Hi,

Its clear that the first signs of what might become a significant "industry" on a global scale are evolving. Whilst registration for such courses is probably still tiny compared to registration at "real" universities, these two courses do clearly fill a niche that more conventional University taught courses in many institutes leave unfilled.

So, anyone out there in real "university and further educationland" worried yet about their jobs?

I think that 'practical' subjects like Chemistry might be in a better position to survive this than purely academic ones, like say maths. It's difficult to see how the skills necessary to perform hands-on experiments could be taught on-line. Unless it was done the same way as the Open University, have a 2 week Summer school where the students do the practical experimentation while everything else is done at home. Of course the problems of travelling to the Summer Schhols would probably mean a course could only be national, not international... Regards, ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK tel: +44 (0)117 928-9000 x4276, fax: +44 (0)117 925-1295 <mailto:paul.may@bris.ac.uk> <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/staff/pwm.htm> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (u)nsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)