The future of online education: transforming great challenges into great opportunities

The future of online education is with us, not ahead of us. We now have great opportunities to help it and us reach its and our great education potential, as well as great challenges. For our new online education world to best meet its challenges and make best use of its opportunities we need to understand what these challenges and opportunities really are. We also need to understand how COVID-19 has accelerated our new online education world and its great new challenges and opportunities. For instance, online education offers important advantages over traditional education including increased scope and reach, such that it extends education opportunities by making it available to people who are potentially isolated, including by geographic location or disabilities. It also extends education opportunities by reducing the cost of education, including because it reduces the need for increasingly expensive physical teaching spaces (McKenzie, Garivaldis, Dyer, 2020). An important barrier to the full acceptance of the value of online education is an ongoing perception that it lacks equivalence with face-to-face education. This great challenge is being successfully met via progressions in online education quality and supporting technology, which are allowing equivalence and even greater than equivalence with face-to-face education to be achieved in an increasingly wide range of online courses. The current and potential advantages of online education are particularly valuable in our post-COVID-19 education world, where tertiary education institutions are facing great financial challenges, including loss of revenue from international students. This chapter describes how we can help our online education expansion story end happily, by creating an optimal online education future, now. The chapter describes key online expansion aims, issues and barriers, and ways to strategically transform great online education challenges into great online education opportunities.