Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 82

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
technologies in online universities are therefore possible to patent, and indeed Aberta
University is in the process of patenting some of its teaching techniques. This interplay
between media technology and teaching will be opening new forms of teaching how to work
with information-rich content. Through online universities, we will be able to see the
development of a new form of teaching within online learning environments with a high
level of quality, and that can be taught to segments of the society that were previously
disenfranchised.
Information Access as a Universal Right
Until recently, the information grabbing techniques learned at online universities were
only useful when people were in front of computers, which was useful to only a fraction of
the available jobs. But the development of technologies, such as the Google eyeglasses,
where all the information in the web can at any time and place be downloaded to a person’s
eyeglasses, means that answering the questions to any exam in any discipline will become
more and more trivial. But if answering to an exam is trivial, then why should students take
exams, since all those exams measure is the difficulty of Internet access? By using
eyeglasses such as those, and its future improvements, it will be possible at any time to be
immersed in 2D and 3D virtual realities representing anything we want to be informed
about. Thus, as those technologies become more and more available, the only exams that
make sense are those that measure people´s capacity to access and process that information
available in the web; and online universities are very well-suited to teach and test those
types of skills. The access to all existing information by anyone anywhere constitutes a
powerful mechanism for the promotion of human dignity, and so we are proposing that this
access should be a fundamental human right. Like all the rights that have a monetary cost
associated to them, its implementation will be gradual and not immediate, but nevertheless it
should be a goal of any civilized nation.
Universal access to information does mean homogeneity in the quality of the
technologies used to assess and process such information. The quality of teaching in the
future, and already in the present, will be about how well the teaching institution has trained
the students on their capacity to assess and process the web’s huge amount of information.
The sovereign states are changing their functions and structure not only through the
appearing of large deeply integration areas such as the EU, but also through the emergence
of sovereign individuals that will create diffuse virtual sovereign aggregates of people
having common goals; with the common goals being economical, religious, linguistic and/or
other. But, regardless of what kind of societal structures are being created, the type of
knowledge gained in online universities is likely to be more appropriate for a life in those
types of societies.
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