Can Online Education Survive the Autonomous Student?
Agentic AI and the Crisis of the Digital Classroom
This post follows my standard early access schedule: paid subscribers today, free for everyone on May 12.
In late 1999, I was a relatively young Computer Science researcher at Arizona State University. One afternoon I found myself driving north to Flagstaff, sent by my department to sit in on a presentation at Northern Arizona University. The topic was a new initiative that would link Arizona’s three major public universities through the internet. I had been asked to attend because I had shown interest in web-based delivery of information, which at the time was about as niche a concern as a university could identify.
The initiative had roots in the Arizona Tri-Universities for Indian Education (ATUIE) program, which had been formalized that same fall through a grant from the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation to the Arizona Board of Regents. ATUIE mandated cooperation between ASU, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona to recruit, support, and retain American Indian students. That collaborative spirit gave rise to a broader project: the Arizona Universities Network (AZUN), a centralized digital gateway that allowed students to earn fully accredited degrees by taking online classes across all three institutions. Over the following decade, AZUN would grow to offer over 1,500 online classes and 53 degree programs.
I never developed courses for AZUN. But the presentation in Flagstaff stayed with me. What I remember most is the ambition of the pitch. There was a conviction that the internet would dissolve the distance between students and institutions entirely. Of course, calling what we were doing “online education” back then is very generous. The late-1990s version of digital learning was online access to a folder housing documents for download. There was no interaction of any kind. Still, the experience became a catalyst for my subsequent work in using digital tools for non-traditional approaches to education.
I have thought about that afternoon in Flagstaff often since then. The ambition of that pitch now reads as both prophetic and tragically naive. The distance has indeed vanished. Just not in the way any of us imagined.
The industrial blueprint
Online education in the late 1990s was, in most respects, a natural extension of traditional distance education. The example I know best is the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany’s state-run distance-learning university, founded in 1974 on the initiative of North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister of Science. The institution, built on the key principles of the British Open University, served working adults whose geographic or socioeconomic circumstances prevented attendance at conventional universities. When teaching formally began in October 1975, the first printed study materials were shipped by post to roughly 1,330 students.
That industrial model persisted for decades, largely unchanged. I encountered it firsthand at Danube University Krems, now called University for Continuing Education, where I directed an e-teaching and e-learning program between 2003 and 2010. Several of my adjunct faculty held their primary appointments at the FernUniversität. And it was through them that I came to appreciate how thoroughly online education still followed the structural logic of distance learning. The FernUniversität’s founding rector, Otto Peters, had captured that logic in a landmark 1967 monograph. He conceptualized distance education as “the most industrialized form of teaching and learning.”
Drawing on Max Weber and the principles of industrial production, Peters argued that distance education replaces the artisanal model of a professor lecturing to a small room with an assembly-line framework. Subject matter experts authored the content. Instructional designers formatted it for independent consumption. Administrators managed distribution. And local tutors handled the evaluation.
