Online higher education and the borderless family: how my sons study from anywhere (2026)

It started with schools closing

I did not plan any of this. In early 2020 my two sons were eleven and fourteen, both at the Deutsche Schule Barcelona — the German school in the city where I was born, to a Spanish father and a German mother. Then the schools closed. Overnight, the ordinary rhythm of the school run and the classroom and the playground simply stopped, and nobody could tell us for how long.

I want to be honest about that period, because I think we are already sanding down the memory of it. It was a hard, disruptive time for children. Kids lost friendships, routines, sport, the small daily social scaffolding that a growing person actually needs. That was real, and it was not nothing, and I would not pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidy story. But it is also true that what happened next reshaped how I think about education entirely — and, eventually, how my family lives.

The Deutsche Schule Barcelona adapted fast. Faster than I expected. Within a strikingly short window they had moved the full syllabus online — not a holding pattern of worksheets, but the actual curriculum, taught, structured, timetabled. I remain genuinely grateful for how quickly that institution built a capability it had never needed before. Teachers who had spent careers in front of a whiteboard were suddenly running a classroom through a screen, and most of them did it with real care.

I should be precise about what that actually looked like, because 'they moved online' flattens a lot of scrambling into a tidy phrase. The first week was chaos, and I say that with affection rather than judgement. Links that didn't work. Microphones nobody could unmute. A timetable that assumed everyone had a quiet room and a reliable connection, which in a locked-down apartment building with two working parents and two boys was optimistic. But by the second and third week something had settled. There was a real morning schedule — subjects at fixed hours, cameras on, register taken, homework set and collected. The teachers learned to break a lesson into shorter blocks because a screen punishes the forty-minute lecture in a way a classroom forgives. They learned to use the chat as a back-channel so a shy kid could ask a question without performing it out loud. None of that was in anyone's training. They built it in a fortnight because they had to.

The texture of our days changed in ways I still remember vividly. Breakfast bled into first period. The kitchen table became two desks and a battleground over who got the corner with the good light. I'd walk past a doorway and hear my elder son deep in a physics discussion with a teacher he could only see as a thumbnail, and walk past another and find my younger one's camera pointed carefully at a spot on the ceiling while he was, I am fairly sure, still horizontal. The line between 'at school' and 'at home' dissolved, and with it a lot of the invisible structure that a building provides for free. You do not notice how much work the walls of a school are doing until they're gone.

My sons learned something that year that no lesson plan had on it: what self-discipline at home actually means. There is no teacher standing over you at the kitchen table. No bell. The work still has to get done, and the only person who can make you do it is you. My older son took to it with a kind of quiet seriousness. My younger son — and I say this with total affection — mostly discovered that if class started on a screen, he could sleep in a little longer, and he treasured those extra twenty minutes like a small daily miracle. Both of them, in their different ways, came out of that stretch more capable of running their own day than they had been going in.

The younger one's lie-ins are a joke in our family now, but there's something real underneath them. He was optimising. He worked out exactly how many minutes he could reclaim between the alarm and the register without missing anything that mattered, and he defended that margin like a lawyer. At the time it irritated me. In hindsight I think he was learning, at eleven, to manage his own energy and attention against a fixed set of obligations — which is, more or less, the entire skill of adult work. He wasn't being lazy. He was being efficient about a system that, for the first time, let him be. The elder one solved the same problem the opposite way: he got ahead, banked his work, and used the flexibility to go deep on the subjects he liked. Two temperaments, one lesson — that when the external scaffolding falls away, you have to build your own, and there's more than one way to build it.

I won't pretend I felt calm about it while it was happening. There was a real anger in me that year — not at the school, which was doing its best, but at the sheer disruption of it, at how much was being asked of children who hadn't signed up for an experiment. I watched my sons miss the ordinary business of growing up in a crowd and I resented it on their behalf. That anger and my gratitude to the DSB lived side by side the whole time and never fully reconciled, and I've stopped expecting them to. Both were true. The institution behaved well inside a situation that was bad for kids, and holding those two facts at once is the honest version of that year.

