Downes - Future of Online Learning 2008

. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media designspecialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing

at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outline the future as I thought it would –

and should

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unfold.In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. Ihave found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been somemovement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives meconfidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998,

and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not

an attempt to vindicate the previous paper

–

time has done that

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but to carry on in the same spirit,and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.

1

New Technology

The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning. While on the onehand, new technology allows schools and instructors to offer learning in new ways, educatorsnonetheless continue to face limitations imposed by technology, and sometimes the lack of technology. While access to the internet has increased greatly over the last decade, some schoolscontinue to experience bandwidth shortages and most schools do not have enough computers forevery student. Yet, this is changing, and the pace of this change will continue to accelerate.

1.1

Bandwidth

As administrators struggle against the demands video streaming and bit torrent networks place onbackbones, it is hard to imagine saying that bandwidth will be unlimited. But from a certainperspective, from the point of view of most users, bandwidth is already unlimited, as they are ableto share text, images and video with ease. The limit of 28K from ten years ago now appearslaughable to most urban internet users, as broadband access allows downloads almost a hundredtimes faster. Applets are now commonplace, a video sharing site (YouTube) is the most populardestination on the internet, and video conferencing (through services such as Skype) is mainstream.And access to bandwidth continues to improve. The employment of data compression technologieshas almost been superseded by fibre-optics technology such as lightpath management. (van der Pol,2007) Companies like Verizon are offering fibre-optics to the home. (Verizon, 2008) And whilesatellite internet did not revolutionize internet access, the spread of Wi-Fi and other wirelesstechnologies created an essentially mobile internet, with Wi-Max, a long-range broadband wirelessinternet standard, poised to greatly extend that in the future. Bandwidth is in the process of becoming ubiquitous, and though we may complain about the price, it is already, relativelyspeaking, cheap.