Boundless Education

In traditional form of education, teaching and learning are both taken place in a visible environment with both educators and students interact with each other to achieve the goal of teaching and learning through direct face-to-face communication. The tool applied during the whole process are the physical teaching materials and some related aids that make teaching and learning meaningful to all parties involved. With the evolving technological improvements in schools and introduction of the idea of Electronic Learning in Education, the first change to teaching and learning seemed to be the use of IT aids such as PowerPoint Presentation or Overhead Projectors during lesson. Now, even students can complete their assignments at home on the computer under an interactive distance learning platform guided by the teachers. Indeed, the major administrative duties involving course/programme administration, student records etc could now even be manipulated through the IT platform such as Moodle of Blackboard. In that sense, the E-learning is no longer confined to a fixed venue but is possible anywhere with internet access. Some people started to doubt the need of a physical teaching and learning place as the no. of distance learning schools are surging in recent years, this is true when teaching and learning becomes boundless in the virtual internet world. Indeed, everyone is obtaining some information once he/she entered the internet world which can already be classified as a way of learning. If the internet world has already provided a well-defined platform for the internet users to acquire knowledge, then why is it necessary to have a physical teaching and learning venue that limits the source of information for studies and arouses unnecessary transaction costs such as time cost, venue cost and any miscellaneous costs arisen from using the venue? In economics, we learn to minimize transaction costs and we aim to look for the option/approach with the best comparative advantage over the others so as to maximize our interests,  possibly the 'internet' (along with one's reasonable judgements ) is a trustworthy information source/agent for minimizing the transaction costs when one wants to pursue his/her study because 'internet' does not only offer a cheap virtual place for studies to take place but also is a virtual worldwide library where information opens to the whole world and will never be limited by the resources owned by a school which a student studies at. How will the boundless education evolve seems to be an interesting story for us to be aware of!