I remember watching that unfold and feeling two things at once, which never fully resolved and probably shouldn't. On one hand, I ached for what they were missing — the corridor noise, the football at break, the low-grade chaos that is half of what school is actually for. On the other, I could see a muscle developing in them that most children never get to exercise until they leave home: ownership of their own time. You cannot fake that, and you cannot teach it in a lecture. It only grows when the external structure falls away and something inside has to take its place. For all the cost of that year, that muscle turned out to be the most valuable thing either of them acquired, and it is the reason online university has been almost easy for them since.

Where online education has actually gone

A few years on, the improvised experiment has hardened into infrastructure. The thing that felt like an emergency measure in 2020 is now, in 2026, an ordinary way to earn a serious qualification. Several shifts stand out to me.

First, accredited online degrees have been normalised. At a regionally accredited university, an online programme awards the same credential as the on-campus one — and the diploma and transcript generally do not even state the delivery format. The employer sees the degree, not the medium. That was not a settled fact a decade ago; it is now.

Second, the quality spread has widened at both ends. The top of the market is genuinely excellent — flagship public universities and their private peers now run online degrees that are, in curriculum and assessment, indistinguishable from what they teach in person, often taught by the same faculty. Whole reputable institutions have built dedicated online divisions that are no longer the poor cousin of the main campus. At the same time the floor has dropped: the barrier to putting up a plausible-looking 'university' website has never been lower, and the marketing is slicker than it used to be. So the average has improved while the variance has exploded. For a family choosing a programme, that means the upside is real and the downside is worse than ever, and the whole task is telling them apart — which is why half of this article is about verification.

Third, AI is reshaping how this generation learns and, uncomfortably, how it will work. My sons study alongside AI the way I once studied alongside a library — it is a brainstorming partner, a tutor available at 2am, a way to self-teach at a speed I would have found unimaginable. In HEPI’s 2026 student survey, 95% of undergraduates reported using AI in some form — up from 66% just two years earlier — and 94% now use it to support assessed work. The flip side is real and I won't sugar-coat it: the same tools are compressing exactly the entry-level tasks that new graduates used to cut their teeth on. Employers increasingly want people who can work with AI rather than be replaced by it, and a lot of students feel that pressure keenly.

It's worth sitting with what AI actually changes for how you learn, not just how fast. When a competent explanation of almost anything is available on demand, the bottleneck stops being access to information — the thing a library or a lecture used to gatekeep — and becomes knowing what to ask, judging whether the answer is right, and doing something with it. My sons spend less time hunting for an explanation and more time interrogating one. That's a genuine upgrade when it's used well: the tutor never gets impatient, never runs out of patience at the fourth 'but why', and adapts to exactly where you're stuck. Used badly, it's a machine for producing the appearance of understanding without the substance — and the gap between those two uses is, again, self-discipline. The tool rewards the student who was already going to do the work and quietly hollows out the one who wasn't.

The assessment side is where institutions are visibly scrambling, and it matters for anyone choosing a programme. If any essay can be generated in seconds, the take-home essay stops measuring what it used to. The serious universities have responded by moving weight back toward things AI can't sit for you: invigilated exams, oral defences, in-person or proctored practicals, project work assessed on process rather than just output. The unserious ones haven't, and a programme that still leans entirely on unsupervised written assignments in 2026 is quietly telling you how much it values the integrity of its own credential. When I vet a programme now, how it assesses is part of the accreditation question, not separate from it — because a degree is only worth what its assessment can defend.

For the job market my sons are walking into, the honest picture is mixed and I'd rather they hear it straight. The narrowing of entry-level work is real — the tasks a graduate used to be hired to do, the drafting and summarising and first-pass analysis, are exactly what the tools do cheapest. But the same shift raises the ceiling for anyone who can direct the tools rather than compete with them. The premium is moving toward judgement, taste, the ability to frame a problem and check a machine's work — the things that are hard to automate precisely because they require knowing when the confident answer is wrong. What this means practically is that the credential alone is worth less than it was and demonstrable skill is worth more, which, if anything, favours a generation that learned to teach itself.

