The elephant in the chat room: will international students stay at home?

FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: We continue our series on the rise of online and blended learning and how free online courses are set to transform the higher education sector. Today, Wollongong University’s Thomas Birtchnell looks at what online education will mean for the international student market.
In 1923, a young boy leaves his small village in India and travels by boat to study at Columbia University in the United States.
This is a time when only five out of every hundred of India’s three hundred million people can read and write. His story, featured in a Boy Scouts’ magazine, was billed as “The Boy Who Would Educate India”. He would return to India with his degree to “teach the people something besides religion” and put India on the path to development.
The aim of the feature was to be an inspirational story for young Americans – they, too, should strive for an education and help others...
Study Without Moving
New technologies are making their way into the global education system and may challenge the way universities operate. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example, offer expert tuition from the world’s most prestigious universities for free — Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and now Melbourne to name a few.
Most seriously for education exporters, these new technologies appear to threaten the lucrative international student market, now a considerable slice of universities’ incomes. The market for Indian students alone is worth over $3 billion to the US, and was expected to grow exponentially alongside aspirant middle classes. With MOOCs, rich students from poor regions can earn degrees from premier providers from the “comfort” of their own homes. In the future they may even interact with others through iPad Doubles (see video below). But at the moment this interaction mostly occurs in chatrooms and quizzes.
The series will conclude on Monday with a panel discussion in Canberra co-hosted with the Office for Learning and Teaching and involving the Minister for Tertiary Education, Chris Evans. We’d love you to take part: leave your comments, join the discussion on twitter.com/conversationEDU, facebook.com/conversationEDU.
This is part fourteen of our series on the Future of Higher Education. You can read other instalments by clicking the links below:
Part one: Online opportunities: digital innovation or death through regulation?, Jane Den Hollander
Part two: MOOCs and exercise bikes – more in common than you’d think, Phillip Dawson & Robert Nelson
Part three: How Australian universities can play in the MOOCs market, David Sadler
Part four: MOOC and you’re out of a job: uni business models in danger, Mark Gregory
Part five: Radical rethink: how to design university courses in the online, Paul Wappett
Part six: Online education: can we bridge the digital divide?, Tim Pitman
Part seven: Online learning will change universities by degrees, Margaret Gardner
Part eight: The university campus of the future: what will it look like?, David Lamond
Part nine: Deadset? MOOCs and Australian education in a globalised world, Ruth Morgan
Part ten: Research online: why universities need to be knowledge brokers, Justin O'Brien
Part eleven: Online education at the coalface: what academics need to know, Rod Lamberts & Will Grant
Part twelve: A little bit more conversation: the limits of online education, Shirley Alexander
Part thirteen: What students want and how universities are getting it wrong, Alasdair McAndrew