Professor Plum, in cyberspace, with a text

"The University for Industry... will use satellite, cable and the new information highways to give every home and workplace access to information, to skills and to teaching, to achieve our objective of permanent educational opportunity for all." Was that Al Gore? Newt Gingrich? Jaques Santer? Tony Blair, as it happens. While it is compulsory for statements on the commercial use of the Information SuperHypeWay (TM) to mention movies-on-demand and, er, home shopping, statements on its social usefulness must mention education and, er, virtual surgery.

What higher education is actually going on on the Infobahn now? There is a "Global Network Academy" based in the USA with an affiliated Virtual Online University -- leading some to wonder whether the UK is being left behind in the technology stakes yet again.

In fact, it's just that Americans are better at coming up with snappy names. "Imagine attending a university with professors from around the U.S.," the VOU asks parochially, "teaching such varied topics as witchhunting in Europe to American idioms to gender issues.... Now imagine doing all this from your home. Affordable, transferrable college credit is now available on the Internet through Virtual Online University."

When you go to the GNA and VOU World-Wide Web pages, you discover that there are a couple of dozen courses actually on offer, of which one is offered by Britain's Open University and several by the new Institute of Baltic Studies. If you want to learn the Prolog artificial intelligence programming language through Estonian, you're in luck.

Much of the most innovative actual work that I've tracked down is, however, happening in the UK. Not surprisingly, some of this is based at the Open University, the pioneer of distance learning for degree courses. The OU, after all, already has 20,000 students on courses which require use of a computer, according to Professor David Hawkridge, who runs its course on IT and Society. From this year, students on the course receive a CD-ROM full of texts and graphics. They file assignments by electronic mail and tutorials take place in conferences (using the COSY software) and mailing lists.

One immediate benefit will be to the OU's 4000 students with disabilities. Electronic texts, for example, can easily be fed to a voice-synthesis program, whereas putting printed texts onto tape or Braille is a major effort.

Other OU courses are introducing an Internet component: of the 2500 students taking the Introduction to Computing this year, around 20 are doing it remotely, from the USA to the Ukraine. And the courses in Artificial Intelligence are, naturally, prime candidates for electronic communication.

Professor Hawkridge is, though, realistic about the difference between the reality of the Internet and the promise of the Infobahn. "Education is a nice shop window for the technology but it's not the main marketplace," he points out; "Even ISDN doesn't really provide fast enough access for, say, video- conferencing. I'm waiting for faster lines and more compression and all those technical things to happen so that we can be less constrained by the technology."

Many courses currently being offered over the Internet are those which have previously been taught remotely using the post and phone, and those which are heavily text-based and require computers anyway.

Other similar offerings in the UK include a Master of Business Administration course from the Southampton Institute, and an MBA for heads of self-managed schools from the University of Humberside. Both courses form part of marketing strategies by the universities to expand student registration without having physically to accommodate large numbers along the Solent and the Humber.

Both MBA courses operate primarily through mailing lists. Professor Brent Davies from Humberside points out that most MBA candidates should be thought of "not as students but as mature active learners... they want a vision and a global network, not just another qualification."

Charles Jennings, Associate Professor in Electronic Communication at Southampton, obtained EU funding for experimental video-conferencing tutorials, which enabled students to install an ISDN line and appropriate hardware. As he says, "That was OK when the European Commission was paying but causes problems with anyone not being funded by, for example, their company."

High-speed communication would also be useful if Birkbeck College in London develops its on-line crystallography course to include large graphics. At present, the course is set out in one of the best-structured World-Wide Web sites I've come across. The whole question of whether any country is "in the lead" is rendered academic by a list of course co-ordinators spread over most of the English-speaking world, and beyond.

Charles Jennings says that "my experience leads me to think that most courses could be satisfactorily followed over networks (although the 'full multimedia' nature of a face-to-face seminar may still be best)." This judgement will be tested to the full by John Clancy at Chelsea School of Art, who sees virtual courses as the only way to cope with demands to teach increasing numbers with diminishing resources.

The concept of a "virtual art school" is about as far as it's possible to get from "Prolog by email". Chelsea, as one of the five London art and design schools which merged into the London Institute, missed out on the JANET network: trial course units are currently being developed over 14,400 baud modem links, which at least puts the teachers and the students on an even technological footing. The demands of teaching design will stretch their ingenuity to the maximum: anyone who's ever asked an artist "why?", for example, will see that video-conferencing will be necessary, it being hard to wave your hands about in email.

Professor Marc Eisenstadt, who heads The Knowledge Media Institute based at the OU, announces that "Our main thesis is that the well-known convergence of telecommunications and computing needs to be merged with a third strand of work in the learning and cognitive sciences area -- this three-way convergence gives rise to what I have called "Knowledge Media". Knowledge Media represents the future of this country, and will help lead us towards what we like to think of as the 'Knowledge Society'."

Fine and true words. But a nagging question remains about education policy. Except where the OU and Southampton received EU funding for pilot projects, the students have all had to find their own hardware and communications links. Remote learning using the Infobahn opens up myriad exciting possibilities -- and it also in effect privatises the provision of classrooms, lecture spaces, computer labs and art studios. A bit like freelance journalists saving on newspaper office space, really.