There's a further shift worth naming, quieter than the others: the attitude of employers and admissions committees has caught up. A decade ago 'online degree' still carried a faint whiff of second-best. In 2026 that stigma has largely evaporated at reputable institutions, in part because the pandemic put every serious university's brand behind remote delivery at once. When the most prestigious names in the world spent a year teaching entirely online, they could hardly turn around and treat online delivery as inferior. That normalisation is precisely what makes the borderless model viable now in a way it simply wasn't for the generation before mine — the credential no longer needs an apology.

Why this matters for a borderless life

Here is where my two worlds collide. My wife is Argentine and German; I hold a German passport; we have built a life that is, by design, not anchored to a single country. We move. We live borderless — not as a stunt, but as a considered way of raising a family and running our work. And for years the honest objection to that lifestyle, the one every parent throws at you, was: what about the kids' education? You can't just uproot children from their school every eighteen months.

That objection is genuinely serious at the school-age level, and I don't wave it away — continuity of curriculum below university is a real constraint, which is exactly why international schools and curriculum portability matter so much for younger children. But at the higher-education stage, the calculus flips. University is the first point where a young adult is expected to direct their own learning anyway. Bolting them to a single physical campus for three or four years, at the precise moment they've become capable of studying from anywhere, started to look to me less like a necessity and more like an inherited assumption we'd never questioned.

Online higher education is the answer to that objection. It is the unlock. When your sons' university lives on a laptop, the family is no longer tethered to a lecture hall in one city. We can spend a season somewhere, a year somewhere else, and the degrees keep progressing on schedule. The children get exposed to places and cultures early — languages absorbed in the street rather than the classroom, history stood in front of rather than read about — and, counter to what you might assume, the family gets closer rather than more scattered. We are together, in the same apartment, in a new place, figuring it out. That combination — freedom, plus early world exposure, plus stronger family ties — is the whole thesis of a borderless life, and education was the missing piece that made it hold together.

I want to be careful not to oversell the freedom, though, because the freedom is only real if the family ties hold, and those don't take care of themselves. The reason this works for us isn't that we're rootless — it's the opposite. We move as a unit. The boys aren't scattered across dormitories in three countries; they're at the same table, in a new place, with the same two parents. The mobility and the closeness aren't in tension the way people assume. If anything, the shared logistics of a move — finding the flat, working out the transport, negotiating a market in a language you're still learning — bind a family together in a way that a settled, everyone-in-their-own-lane suburban routine never quite does. The borderless thesis isn't 'go it alone, everywhere'. It's 'go together, anywhere', and online education is what makes the 'together' compatible with the 'anywhere'.

The early world exposure deserves its own line, because I think it's the most undervalued part. My sons have stood in places they'd otherwise have read about, argued about a bill in a currency they had to convert in their heads, worked out a bus system in a script they couldn't read, and absorbed the plain fact that the way any one country does things is a choice and not a law of nature. That last realisation is worth more than most modules. It's the difference between someone who assumes their home country's defaults are 'normal' and someone who understands them as one option among many — which is the single most useful frame I know for building a life, a career or a portfolio across borders.

And the exposure isn't only geographic. Studying online has put my sons in a classroom with people from every walk of life — classmates logging in from different countries, careers and generations, the working parent retraining at forty in the same seminar thread as the eighteen-year-old. A conventional campus, full of people the same age from the same catchment, rarely delivers that mix. Learning alongside it is an education in itself: they hear how a problem looks from a life nothing like their own, which is exactly the perspective a borderless life is meant to build.

If you are weighing where a family like this can actually thrive, that is a separate and important question — I've written about the practical side of it in our guide to the best countries to raise a family, about the schooling ladder below university in our piece on international schools abroad, and about the visa layer that makes the moving legal in our roundup of the best digital-nomad visa countries.

What my sons do now

Both of my sons now study for accredited bachelor's degrees online. Not a campus with a webcam bolted on — full, recognised undergraduate programmes delivered remotely, at IU International University of Applied Sciences — a large, German, state-recognised online university we vetted specifically for its accreditation and the cross-border recognition of the qualification (more on how to do that vetting below). I'll name it plainly, but the point is not an endorsement of a brand; it is the model — choose the institution whose accreditation and recognition fit your own map.

