To further the goal of lifelong education, the report suggests that universities team with elementary and secondary schools, as well as businesses and governments, to make educational resources available to everyone. The group also supports the formation of accredited groups devoted to setting standards for lifelong learning programs and distance education. The growth of the Internet will force changes in education that could greatly benefit students, writes Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in a recent USA Today article. University professors could abandon traditional schools in favor of Internet schools, or could teach their own online courses. McNealy says these possibilities, combined with changing student demographics, require schools to change the way they operate.
Many students are now older, trying to balance school with jobs and families.
McNealy notes that this type of student will soon represent 60 percent of the student population, and schools need to accommodate these students by offering convenience and flexibility. Technology now allows distance learning to provide students with online access to text, graphics, audio, video, and libraries of information. Cyberterrorism Year 2000 remediation efforts could cause problems of their own if a disgruntled employee buries a virus or trojan horse into the Y2K fix, warned the SANS Institute in a briefing for network administrators. SANS also warned that most computer systems have vulnerabilities that even hackers with little knowledge can exploit. SANS security expert Alan Paller says most systems have an average of five to 30 vulnerabilities, while most administrators have neither the time or the budget to fix them all, leaving their systems open to a possible attack.