Digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed. They are less good at making them. Hence, paradoxically, technologies may do a better job on the conventional campus than on the virtual one.....

The more expensive, conventional campus, with its rich and respected resources, is unlikely to disappear. It provides a highly effective setting for students to access multiple communities, directly and indirectly, purposefully and serendipitously. On the conventional campus, on-line activities complement the off-line. they do not replace them. Consequently on-line degrees that only provide half of this mixture are unlikely to be regarded as fully equivalent to those that provide the whole.

J. S. Brown & P. Duguid, 2000