The model looks like this in practice. Lectures and materials are asynchronous, so they fit around whichever time zone we happen to be in. Assessments and any live seminars are scheduled, and those we plan our movements around rather than the other way round. Exams, where they must be invigilated, are handled through remote proctoring or an approved local test centre. The degree that comes out the other end is, on paper, identical to the on-campus version. And because they learned self-discipline at a kitchen table in Barcelona in 2020, the hardest skill this whole thing demands — running your own day without a bell to tell you to — they already had.

My older son has taken this further than I ever nudged him to. This past year he has been travelling on his own to visit friends scattered across the world — some of them on their Erasmus placements — living out of a spare room or a student flat for weeks at a time — up to a month in one place — and carrying on with his degree from wherever he lands. He has studied from Dubai and Shanghai, and he is now preparing to visit a friend in Medellín. He combines travel and study on his own terms — a morning of coursework, an afternoon in a city he has never seen, an evening with people he would otherwise only text. Watching him do it, unbothered and self-directed, is the clearest proof I have that this way of learning is not a compromise; it is a head start.

What surprised me most is how little the 'where' now intrudes on the 'what'. My sons have sat exams from three different countries in a single academic year without the university blinking, because the programme was built for it from the start rather than retrofitted. We keep a boring but essential checklist: reliable internet at every base, a quiet room that can double as a proctored exam space, and the academic calendar pinned to the family calendar months ahead so a move never collides with an assessment window. It sounds mundane, and it is — but mundane logistics, handled early, are what turn a nice idea into a life that actually functions.

What a week of borderless study actually looks like

The romantic version of this life is the one you see on other people's feeds: a laptop on a balcony, an ocean, a coffee. The real version is more logistical and, frankly, more interesting. Here's the texture of an ordinary week, because the texture is where the model either works or falls apart, and nobody tells you about it in advance.

It begins with the time zone, which is the silent organiser of everything. Asynchronous material — recorded lectures, readings, most coursework — is time-zone-agnostic; you do it when you do it. But the fixed points are not. A live seminar or an exam window is set in the university's home time zone, and 'the university's home time zone' is often five, six, nine hours from wherever we're sitting. So the first thing that happens when we plan a move is that my sons overlay the semester's fixed points onto the new local clock and find out what it costs them. A base that turns a 10am seminar into a civilised 2pm is a good base for that term. A base that turns it into a 3am exam is not, and we either don't go or we plan around it. The time zone doesn't just affect comfort; past a certain offset it quietly dictates where you can be.

Then there's connectivity, which is less solved than the brochures suggest. 'There's wifi' and 'there's wifi you can sit a two-hour proctored exam on without your session dropping' are two completely different claims, and the gap between them has caused us more stress than anything else. We've learned to treat connection as infrastructure, not a given: test the actual line before an exam week, keep a mobile-data backup with enough allowance to finish a session, and know where the nearest reliable fallback is — a co-working space, a library, a friend's flat — before it's needed rather than during a panic. The single worst place to discover your connection is marginal is halfway through an invigilated exam.

Exam proctoring on the road is its own small discipline. Remote proctoring software wants a quiet, well-lit room, a clear desk, a camera that can pan the space, and often a government ID it can check against your face. On the move, that room is a moving target. My sons have learned to scout it on arrival: which room in the new flat is quiet at the exam hour, whether the neighbour's dog will feature in the recording, whether the light is good enough that the software doesn't flag them. Where remote proctoring isn't available or the programme requires a physical centre, we find the approved local test centre in advance and build the move around its calendar. It's not hard. It's just work that has to happen before, not during.

And then there's the family rhythm, which is the part that actually makes it sustainable. Two students, two sets of deadlines, two parents working, one household in a new place — that only functions with a shared calendar and a bit of ritual. We do a rough weekly sync so nobody's exam collides with a moving day or a parent's deadline. We keep mornings loosely protected for focused work because that's when everyone's sharpest and the internet's least contested. And we're deliberate about the non-study time, because a life that's all screens and deadlines in a beautiful place is just an office with a view. The rhythm isn't rigid — the whole point was to escape the bell — but it isn't absent either. The freedom is real precisely because the structure underneath it is boring and reliable.

