In the Internet age, walls are everywhere falling in academe. Online education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities, which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling far-flung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs.

there is no way to tell how much actual learning these expensive projects are creating. “If you take away OCW completely,” said Ira Fuchs, former vice president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of MIT’s celebrated OpenCourseWare project, “I’m not sure that higher education would be noticeably different.”

Though often designed primarily for external audiences, these projects have also made an impact closer to home, aiding efforts to improve alumni relations, recruit prospective students, and provide a welcome study aid (and a kind of enhanced course catalog) for the university’s enrolled student population.

Only 10 percent of colleges have begun phasing out their physical computer labs, even though the vast majority of students now own laptops, according to the Campus Computing Project. A full two-thirds of respondents to last fall’s survey said they had decided not to phase out their labs. Yet all of the technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed agreed that virtual computing labs are bound to emerge to supplement physical computer labs across higher education, and some even suggested that the rooms where students currently tap away on campus-owned computers will eventually yield to the virtual kind.