The Economist has a survey on higher education. It starts by identifying four fundamental changes:

The first is the democratisation of higher education—“massification”, in the language of the educational profession....The second reason is the rise of the knowledge economy. The world is in the grips of a “soft revolution” in which knowledge is replacing physical resources as the main driver of economic growth....The third factor is globalisation. The death of distance is transforming academia just as radically as it is transforming business....The fourth is competition. Traditional universities are being forced to compete for students and research grants, and private companies are trying to break into a sector which they regard as “the new health care”.

[via Sadagopan] Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes:

One of the most exciting areas of innovation is emerging around what I'd like to call 3rd Generation User Interfaces or 3G/UI. 3G/UI, inspired by game players, promises to bring highly visual, interactive interfaces to all sorts of applications in health care, education, science and business. The reason this is such a huge deal is that every time a new paradigm emerges in the way people interact with computers, we've seen all kinds of new applications begin to appear, qualitatively better and different from anything before. Furthermore, innovation in user interfaces soon gives rise to innovation in the programming and computing models needed to develop and run the new round of applications that they enable.
...
Visual interfaces, which first appeared with scientific applications, and have been increasingly perfected (along with the accompanying sounds) with digital animation and video games promise to finally usher in the next round of new and innovative applications. Video games are particularly important in this regard, because in addition to their very realistic visual images and great sound, they are also highly interactive and increasingly collaborative, and thus a good launch pad for thinking about how people should best interact with all kinds of computer applications as well as with each other in the future.

Brad Feld links to all his posts explaining everything about term sheets. A must-read for entrepreneurs and investors.