The benefits — through a borderless lens

Let me lay out honestly what a family actually gains, because the brochures oversell it and the sceptics undersell it, and the truth is somewhere more interesting than either.

• Location independence. The degree travels in a backpack. Where you live becomes a lifestyle and tax decision, not a decision dictated by a campus. A family can base itself around a digital-nomad visa, a retirement-friendly country or a low-tax residency without breaking anyone's studies.
• Family togetherness. This is the one I did not expect. Instead of shipping an eighteen-year-old off to a dorm in another country and seeing him twice a year, we are all still under one roof, in shared new places. The bonds got stronger, not weaker.
• Early, real world exposure. My sons have absorbed languages, currencies, border formalities and cultural fluency as ordinary life, not as a gap year. That is an education that no syllabus contains.
• Cost and flexibility. Online tuition is frequently a fraction of campus tuition, with no relocation-to-campus cost and no big-city student rent. You pay for the credential, not the real estate.
• Credential portability. A properly accredited, well-recognised degree is a passport of its own — it opens graduate school and employment across borders, which is exactly what a mobile family needs.

I'd add one benefit that never makes the brochure because it's hard to quantify: resilience. A young person who has learned to keep their studies on track through three moves, two time zones and an unfamiliar apartment has learned something about adaptability that will outlast any single subject on their transcript. My sons are, frankly, less rattled by disruption than I was at their age — and I trace a straight line from that to the year the schools closed and they had to figure out how to keep going anyway. The lifestyle didn't create that trait on its own, but it kept exercising it.

Now the trade-offs, because pretending they don't exist would be dishonest and would make me exactly the kind of salesman I distrust.

• Self-discipline is non-negotiable. Remove the teacher and the bell and a certain kind of student drifts. If your child cannot run their own day, online study will expose that fast and painfully.
• Social life takes deliberate work. A campus hands you a ready-made peer group; online study does not. You have to build it — through sport, local communities, other travelling families, in-person meetups. It does not happen by default.
• Time zones are a real tax. Live seminars and exam windows are set somewhere, and 'somewhere' is often not where you are. Plan movements around the academic calendar, not the other way round.
• Accreditation risk is the big one. The gap between a real degree and a diploma mill can be almost invisible from a marketing page and enormous on a CV. Getting this wrong is the one mistake that cannot be undone.

The candid trade-offs — and when campus is still the right call

The bullet list above is the short version. The honest version needs more room, because the trade-offs are exactly where families either quietly succeed or quietly struggle, and where I most distrust the glossy accounts. Let me take the hard ones in turn.

Isolation is the first and, for a lot of students, the biggest. A campus is a social machine — it manufactures a peer group, hands you a ready-made set of people at the same life stage in the same corridor, and does it without anyone having to try. Online study manufactures nothing of the sort. The default state is you, a laptop and your family, and if you don't actively build a social life, the default is where you stay. For my sons the borderless part actually helps here — new places, sport, local scenes, other travelling families, the kids you meet when you're all outsiders together — but I won't pretend it's automatic. It is a real, ongoing effort, and for a naturally introverted eighteen-year-old it can be a genuine cost rather than an adventure. Some young people need the social scaffolding of a campus more than they need the flexibility, and there is nothing wrong with that; it's a fact about the person, and it should drive the decision.

Self-discipline is the second, and it's the one people most consistently underestimate about themselves. Everyone believes they'd thrive without a bell until the bell is gone. The truth is that some students are motivated by structure and wilt without it, and no amount of wanting the flexible life changes that wiring on demand. My sons happened to get a two-year crash course in self-direction when the schools closed, which is the only reason online university has been easy for them. A student who hasn't built that muscle can absolutely build it — but they should build it deliberately, in a lower-stakes setting, before they bet a degree on it. Online study doesn't teach self-discipline gently; it assumes it and punishes its absence.

