ABSTRACT

Drew Faust, the president of Harvard University, in a message to the World Economic Forum in 2015, described three major forces that will shape the future of higher education:

1. The influence of technology 2. The changing shape of knowledge 3. The attempt to define the value of education

She went on to extol the facilities that digital technology and communications will provide for teaching, learning, and research. She sees great benefi ts in technology’s ability to reach masses of students around the globe and to easily quantify large databases for scaling up and assessment purposes. On the other hand, she made it clear that “residential education cannot be replicated online” and stressed the importance of physical-being interaction and shared experiences.