A distributed presence around the world. Colleges and universities operate campuses and require students to come to them. In the past couple of decades, online education has grown substantially, but for the most part, higher education is still about face-to-face interactions. Georgia Tech imagines a future in which the two worlds are blended in what it calls the “atrium” — essentially storefronts that share space with entrepreneurs and become gathering places for students and alumni. In these spaces, visiting faculty might conduct master classes, online students could gather to complete project work or alumni might work on an invention.