Distance learning programs have actually existed since the 1980s, but technological innovation, content scalability, and widespread mobile adoption have made possible the online degree program to become a competitive option for aspiring students. Long gone are the days of aggressive marketing tactics and empty promises made by degree mills and unaccredited for-profit universities. Today, a learner can enter in competitive bachelor's and master's programs at U Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and more. In many cases, the virtual programs can pass tuition savings of 25-50% to enrolled candidates. 

 

Take, as an example, the Georgia Institute of Technology. An elite public institution, Georgia Tech boasts proud figures of #35 for national university rankings and #8 for best computer science programs. Backed by a $2 million investment from AT&T and a tendency to democratize education by extending beyond physical class sizes, Georgia Tech spun up a Master of Computer Science degree provided asynchronously in a virtual environment. The total price tag? ~$7,000 USD.

 

Georgia Tech is absolutely not all alone. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suspended their on-campus MBA program to transition into an iMBA online, enrollment in individual online courses is tracking upwards year-over-year, and 25% of universities are envisioned to fail in the next 20 years due to heavy losses incurred by pricy facilities and declining student registration.

 

The acceleration of online-based learning has its positive factors, but it is not a silver bullet. But, a set of next-generation improvements facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) stands to totally change the virtual experience.

 

The AI Advantage

 

To improve the current teaching model in which the teacher is the source of knowledge and the student is the recipient, we need to fundamentally reimagine the role of an educator in the university system. Advances in automated assignment grading and remote monitoring services (e.g. Proctorio) allow instructors to forego repetitive, time-intensive tasks and instead dedicate their saved time to higher-value work. For students that do not thrive in the regular classroom setting, AI-enabled learning management systems (LMS) can deploy surveys to categorize individuals into distinct learning buckets (e.g. visual, auditory, text), which can provide effective and targeted content that fits with each preferred learning style. Apart from just identification of preferences, the platforms can also break down long-form lectures and reading assignments into smaller, atomic components that are conveniently digestible.  

 

For international students, the language barrier may complicate progress, but cutting-edge research in text translation and machine learning seeks to create deep-learning systems that can translate English lectures into the student’s native tongue. Similar technologies in voice recognition and text summarization can transcribe a complete lecture with stunning accuracy and minimize paragraphs of text into just the relevant bullet points for review. Machine learning algorithms can equally be deployed over a course curriculum to flag areas of bias, complexity, and ambiguity for much closer review by the instructor. 

 

The climb is slow, but students, teachers, and administrations will without a doubt enjoy the benefits of AI as it evolves and matures over the next decade. The question of whether this field will be disrupted by a tech company, university, or research organization is still up for debate.

 

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