Today, I again heard the canard “there won’t be physical campuses soon”. A great twitter response to that was:
I will take up Shelley’s challenge. Being me, however, I will do so by first making you read through a personal anecdote. Ready? OK:
I’m 10. Like many kids my age, I go to sleep-away camp. Unlike most other kids, my parents are an ocean away, and I only sort of speak the language. (Imagine the embarrassment of asking for the “nursery” when I meant “infirmary”. I never made that mistake again, but it was still too late.) Anyway, my mom wanted me to feel loved, even from far away, and to her that meant making sure I got a note from her as often as possible. If only that meant many postcards, but no… My mom decided that the newfangled fax machine was the perfect way to make sure I heard from her every day. So instead of care packages or even just a pretty postcard, I got that horrible rolled paper with pixellated, hard-to-read words. And I had to go to the office every day to get it, rather than being surprised by a nice letter in my bunk.
Take a minute to think how YOU would feel if you received faxes every day, even filled with sweet words. Yuck, right? That’s exactly why physical campuses won’t go away anytime soon. It’s not (just) that we haven’t hit on the right MOOC or the technology to make distance learning easy or a way to solve the problem of meaningful online credentials.
The reality is: NO ONE LIKES RECEIVING FAXES. Period.
It’s exactly the same with college. Why would millions of students decide to study at home? Yes, cheaper. But also: live in your parents’ basement for years and stay motivated? No new friends, no reinvention? No sports, activities, developing school spirit? No learning to do your own laundry or living on ramen and pb&j? Not getting the million other things one gets in college?
This isn’t a technical issue, so it simply can’t be solved with technology. Campuses are going to exist until and unless people stop living physical lives and move 100% online. We’ve seen that in sci-fi novels plenty, and guess what? They’re all dystopias (it’s even worse in reality <= don’t look at this link unless you really want to hate the world. You’re warned).
So everyone, can we please stop the alarmist “campuses are about to die” thing already? There’s actual work to do. Thanks. (And yeah, I’m preaching to the choir, I know it. But I had to get this off my chest. Thanks for your patience.)