The trend for online classes will continue to increase, however universities will still require faculty. College classes are not one-way broadcasts, they are interactions. Perhaps rather than 'dismember', the web will 'dismantle', ie, remove some of the brick-and-mortar requirements, but certainly not all, and certainly not its staff. Faculty are what make a university good.
> College classes are not one-way broadcasts, they are interactions.
Some are; some aren't. There are some college classes -- intro (100-level) courses at big state schools -- that are pretty much just broadcast. Some really big lecture halls even have TV screens so you can clearly see the lecturer (who more often than not isn't a professor, but just a grad student forced to teach the class in order to pay for their own education) from the back rows. If you're doing that, you might as well just watch a recording, and if you can do that, why not just watch it on your computer?
I don't see the Internet eliminating labs, seminars, or Socratic-method classes, or just about anything else where there's genuine classroom interaction going on. Unfortunately, there are a lot of college classes that involve nothing close to the sort, and could easily be moved online. I say "unfortunately," because the real solution ought to involve making these courses not suck and have them take advantage of being conducted in-person, rather than just moving them online as if that's the way things should be.
