IMS Global: Looking into your crystal ball, how would you describe the classroom of the future? How will technology affect the relationship between the student and teacher?

MB: As a backdrop, we really see the education landscape changing quickly. In the United States, for example, just a few factoids for you: We estimate on the research we've done that about 3.2 million students took at least one online course during 2005, versus about 2.3 million the previous year. Fifty-five percent of employers prefer traditional over online degrees, compared with 96 percent previously. That means more and more employers are seeing online degrees as acceptable. Sixty-two percent of chief academic officers rate online learning outcomes as same or superior to face-to-face, versus 57 percent in 2003. And as you probably are already aware, federal student aid is available now for distance learning institutions. As a result of these trends, we think students now are considering better cost alternatives, enrolling in more online courses or full degrees, are juggling their work and studying more than ever before, and are really going where the business opportunities are. And they are demanding relevance and a better sense of progression. If that is where the student today is at, the classroom of the future is likely to be online as often as it is in a seat.

We've been very interested in the work of a professor named Carl Wieman. He's a Nobel prize-winning physics professor who was also named U.S. Professor of the Year in 2004. He is now at the University of British Columbia. Professor Wieman writes about transforming students from novices to experts, about enabling them to learn and retain basic concepts and innovate on top of those concepts through research-based and guided thinking. He believes that technology is a critical tool to scale instruction in higher education. He engages students even before they get to class through online resources and Web communities. And then, in the class, he uses response devices such as clickers for real-time feedback and just-in-time adjustments, and interactive simulations that give students hands-on experience to concepts so they can apply them. We believe that faculty will implement these kinds of tools and strategies and transform the classroom experience once they are mainstreamed. So as we look at technology and its intersection with pedagogy, we understand that we've got a responsibility to work with educators, to be able to get those types of methodologies to scale. We see the classroom of the future being very much like the world that Wieman describes. It's going to be very instructive, experiential, where students are going to get involved in the learning process before they even walk into the classroom. And when they are together, learning is going to be much more interactive, collaborative, building on their base level knowledge through active experiments, and applying the concepts that they're learning to deepen their understanding and go to the next level. What's kind of ironic about that is that if you go back to scientific methodology, that's the way it's always been done. And what Wieman talks about is just the application of science to instruction in the classroom. That approach seems to make a lot of sense to us.