With higher education increasingly going online and the recent arrival of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), many have predicted the death of the university campus. It’s said that the student no longer needs to go anywhere, class will come to them, The Conversation reports. But these predictions are unfounded. The campus will survive the age of online learning, but not without change. MOOCs might be novel right now, but the truth is teaching materials, such as lectures, have been available for little or no cost to students for longer than most can remember. For more than 50 years, the UK’s Open University (OU) has used radio, then television and now the internet to deliver course materials to students. Yet even OU still engages with students on campuses – not only their own, but also on underused campuses of other institutions. Before MOOCs were even thought of, many institutions had also done away with campuses all together. The University of Phoenix, for example, offers classes in office buildings across the United States, reaching into neighbourhoods that would never normally have a university campus – a kind of on demand pop-up classroom.
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