Employer perception is the third, and it's shifting fast enough that a snapshot misleads. The stigma against online degrees has largely collapsed at reputable institutions, for the reasons I laid out earlier — the pandemic put every serious university's brand behind remote delivery, and you can't credibly disdain a mode you spent a year teaching in. But 'largely collapsed' is not 'entirely gone', and it's uneven by field and by region. In some conservative professions and some markets, an interviewer of a certain age still carries an unspoken prejudice. The practical answer is the same as the accreditation answer: a degree from a well-recognised institution whose diploma doesn't announce the delivery format neutralises almost all of this, and demonstrable skill neutralises the rest. But go in clear-eyed that the perception, while fading, is not yet zero everywhere.

And then the honest counter-case: sometimes campus is simply the right call, and I'd be a poor guide if I only argued one side. If a degree is fundamentally hands-on — wet-lab science, clinical medicine, certain engineering and studio disciplines — the physical facilities and in-person supervision are the point, and no amount of asynchronous cleverness substitutes for them. If a young person is not yet self-directed and would flourish inside structure, campus gives them that structure while they grow into independence. If the whole value of a particular programme is its network — where who you meet in the seminar room matters as much as what you learn — then being in the room is part of the product you're paying for. And if a student simply wants the classic residential experience, that's a legitimate want, not a weakness. The borderless-study model is a powerful default for a mobile family, but it is a default, not a dogma. Fit the choice to the child and the field, not to the lifestyle you'd prefer they wanted.

How to choose an accredited online degree that travels

This is the section I would have wanted before we started. The whole enterprise lives or dies on whether the credential is real and whether it is recognised where you might one day want to use it. Here is the process I actually use, in order.

Let me put more meat on the accreditation bones, because 'verify accreditation' is easy to say and easy to fumble. Accreditation is not one global stamp; it's a patchwork of national and regional systems, and the trick is knowing which body actually governs the institution you're looking at. In the United States the meaningful distinction is institutional accreditation recognised by CHEA or listed in the Department of Education's database — the old 'regional' accreditors, now simply called institutional accreditors after a 2020 rule change, are the gold standard, and 'nationally accredited' can, confusingly, mean weaker. In the UK it's degree-awarding powers granted by the government and quality assurance via the QAA. Across the EU it's national quality-assurance agencies, many aligned under the European standards, with ENIC-NARIC as the recognition layer on top. Elsewhere it's the national ministry of education or its designated agency. The point isn't to memorise all of this — it's to identify the one body that legitimately governs your specific institution and confirm the listing there, in that body's own directory, with your own eyes.

Recognition is a separate question from accreditation, and conflating them is a classic and expensive mistake. Accreditation says the degree is real where it was issued. Recognition says a specific other country will treat it as equivalent to one of its own. Those are not the same, and a degree can be impeccably accredited at home and still hit friction at a foreign employer, a foreign graduate school, or a professional licensing body. This is what the ENIC-NARIC network exists for in Europe — you can check in advance how a given qualification is likely to be assessed — and most countries outside Europe have an equivalent recognition centre. If your family might land anywhere, the honest move is to check recognition in the two or three most likely destinations before you enrol, not to discover the problem years later when it's unfixable.

Credential portability across borders is the practical goal underneath all of this, and it rewards thinking one step ahead. A degree from a large, internationally legible system — the kind of institution an admissions officer or HR screener on another continent has heard of — carries its own recognition with it and saves you a lifetime of explaining. A degree from an obscure but perfectly legitimate institution can still be real and still require a certified translation, an ENIC-NARIC statement, or a credential-evaluation report every time it crosses a border. Neither is wrong. But if you already know your family is mobile, weighting the choice toward reach and legibility is worth a modest premium, exactly the way you'd weight the choice of a second passport toward the awarding country's reputation rather than just the price.

The red flags of a diploma mill are, once you know them, fairly consistent — and a plausible marketing page hides none of them if you look. Watch for: accreditation claimed only on the institution's own site and traceable to a body that accredits nobody but its own members; a degree offered on the basis of 'life experience' with little or no actual coursework; a name suspiciously close to a famous university's; a physical address that resolves to a mailbox; pressure to enrol fast with a discount that expires; fees quoted per-degree rather than per-credit; and a complete absence from the recognition and accreditation directories that every legitimate institution appears in. The single most reliable test is the one in the callout below: if you cannot confirm the institution at an independent official source, treat every other signal as marketing, however polished.

