And Now Let’s Really Innovate: The Notion of Perpetual Online Courses

Abstract

In addition to traditional online formats, universities and other institutions have the technological capacity to offer courses continuously without any particular start or end date. The notion of a perpetual course suggests that students can enroll in a course at the time of their choosing, as opposed to waiting for the traditional published start dates. It also indicates that students could complete the course when they desire if they find the need to temporarily disenroll from the course for any reason. Instead of students enrolling in a course accompanied by a fixed group of other new students, the perpetual online course would expose the student to the best student inputs that the professor has recorded over time. This is similar to a designer incorporating the best elements of reality into a simulation through the choice of significant learning events and algorithms. This paper presents some basic considerations for perpetual online courses.