Advances in communication technology are opening up new possibilities in distance interaction that promise to transform the elite research university from a community of common location to a community of common interests. This transformation into a truly global university will fundamentally change the academic landscape, providing faculty, students, and industry with many new opportunities. The traditional enterprises of the elite research university will not change; but teaching and research will now be conducted in an environment much less constrained by physical co-location.

A global MIT will remain first a residential "MIT" and only second will be a "global" MIT. The new information and communications technology will serve to define a distance presence consistent with MIT's longstanding institutional values. Based on the discussions within the MIT Council on Educational Technology, there appears to be little interest from, and benefit to, MIT in becoming a provider of commodity "educational products" to large numbers of students. Rather, MIT should continue to provide highly interactive offerings for the few and the best – which is the current "extended" MIT community of MIT students and alumni, MIT faculty and collaborators, and MIT industrial and institutional partners. In the same way that OpenCourseWare can be viewed as a modern version of the MIT-authored textbook, so can the global university be viewed as a modern version of MIT teaching and research. By removing geographical limitations, MIT should have even better access to the most talented students and academic collaborators worldwide.

The global university will permit MIT faculty to: (1) jointly develop and teach courses and curricula with faculty at other universities, (2) more effectively conduct research with peers at other institutions, and (3) more closely interact with our industrial partners. We describe the first two of these opportunities in greater detail.

(1) Many faculty have common pedagogical interests with colleagues at peer institutions. Typically, these scholarly collaborations focus on a particular subject area, with each faculty member providing complementary expertise. At present, faculty can pursue this common passion only in jointly-authored books. In the future, faculty from different institutions around the world will be able to combine forces much more effectively, in jointly-taught courses simultaneously offered to students at both home institutions. High-bandwidth video-conferencing, application-sharing, electronic whiteboards, and telecontrol of remote experiments will provide the necessary synchronous environment.

(2) Similarly, most faculty also have long-standing and ongoing research collaborations with colleagues at other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Regular multi-institution group meetings will represent a major improvement in research efficacy. Yearly meetings currently requiring air travel can be supplemented by much more frequent exchanges enabled by distance interaction technology. Furthermore, not only the faculty, but also graduate students and research staff can now actively participate in such collaborations.

These distance-collaborative efforts will be effected both at the individual level – smaller efforts conceived and initiated by individual faculty or units at different universities; and at the "alliance" level – larger (and fewer) efforts conceived and organized at the institutional level.