Dive Summary:

• Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism and the Budig Professor of Writing at the University of Kansas, writes for MediaShift explaining how cheap, easy-to-learn technology, increasing college costs and competition with for-profit colleges created a ripe atmosphere for online learning to evolve.
• Free services such as Moodle, Jing, YouTube, and Twitter have made knowledge exchanges extremely easy using PCs, tablets and smartphones, while digital education has thrives due its low costs and lack of geographic restrictions.
• Meanwhile, public schools have increasingly found themselves in competition for students with private learning companies.

From the article:

The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.

Many institutions have been preparing for these changes for years, building infrastructure and expertise, experimenting and recruiting, and integrating online learning into long-term strategies. Many others, especially traditional research universities, have been caught flat-footed as education has transformed around them. ...