I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future of online learning. The industry seems to be at a point where some really great teaching could happen online, but I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me believe that anyone is actually doing it. There are a lot of good signs: the iBooks initiative from Apple, new Learning Management Systems like Canvas that seem to be at least stepping forward (although not leaping), and more and more universities that seem to be taking online learning seriously (if not for the opportunity to develop a new kind of teaching, then at least for the potential financial windfall).

And iOS apps, among others, seem to be attracting the attention of some very smart people; just take a look at this Youtube demo of a prototype for dynamic page turning in a tablet application.

But the question remains – who is really going to push this envelope and use the cutting edge technologies that are out there? When are we going to see live learning sessions where each student uses an iPad to listen and touch the materials while the professor uses an iPad or PC to moderate and steer the conversations? To show the students videos, 3d graphics, and documentation exactly when appropriate, and to converse with them face to face and allow them to talk back?

I recently finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a fun sci-fi book set in the future in which a simulated world, the OASIS, has been created to which humans escape using a virtual reality visor and gloves with haptic feedback – kind of a mix between a successful and more immersive version of Second Life and the virtual world from Wall-E. The interesting wrinkle is that the OASIS has also provided opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise have existed; for example, a child who is raised in a poor family and can’t get to a good school can apply to go to school in the OASIS.

Aside from appealing to my inherent affinity for technology by endlessly referring to 80s geek culture (the creator of the OASIS grew up in the 80s and laid mountains of easter eggs in the virtual world referring back to it), one passage near the beginning really struck me with regards to online learning:

It was also a lot easier for online teachers to hold their students’ attention, because here in the OASIS, the classrooms were like holodecks. Teachers could take their students on a virtual field trip every day, without ever leaving the school grounds.

During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we’d visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamen’s empire in all its glory.)

In my next class, Biology, we traveled through a human heart and watched it pumping from the inside, just like in that old movie Fantastic Voyage.

In Art class we toured the Louvre while all of our avatars wore silly berets.

In my Astronomy class we visited each of Jupiter’s moons. We stood on the volcanic surface of Io while our teacher explained how the moon had originally formed. As our teacher spoke to us, Jupiter loomed behind filling half the sky, its Great Red Spot churning slowly just over her left shoulder. Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon’s icy crust.

How can you not read that and get excited? We’re not there yet, but we do have technologies at our fingertips to begin the journey. The question is: who is going to take the first step?