Epilogue: How can we best prepare for our brave new education world? New directions and vehicles

Great problems require and allow great solutions. A great problem currently facing tertiary education is that there is not enough of it to go around. Rapidly increasing numbers of students, including in developing countries, are creating traditional education bottlenecks-caused by limitations of physical space and other physical teaching resources. This online education supply problem and related opportunities for the development of a new generation of online education courses have recently been accentuated, by the rapidly increased demand for online versions of existing non-online courses and the development of new online courses in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Another great problem facing tertiary education is its increasing emphasis on the development of courses that need to meet specific learning objectives, including vocation specific learning objectives, and a decreasing emphasis on courses that meet general learning objectives, including transferable skills and deep learning. We are increasingly teaching students what to think rather than how to think. A rapid expansion of online education is needed for education to fully meet its new needs and to move freely beyond its traditional format limitations. This expansion needs to not only respond to a need for more all education and online education access, but respond to a rapidly increasing need for high quality education access. There are potential problems underlying our rapid online education expansion that need to be identified and met before they can be transformed into great online education solutions. This epilogue chapter explores where online education needs to go and what it needs to help it get there.