With the advent of online learning, university students can get their degrees without ever setting foot in a classroom or visiting a campus.

Distance education - which requires computers and Internet access - can mean courses are offered at remote sites that bring students together in realtime through interactive video classrooms. Online executive education programmes allow students to come together one weekend a month and stay connected to their professor and classmates via the Internet.

Distance learning means access to higher education is not limited by proximity to a university or the ability to afford to move to a foreign country. Respected institutions are offering complete degree programmes online.

The University of Pennsylvania, for example, offers an MBA degree completely online. The University of Phoenix provides online education to 12,000 students seeking degrees. New York Institute of Technology offers hybrid courses where people can meet in a traditional classroom on campus and in a virtual classroom online.

Last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it would post all 2,000 of its courses, complete with lecture notes, syllabuses, exams and video lectures, on the Web, free to everybody. However, visitors to the site would not earn college credentials.

Tom Friedman, foreign affairs correspondent for the New York Times, observed recently that "the biggest foreign policy issue is now the biggest domestic issue: education. In this era of globalisation, we think we need to get smarter to survive in a world without walls".

Indeed, Dr Edward Guiliano, president of New York Institute of Technology, said last week he was in no doubt that technology, globalisation and competition were driving change at a frenetic pace. While he admitted American higher education might not be the smartest in the world, he said it was now a hot issue. "With all its warts and contradictions . . . it is the short-term future vision of education globally. American education in business, technology, medicine and other fields is coveted and copied around the world. American higher education has become an export."

He said there had been a shift in American education toward student-centred learning and interactive learning and coaching, with an "emphasis on the creative examination of ideas, rather than the absorption of facts".

The argument over international comparisons in education, Dr Guiliano said, is the debate over the validity of SAT scores, a comparative test widely used by American colleges and universities as an entrance exam. If a degree obtained through distance education is to become as valuable as one that is conferred upon a student in residence, educators worldwide must agree on and enforce standards and procedures, he said.

Crucial to distance education is the Internet, which can provide ready access to information, course materials and tutors. More than 90 per cent of American college students access the Internet. "Certainly the profusion of technology at America's campuses," Dr Guiliano said, as well as "the integration of technology into the teaching and learning process, distinguishes America's higher education system from most others".

This means not just the use of the Internet but also of high-tech laboratory equipment in the sciences, technology and medicine, as well as high-end computer graphics and digital editing equipment in communications, architecture and design programmes.

Dr Guiliano said Web-based electronic learning was more efficient and effective when it was applied to corporate training and staff development. "Delivery through the Web makes training just-in-time and continuously available."

But not all college professors are enamoured with online learning. Michele Kidwell-Cohen, professor of art history at the New School in Manhattan, told me she did not like the idea of teaching a course online.

"I like to take students to museums or to show them slides so they can feel art and see its beauty and relevance in their own lives." Putting art online, Ms Kidwell-Cohen said, would lose meaning, vitality and the true experience of learning.

Above all else, though, Dr Guiliano believes the one advantage of distance learning is the opportunity for people from different countries to meet and exchange ideas in an educational setting, "even one as artificial as a classroom in cyberspace," he said.