Finally, the questions I'd actually put to an admissions office, in writing, before enrolling — because a good institution answers them plainly and a bad one deflects: Which body accredits you, and where can I verify that listing myself? Does the diploma or transcript state the delivery mode? Is this exact programme recognised for graduate study and professional licensing in the following countries? How are exams invigilated, and are there any in-person or residency requirements? What time zone are live sessions and exam windows scheduled in? What's the total cost, per credit and all-in, and what happens to my credits if I need to pause or transfer? The quality of the answers — specific and verifiable versus vague and reassuring — tells you almost everything you need to know about the institution behind them.

If cross-border recognition is going to matter for your family — and for a mobile family it almost always will — treat the choice of awarding country the way you'd treat a choice of tax residency: as a deliberate, researched decision with second-order consequences, not a snap purchase.

Why I care — and where I build

I should disclose my bias plainly, because you deserve to weigh it. I don't just live inside online education as a parent; I build in this space. I'm the founder of Ewance, which connects real company challenges to student learning; of LearnCoin, which is about rewarding and recognising learning; and of Challenge University. So yes — I'm biased. I have a professional and financial interest in a world where learning happens well outside a single campus.

But here's the thing about building in a space: you see how the sausage is made, and it makes you more sceptical, not less. I know exactly how thin some of the offerings are. I know how easy it is to slap 'university' on a landing page. That vantage point is precisely why I'm so insistent on real accreditation and independent verification — I've watched the gap between good and worthless from the inside. What I actually see, across the industry and at my own kitchen table, is that when online education is done seriously it is one of the most liberating tools a family can have, and when it's done cynically it is a trap. The whole difference is in the diligence.

The work I do professionally and the choices I've made as a father point at the same conviction. Ewance exists because I believe learning sticks when it's attached to a real problem rather than an abstract exam — which is also, not coincidentally, how my sons learn most when we're somewhere new and the place itself becomes the curriculum. LearnCoin exists because recognition of learning shouldn't be locked to one institution's paperwork — which is the same portability problem a borderless family runs into at every border. And Challenge University is my bet that the campus was always a delivery mechanism, not the essence of a university. I'm not neutral about any of this. But I'd rather tell you plainly where I stand and let you discount it, than pretend to a detachment I don't have.

What building here has actually taught me, more than anything, is that the credential and the learning have quietly come apart, and that's the whole story of the next decade. For most of history the two were welded together: the only way to prove you'd learned something was the institution that taught it, and the paper it issued. That bundle is coming undone. You can now learn almost anything from anywhere, prove skill in ways that don't route through a single university's registrar, and — this is the part that matters for a mobile family — carry that proof across borders that a traditional paper credential struggles to cross. I don't think campuses disappear; the good ones are extraordinary and always will be. But I do think the assumption that serious education requires a specific building in a specific country is an artefact of a bandwidth constraint we no longer have. My sons are, in a small way, living proof of that, and it's the same thesis I'm betting my working life on. Which is exactly why you should weigh what I say with the bias in full view.

How Expectat helps you get there

Online education is the piece that makes a borderless family possible — but it's only one piece. The degree living on a laptop doesn't tell you where to base the family, how to structure residency and tax, or how to build a life that holds together across borders. That's the work we do at Expectat: turning the aspiration of a free, mobile family into an actual, ordered plan.

• We help you choose where to base your family — matching your priorities on schools, safety, cost of living and lifestyle to the right countries and visas.
• We structure the residency and tax side so the freedom is real and compliant — tax residency, digital-nomad and retirement routes, and the paperwork that underpins them.
• We connect the dots between education, mobility and money, so the kids' studies, your work and your family's long-term security all point the same direction.

If you want a family that can roam the world while your children keep their studies firmly on track, let's map it out properly. Book a strategy call and we'll build the plan around your family, not a template.