Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 And who knows what else? The capacities of the medium have only begun to be explored. A few years from now, Herb Allen says, "You're going to be playing this stuff on your thumbnail, on the back of your eyelid, on your glasses." Maybe you'll be sitting in your living room with helmet and goggles -here" and "there" at the same time. Whether this is a brave new world to which we ought to aspire is, of course, another question altogether. While it has become a truism that the internet will revolutionize higher education, there is some confusion as to exactly whose experience is likely to be transformed. GEN expects to do about 90 percent of its business with adult learners, who would be taking noncredit classes, and the remaining 10 percent with high school students, who would, or so the theory goes, receive Advanced Placement credit for a GEN class. Only somewhere down the road would GEN be colonizing the campus itself. At least in the immediate future, the elite institutions will function principally as producers, rather than consumers, in the online marketplace. But that's not to say that students at these institutions will be confined to the traditional technologies of lecture and blackboard. Academics on campuses across the country are experimenting with the Internet as a pedagogic tool. Edward Burger, a professor of mathematics at Williams, has created a series of lectures on algebra and calculus that look very much like a GEN course. Burger realized that if his students could learn the basic concepts and do required exercises back in their dorms, then once they came to class they could work problems together at the blackboard rather than sit silently, hunched over their notes. Burger's motivation was to bring spontaneity and life to the classroom. "I just want to teach in the most powerful way I can," he says. "If it's technology, that's great. If it's a crayon, that's great, too." Elite undergraduate education will probably be the last bastion to fall to the online providers. But the Internet has already made major inroads in alumni education, extension schools and ongoing-training programs for doctors, lawyers and others. Much of the really serious action right now is in professional education, where instruction tends to be directed to the mastery of discrete skills, and where the students' own utilitarian ambitions make them willing to do without with the physical community of like-minded souls. Kaplan Inc., the College Boards preparation company, has established Concord Law School, an online institution that currently has 500 students across the country enrolled in a four-year J.D. degree program. The American Bar Association does not accredit distance-learning schools, and no less an authority than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has criticized Concord for trying to offer legal education without face-to-face interaction. But the school has been a boon for older students who are fully employed or must stay at home and who are pleased to pay $20,000 rather three or four times that much for a law degree. Perhaps they also appreciate the modest workload, since Concord's application form asks students, "Are you willing to devote 2.5 hours a day to achieve your goals?"