Here is a very important report:Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004

This study takes a look at online learning in American Universities. Here’s a few facts the study brings to bare.

Will online enrollments continue their rapid growth?

• Over 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003.
• Schools expect the number of online students to grow to over 2.6 million by the fall of 2004.
• Schools expect online enrollment growth to accelerate — the expected average growth rate for online students for 2004 is 24.8%, up from 19.8% in 2003.
• Overall, schools were pretty accurate in predicting enrollment growth — last year’s predicted online enrollment for 2003 was 1,920,734; this year’s number from the survey is 1,971,397.

Are students as satisfied with online courses as they are with face-to-face instruction?

• 40.7% of schools offering online courses agree that “students are at least as satisfied” with their online courses, 56.2% are neutral and only 3.1% disagree.

What about the quality of online offerings, do schools continue to believe that it measures up?

• A majority of academic leaders believe that online learning quality is already equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction.
• Three quarters of academic leaders at public colleges and universities believe that online learning quality is equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction.
• Three quarters of all academic leaders believe that online learning quality will be equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction in three years.

In light of these facts, recall my earlier prediction:

I predict that in 5 years, students all over the world will learn Calculus with little input from from instructors (but a lot of input from other students!). They will use sophisticated on-line laboratories and on-line testing, and on-line support. The technology is already here, but we still don’t know how to use it properly.

It looks like it might happen even faster than 5 years! But my prediction is bold enough as it is, so I’ll keep it in its current form.

From Slashdot, I learned that for $3k, one can buy a 1.6TB hard drive similar to normal PC hard drives:

IO Data Device’s new ‘HDZ-UE1.6TS’ exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities — it’s an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB. Not much larger than four 3.5″ hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space. (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

Maybe $3k seems like a lot but I bet that in 5 years, these beasts will cost under $1k and fit inside a normal PC.

The consequences of so much storage (nearly infinite) are still not well understood, but I believe it could bring about new killer applications we can’t even imagine right now.

Richard Hotte announced that we just got internal funding for what must be the first blog project at the University of Québec (post in French) and certainly one of the first blog project in canadian universities. It is not yet a blog-for-students but a rather blog-for-tutors project. It does lay the foundation for a future blog-for-students project. We are getting there one step at a time. I bet we will get there before any other university in Québec (crossing fingers).