With the increasing level of credentialism in the United States the number of people entering college will climb considerably. The use of Community Colleges and Universities as polishing schools for training versus education will increase the breadth of the educational requirements. Further the higher education infrastructure and building environments are continuing to erode in the United States. Add to this the increases in gasoline prices, the “super size” state school problems, and decreasing middle class life style, and you will find distributed or distance learning increasing.
These problems can be solved and distributed or distance learning technologies will become larger and more prevalent over the next few years. Virtualization and collaborative learning environments are server dependent, and require broadband for the user. Tools like Citrix, Microsoft Portal Services, WebCT, Moogle, OS independent applications, collaborative technologies like XP Conference Client & Server software (R&D for Universities at Microsoft), web forums, social bookmarking, and other Web 2.0 technologies will be adopted by the higher education institutions. VMWare, VirtualPC, and Parallels allow technology schools to virtualize operating systems installs and configuration. Shadowing, desktop sharing, and remote desktop tools allow an English teacher to interact in real time with a student anywhere in the world. Document tracking technologies like Microsoft “track changes”, TurnItIn.com with copyright and intellectual property validation, advanced and customized web browser packages.
I think one of the neatest things to come to the higher education environment is iTunes University. Podcasting live lectures for students to review, for distance education students to view, and interactive web conferencing to distribute real time content (and recorded for later podcasting), give the students a sense of presence.