Issues in Accounting Education Vol. 13, No. 4 November 1998 EDUCATORS' FORUM How to Survive a New Educational Era Alan Sangster and Andrew Lymer ABSTRACT: A number of authors foretell the dawning of a new era in higher education, an era involving a technological and structural redefining of the en- vironment, a reshaping of the nature of institutions and of the market, and a transformation in the nature of the role of faculty. Underpinning many of these views is the present and potential impact of the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web and the resulting opportunities for new approaches to delivering and managing the educational process. These opportunities are already evident. While the establishment and suc- cessful operation of virtual universities might still appear to many to be in the realms of science fiction, there are already some fledgling examples in exist- ence. The presence of virtual modules and degree courses is a reality, along with a growth in the extent of the integration of Internet technology within exist- ing courses. This paper concentrates on the World Wide Web as a basis for these fore- casts of a new educational era. It describes how the web is currently used in education focusing, where appropriate, upon its use in accounting and finance education. It presents views on educational use of the technology, pointers to a range of web-related developments and indications of the wealth of support available on the Internet for integrating World Wide Web into the curriculum. Wherever appropriate, the focus switches from general educational issues to specific accounting and finance ones. INTRODUCTION T he March 1997 issue of countiijg'Horizons included a view of the structure of higher education within a decade that dif- fers markedly from how we know it today: Not only will many traditional business schools not survive, but the role of the...professor will be fundamentally different from what it is today....Schools and professors...will face a com- petitive market in which all the rules of the game are changed. Shifting demands of global cor- porations, leaps in technology and an emerging challenger— the corporate university—will all affect these rules in funda- mental ways. (Moore 1997, 77) While the focus of Moore's (1997) paper was upon the threat posed by corporate universities to business schools, one of the factors Alan Sangster is a Professor at Queen's University of Belfast, U.K. and Andrew Lymer is at the Univer- sity of Birmingham, U.K.