Does Campus Education Have a Future?
Campus based education is under increasing pressure financially and structurally. These pressures have been recently exacerbated in Australia by the release of a strategic report by Ernst and Young [1] which roughly speaking predicts the demise of traditional model universities in Australia within the next decade or so. Reading between the lines is an underlying assumption that traditional classroom instruction offers few benefits over watching sophisticated online content. Internet universities are becoming more common, as the cost of higher education is increasingly criticized in the USA and abroad. Burdened with the high cost of maintaining physical infrastructure, buildings, laboratories, sports grounds and the like, how can traditional campus universities compete with their online counterparts? To meet this challenge it seems imperative that traditional universities adapt, by changing their education to better utilise their costly physical assets. I think this means tha