There are many benefits to online education explosion, but how much attention universities are paying to all the components that go into building a successful educational enterprise remains unclear, writes Tala Jarjour. Hardly a week goes by without news about a brand-new university popping up on some newsfeed or another. It is not only new university campuses that are continuously appearing; there is also a proliferation of online educational enterprises. Courses, degrees, even universities are now online, and their variety is increasing exponentially. There are many benefits to this apparent explosion of opportunities for formalized learning and professional knowledge acquisition. How much attention universities are paying to all the components that go into building a successful new educational enterprise, however, remains unclear. One major point of concern for educators and students alike is the degree to which the minimization of face-to-face interaction is influencing the learning and teaching process, and whether such a shift is a matter to which more attention should be paid in the increasingly managed and strongly commercialized model higher education establishments have been adopting over the past decade or two. The change is rapid, but whether the scrutiny necessary for this model’s development is keeping up with the pace is a different matter. Aspiring students (perhaps better called clients in many cases) find that selecting one of the online models, for instance — which are typically based on six to eight-week units — requires investing a full course’s worth of time just to sift through a few of the options that come highly recommended. Still, without the ability to go to a place, meet with faculty staff, and simply get a feel of the environment for which the student is signing up, the experience that follows remains anyone’s guess. The leading names in the long history of Euro-American academia as we know it today are cashing in on their reputation of excellence Tala Jarjour Surely a degree of unpredictability is an essential part of any new venture, one might think. Uncertainty, moreover, is part and parcel of all journeys of learning and discovery — higher education being chief among them in many circles of the world’s rich countries today. As a scholar and educator whose professional career has centered on academia for almost two decades, I would not have it any other way. Encouraging students not only to confront the unknown but also to be excited by it is the essence of teaching as I understand it and have practiced it, inside as well as outside the ivory tower, for even longer than 20 years. But that does not stop me from taking a critical look at how university education at large, and particular trends within it, are jumping into realms of the unknown. Rapidly growing ventures appear armed with figures and statistics universities share selectively with the wider world, yet they seem less attentive to other kinds of capital that remain scarcely tapped into. Consumers buy brands; students and universities are no exception. Leading names in the long history of Euro-American academia as we know it today are cashing in on their reputation of excellence. Hard-won prestige, no doubt. But fees for the virtually delivered knowledge hardly come cheap either. UK universities, for example, are able to charge for their online courses comparable fees to those they charge for degrees that require the actual use of their multimillion-dollar facilities. In return, the hopeful student in Shanghai or California, for instance, gets a promise: You may receive a student card if you apply for one, and it will give you access to our buildings and libraries in the UK. For a full-time professional on a different continent, who is taking a part-time course with strict deadlines across a seven or eight-hour time zone difference and who is likely using up their savings and spare time for the task, such a promise can hardly seem like a heartfelt invitation. An important note to make here is that I am not trying to be cynical about the online teaching enterprise or the laudable intentions behind it. Quite the opposite. The huge financial benefit online education is yielding to fledgling institutions, and the significant boost it has recently given to the economic viability of entire fields of higher education, are but a sample of the motivators any academic needs in order to be pleased that universities have found creative ways to ensure their survival and relevance in the digital age. Heaven forbid I should also appear remotely unsettled by the gradual humbling of the often-perceived academic self-importance or by growing fissures in the proverbial tower gates that students, until very recently, had to climb with incredible grit, resilience and outstanding excellence just to get in without being born into nation, race, wealth or legacy privilege. What online education also provides, at any rate, are instances of the blunt edge that managed education can wield against student experience and the painstaking fostering of healthy student-professor relationships. With university teaching activities multiplying outside the purview of inherited modes of intellectual oversight as their main driving force, and as institutions of established and aspiring excellence grow new extremities beyond the legal reach of student rights and the tried and tested experience of all that it takes to turn someone who can deliver a lecture into an educator and intellect cultivator, higher education is facing new challenges. Novel issues are at stake in global, widely accessible educational models. In this emerging sphere, longstanding academia might benefit from a more mindful engagement with the intended fruit of its exponential growth.