The coronavirus crisis and the enforced shift to online teaching might very well lead to major changes in higher education. At the university where I work in J

The coronavirus crisis and the enforced shift to online teaching might very well lead to major changes in higher education. At the university where I work in Japan, we began teaching all of our classes online a month and a half ago using Zoom. I don't know anyone, teacher or student, who thought that they would prefer online classes, but now that we have been doing it for a while it's clear there are advantages. Perhaps most significant is the fact that teachers and students do not need to live near campus. The students in my undergraduate classes are scattered throughout Japan, and my graduate seminar includes students in Thailand and Indonesia who were unable to enter Japan when travel was shut down in early April. Some of our teachers are also stuck outside the country and are conducting their classes from overseas. Overall, classes seem to be going surprisingly smoothly, and students are able to participate equally in class discussions regardless of their location. What the author of this post presented as a cost-comparison exercise—get a group of people who want to study the same thing and hire a teacher—is much more feasible when the students and teacher do not have to be in the same geographic area. It will be interesting to see how such possibilities change higher education in the years ahead.