Chapter 11: Will E-Learning Permanently Alter the Fundamental Educational Model of the Institution we Call “The University”?

The university can be rightly viewed as a medieval organization operating in a twenty-first century world. In the purest sense, the institution represents the intellectual achievement of a collection of thirteenth century European educators who sought to move formalized medieval education beyond the rote memorization learning paradigm so prevalent within the High Medieval Period (Carruthers, 2008). The educational innovation established by these individuals was ultimately so successful that the university was to quickly find its model of learning exported to virtually every part of Europe and eventually, the world (Rudolph, 1990; Rüegg, 2003b). The modern university has certainly moved beyond such medieval instructional approaches as the scholastic method and has long since enlarged upon the originally prescribed curricular sequence of the triv-ium and quadrivium (cf. Daileader, 2001; Leff, 1992; North, 1992), but the institution’s eight-century track record has demonstrated a robust underlying model adept at meeting a wide variety of educational challenges throughout its history (Radding & Clark, 1992). The university can therefore not only be rightly considered only a medieval educational concept but also a truly resilient model of teaching and learning.