ABSTRACT
In November, 2014, I gave a keynote address in New York City titled, “The Online Learning Landscape.” My purpose in this talk was to provide an overview of the current state of online learning in higher education and to offer possible scenarios regarding the not too distant (three to four years) future. After the address, an associate professor from Borough of Manhattan Community College came up to me and asked if I thought that she would be out of a job in ten years. I told her that I didn’t think she would be out of job, but it was very likely that the way she teaches and the way her students learn would be different, with a greater emphasis and integration of online technology. It was this conversation that started me thinking further into the future and about the potential impact of online learning on higher education and particularly on the university professoriate. A few months later, in January 2015, I was putting the fi nishing touches on a book about education research in online education that I was writing with colleagues from the University of Central Florida and Brigham Young University. In the concluding chapter we speculated on the future of online and blended learning research. Again, I thought about the exchange with the associate professor from Borough of Manhattan Community College. It was clear that online learning had progressed signifi cantly since its introduction in the early 1990s, evolving as a series of stages or waves that seem to occur every seven or eight years. Before I knew it I was thinking about 2030 and beyond and the effects online learning has had and will have on higher education. This was the inspiration for this book, the purpose of which is to consider how online education in all its manifestations has infl uenced and will continue to infl uence the evolution of higher education, especially the professoriate. It has always been my position that you cannot understand where you are going unless you know where you have been. The book’s title, Online Education Policy and Practice: The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University , refl ects this position and forms the basis for its introduction.
