by Samuel L. Dunn

About the author: Samuel L. Dunn is vice president for academic affairs and a professor of business and mathematics at Northwest Nazarene University.

By 2025, traditional universities may be a thing of the past, replaced by consortia of course providers with delivery systems that simply bypass the classroom.

Education is an absolute imperative in the emerging global knowledge society, so new ways of providing access to education for a much higher percentage of the population are now being devised.

The most dramatic examples of access to education are found in the 11 distance- education mega-universities found around the world. In “distance education,” the student is separated in time or space from the teacher or professor. The largest of these high enrollment universities is in China, the China Central Radio...