Universities working in consortia to produce new courses will need to identify quality assurance processes that fit their current practices and to propose which of them will function as the awarding body. The key pedagogic ideas are to incorporate self-assessment material in each constituent module of any course and to provide navigation support for potential and active students as they move through and between courses and modules. I believe that the e-university could be operational in 2002, but there is a lot of work to be done before then. The current models of assessment used in universities are already a bad fit to technology-based courses. Eventually it will be taken as normal that students use personal computers for assessment, including three-hour exams.
Great universities have extensive libraries.
The e-university must be able to support sustained student communities that continue beyond the temporal boundaries of courses, and its library will be a natural locus for them. The e-library should also be a base for groupings of academics, especially those concerned with disciplines like classics that need support or emerging interdisciplinary subjects such as bioinformatics that need clearer definition. But as ubiquitous and omniscient advisers cannot be found in ordinary-sized real universities or out in internet space, designing effective navigation services will be a challenge. The suggestion proposed of offering learners a choice of competitive navigators is loopy. Multiple navigators would require the creation of meta-navigators to help the learners choose between them.