Graduation weekend, and then the nicest time of year at my place of work. All the undergrads are gone, the place quiets right down and the gym empties out. Working on a campus wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the students.

Perhaps sometime in the not too distant future all students will be distance learners, attending their classes from home. Think of the cost savings for the university– all students live and eat and play at home, they attend classes through their computers and tablets and do all their work from home.

Of course, the university would have none of that. It would mean that students then pay only for credits, and then the real estate of the campus would be too expensive to hold on to, and the entire model of higher education would have to change. Faculty would work from home, spending their time designing courses that can be “delivered” online rather than teaching them every day, either as asynchronous correspondance-type courses where students mail in their writing and exams, or real-time, direct video-to-video synchronous “virtual” classrooms, or of course a blending of the two. Students will come to campus for some things, like capstone events, maybe exams, other exercises and projects. The rest of the time they study from home or from giant dorms far from the campus.

Perhaps in the those giant dorms they have pretty good amenities– a cafeteria or two, a gym maybe. Maybe some conference rooms for group work, or maybe even some rooms for dialing into their courses instead of doing it all from their dorm rooms. Tutors and TAs might be there. Perhaps a faculty or two could manage some classrooms there, and teach out of them.

And then, accidentally, it’s the university model all over again.

It’s hard to think outside of the system in which you’ve grown. Humans rebuild the familiar wherever they go, despite opportunities for improvement and innovation. If you ask someone to radically re-imagine “school” and describe what it could be like, you’ll find it’s pretty much the same idea we have today. This was studied when Second Life became a hot topic. Classes started being offered in Second Life, where you would attend with your avatar. You’d be assigned to meet somewhere in there, and that place would always end up having 4 walls, rows of desks and chairs, a teacher, etc. In that world there are no rules, not even laws of physics, so your class could be held on a cloud, or underwater, or in a giant sphere. But for the most part, virtual classes in Second Life were identical to their analogue counterparts in the real world.

It’s funny and maybe a little sad and cute.