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“Virtual work” is increasingly just “work” for most of us – whether we’re dialing into a conference call with our branch offices in London and New York, or VPN-ing in from home to catch up with work after-hours, remote work is the new normal. But as Peter Hirst, director of the executive education program at the MIT Sloan School of management, told me, there’s still something special about face-to-face interaction. “The richest experience [is still] being able to get together in person, face to face. There’s millions of years of evolution behind that.” But Hirst is no Luddite. (I don’t think they allow those at MIT.) He’s helping to lead MIT into a new era of online learning, and experimenting with remote work with his own team at the same time. I talked with him about the state of virtual collaboration today. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.

This is an area where universities have innovated a lot. I’m not sure companies have moved quite as quickly.

One of the advantages we have being in the university environment, and particularly being at MIT, is exactly that it’s much easier for us to try different technologies and experiments and learning models and collaboration models. I think it probably is much easier for us at MIT to say, “We’re at MIT and we really should be trying out these things, to see how they work,” and not feel that we have to make a huge sort of enterprise scale investment before we can do that.

So is the goal of virtual collaboration really to mimic real-life interaction, or are they fundamentally different — so we shouldn’t really compare them to each other?

I think they clearly are different. What we’ve been doing is two-fold. On the one hand, we’ve been trying to say, “Are there ways we can use technology that don’t cause us to have to completely re-think and re-write how learning happens, how our faculty teach, how program participants interact collaboratively?” So in that sense it is trying to mimic the in-person experience.

And then there’s the very different approach. There’s a lot of activity around this now, through things like edX, which MIT is one of the founding partners of. [This approach] is really not trying to mimic what we would do in the physical world, but starting from an entirely digital form, and really being very thoughtful about what the learning outcomes are that we’re trying to achieve, and how can the technology enable us to achieve those outcomes. There are many things that are very different about how you would design learning and work, if you really are doing it from a digital-first standpoint.

In trying to do the latter, what are some of the principles you keep coming back to?

We very much have the MIT philosophy of “mind and hand.” The actual application of the knowledge and frameworks [we teach], is vital. And I think we’re all getting better at getting people engaged, creating compelling video content and graphics and animations, which are necessary to bring alive the content in digital programs. But really, we have to match that up with effective activities — whether those are digital or real-world activities that people do [when] they walk away from their computer screen – to actually apply the learning and the ideas.

Where do you see online learning going next?

If you look at a lot of the MOOC-style programs that proliferated in the last couple of years, I think their starting point was to try to capture a professor teaching a class that they’re already teaching. Just put that out in a very long-form video for people to watch. And that’s evolved into trying to break those up into something more like a collection of TED talks. [But even that is] still linear — you progress through the class through a sort of a syllabus.

What we’re seeing most recently, and what I’m very excited about, is going from that linear model to a much more non-linear idea. The digital learning experience is becoming really a collection of inter-related learning nuggets, that you might take very different paths through, depending who you are and what your needs are, and how you learn most effectively. So that’s where I’m seeing some interesting changes happening.

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Sarah Green is a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review. Follow her on Twitter at @skgreen.