"In the online world you don't need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don't need to be trapped into a lecture timetable," says Peter Scott, director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute. The Open University, the UK's open access university, which allows people to study from home in their own time, has been an international pioneer of degree courses online. The university, with more than 263,000 students in 23 countries, has become a record breaker on the iTunes U service, which provides a digital library of materials for university students and staff.Instead of music or movies, Apple's iTunes U provides a download service for lectures and resources from universities around the world.Top universities from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in the US to Oxford and Cambridge in the UK have been making their materials available, with no charge to the users. There have been 31 million downloads of OU materials, more than any other university, representing roughly 10% of all iTunes U downloads.Nearly 90% of these users are from outside the UK.In this online era, the OU student is also getting younger.A quarter of students are aged under-25 and only 10% are aged 50 or over.That change can only be accelerated as the cost of going to university increases in many countries.The prospect of learning from Harvard from your own bedroom is getting closer. "We have a belief that a degree and an opportunity are rights for all citizens.And we have got to enable the population of students attending higher education to scale up.What I am most excited about is that the privilege of going for higher education is not something only for the wealthy or for the smartest or for the most well-equipped students in the future," an American educator says.Online education will be a way of opening up more choices and getting beyond the big brand names of the most exclusive universities. At the Open University, Peter Scott says they are trying to develop services that give students exactly what they want, from face-to-face learning to the fully online experience."We can produce brilliant televisual material and get it to you on YouTube, on iTunes U or even on the web. According to the passage, we can infer that  _  .
all the citizens can get the higher education now online education will take the place of the traditional education online education will probably change the way that people go for higher education studying in Harvard or Cambridge will become easier in the future