Great article from Russell Moench of VentureBeat.com

The education industry is on the cusp of being massively disrupted by innovation in Web technology. Like other industries prior, it would like to pretend that it can weather the storm and continues business as usual, with only minor tweaking. We all know how that story ends.

It won’t happen immediately, and the path won’t be a direct one. Marketing giants such foreign-language instructor Rosetta Stone will be able to build healthy businesses off of dying trends — i.e., using the Web as a retail store for pre-packaged content — but these models won’t last long. Educational companies that focus on the needs of the publisher rather than the user are no less vulnerable than other media players, and they face a real risk of being made obsolete by more scalable Web-enabled models.

People are already waking up to the fact that they can learn online at a fraction of the cost of traditional means; the next realization is that they might be able to learn better. The U.S. Department of Education, with the help of research organization SRI, just completed a 12-year study on online education that concluded: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” This is not yet commonly accepted wisdom, but things are changing quickly.

What makes me so sure web-based instruction will eclipse more traditional methods? Three things: the web offers rich opportunities for collaborative learning, it allows for almost infinite customization, and it’s cheaper than pulling people into a physical classroom.

To read the complete article click here…

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The reliance on the internet to educate our children in the classroom and ourselves at home or in the office will continue to increase as accessibility grows to meet demand. We are home to one of the world’s most recognized research institutions, the University of Wisconsin, their slogan, Forward. Thinking. encapsulates Wired Wisconsin’s goal of expanding 21st century e-learning for today and tomorrow.