Why struggle to college through traffic and torrential rain at ungodly hours when you can learn whatever, whenever and wherever you want on the web? The surge of small dot.com companies offering instant learning solutions makes this achievable in theory. What's more, the DfEE is funding the development of an e-university. But can people really learn on their own at a computer?
Publishers trying to penetrate the lucrative internet education market think so. They are investing serious money in a race to upload bits of knowledge that would produce tailor-made courses for any student at the click of a mouse. In this edutopia, a student would select a topic and then work happily, with ongoing automated feedback, through a personally designed syllabus and end up with a qualification suited to the topic and validated by a training council or university.
The success of this venture depends not only on being able to organise knowledge into chunks that can be turned into individualised courses, but also on people becoming independent, autonomous learners. Based on present understanding of human beings and the ways they learn, both are pretty unlikely. But interesting spin-offs are emerging, and web-learning opportunities are just the ticket for quick, just-in-time, I-need-to-learn-this-now situations. Sites such as www.learnhow.com, http://learn.co.uk, www.learn2.com or www.click2learn.com, will teach you anything from how to iron a shirt to how to use Microsoft Explorer.
At www.iLearn.To, a search engine builds a profile of your learning needs using artificial intelligence, and the company promises that the more you use it, the more it gives you exactly what you want. It even sends new information to your desktop every time you log on to the net.
A company that wants to train its staff rapidly might contact www.nelsoncroom.co.uk, www.ftknowledge.com, www.blueU.com, www.digitalthink.com, www.knowledgeplanet.com, www.ecollege.com/student/myecollege.cgi, http://corp.embark.com, http://fuelgb.com and many others for good, quick business courses.
An EU-funded project to bring longer and more substantial web courses to small and medium-sized enterprises is currently offering them free in such areas as e-commerce, innovation management, supply chain management and even polymer engineering.
More and more colleges are putting their courses online, led by the University for Industry, which is operating a nationwide scheme called learndirect.
The BBC and commercial TV channel operators are also offering courseware of all kinds, an area ready to explode as the difference between television sets and computers shrinks. On top of all this, the Wap phone is in the picture, too. We may all soon find we never again have an excuse not to learn something. Art enthusiasts with no time for a conventional course will find one of the best being run by the City Literary Institute jointly with the Tate Modern (VisualArts@Citylit.ac.uk).
This offers wonderful videos of the gallery, excellent explanatory talks about the art works, and a discussion area where learners from all over the world and tutors can share thoughts and questions. What is more, they will send a CD to anyone without the equipment to play the films and graphics live on the net.
If you would like to create your own web learning site to teach your special subject or hobby, try www.moonfruit.com, which offers a neat set of templates for putting material into web pages.
Another helpful site is www.tourbar.com. The question is: do we really want to abandon classrooms in favour of this kind of thing? The evidence so far is that most of us will do so when we are in a hurry to find out about something for work or leisure. But we have to be exceptionally well-motivated to keep up the effort for a whole course. Most of us keep making excuses, put it off, and finally abandon the enterprise.
What keeps us going in online college study courses are the social factors that can be built in. These make learning a pleasant group activity, with plenty of collaboration and help from teachers. The internet has made communication between people easier than it ever was. So the courses that put knowledge and people together are the ones most likely to succeed.
There are many ways of doing this, from simple email and live chat to sophisticated computer conferences like FirstClass, WebCT or Oracle's hink.com. But until everyone has highly sophisticated equipment and fast access to the internet, it is unrealistic to think of a truly virtual school or university.
But it will come. The convergence of TV and computing has made it inevitable. When it does eventually happen, we could be led into a virtual learning place in the same way as we are led into places where computer games are played out. Then we would feel as if we in a classroom with other people. Despite lingering problems, such as the lack of people with real experience in the area, these are exciting challenges for teachers and learners that nobody can afford to ignore.
• Anita Pincas is senior lecturer in education at the Institute of Education, University of London and has been involved in online education for 12 years
