Eko Indrajit from Indonesia explained that in a country with 19 million people of college age but where the universities can only accommodate 5 million — and where there are only 3,000 Ph.D.’s in the entire country — putting the best courses on the Internet was the quickest way to expand capacity without sacrificing quality.

“We don’t believe in invisible hands,” Dr. Indrajit said. “We believe that success can be designed.”

One theme heard repeatedly during the three-day meeting was the opportunity created by the world financial crisis. Cable Green, director of global learning at Creative Commons , said that policy at the state level in the United States was swinging decisively in favor of open access partly because of the skyrocketing cost of textbooks. “Textbooks cost more than tuition in many community colleges,” he said. “That can’t be right.”

“Digital technology makes sharing a lot easier and cheaper,” said Nick Pearce of Durham University in Britain. Dr. Pearce, who teaches an anthropology course he described as “Sex, Death and Monkeys,” cited the rapid growth of the Pinterest Web site as an example of “the way social media allows you to treat ideas as objects.” Although initially favored by young women for sharing photos and fashion ideas, the site, which now ranks third in popularity behind Facebook and Twitter, is starting to be used in education, he said.

A decade ago there were only a handful of courses available online — all of them from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today there are more than 21,000, with more being added every week, according to Anka Mulder, president of the Open Course Ware Consortium , which hosted the conference along with Open University in Britain. “We are now on every continent except Antarctica,” she said, adding that students everywhere now live in a digital world. “My kids meet their friends online just as easily as their friends around the corner. But it has to become a lot easier, and more interesting, for students to meet online.”