that building prestige takes a long time and requires considerable resources.
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The movement of "Massive Open Online Courses, " which began with elite universities making their courses available online to the masses, is rapidly moving into the trenches of public higher education.
While it is true that many proprietary colleges and universities use online methods to deliver instruction, not all do.
It might be noted also that information is becoming a commodity with universities offering online coursework and companies online seminars.
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Offerings of free online courses from top universities are expanding rapidly.
Online education will allow universities to do that even better: for one, they will provide a way for the best teachers to be recognized and promoted for something other than just research, a long time concern in the APT process at research universities.
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Ding began looking into online education and realized that more and more U.S. universities were posting their classes online for free.
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There are more than 250 firms eager to help established universities to go online.
Martin Bean, the Open University's vice-chancellor, said that the arrival of online courses meant that UK universities could either "stick their heads in the sand" or rise to the international challenge.
As more schools embraced online education, smaller, less well-known colleges and for-profit universities drove further innovation in the online education space.
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The bottom line, though, is that while online education poses a challenge for universities, they will ultimately improve them.
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Best is chairman of Academic Partnerships, a five-year-old company based in Dallas that helps public universities move their courses online.
But he argued that the scale of demand would need to be met by online courses as well as campus universities.
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.
Online education platform Courserahas added 17 new universities to its ranks, doubling the number of partner institutions.
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Young Kabulis are already surfing the internet and signing up for online degree courses at Indian and Pakistani universities.
Early in 2013, the American Council on Education is going to start an evaluation of how online courses from more than 30 leading universities on the Coursera platform could be accredited.
In a recent editorial, Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Singularity Chancellor, compared the current university model to the bookstore model, suggesting that universities will be undermined by online the way that digital books undermined Borders.
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Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as "massive open online courses, " or MOOCs.
For instance, many American universities are providing free open courses online with Coursera, Academic Earth or their own platforms.
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Others have suggested that online teaching represents a new funding model for universities.
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Recent projects include the search for an environmentally friendly toilet that can improve sanitation around the world and funding online access to some of the US top universities.
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