Distance Education
From A2K Wiki
Contents |
Panelists
Speakers
- Titilayo Akinsanmi - Program Manager, Global Teenager Project, Mindset, Johannesburg, South Africa
- Saskia Harmsen - Capacity Development Officer, IICD
- Geidy Lung - Legal Officer, Copyright Law Division, Copyright and Related Rights Sector, WIPO
- Mira Sundara Rajan - Canada Research Chair in Intellectual Property Law, Faculty of Law, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
- Andrew Rens - LINK Centre, Creative Commons, South Africa
Moderator
- Jack Lerner - Fellow, Samuelson Clinic, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley
A2K2 Conference Organizers
- Nathaniel Gleicher - Student, Yale Law School
Panel Description
Both e-learning and distance education play large and important roles in improving access to knowledge. New and emerging technologies have the potential to allow educators to reach individuals and communities in numbers and in manners that were previously unimaginable, even in the midst of great poverty. Public-private partnerships between corporations, NGOs, and government officials are helping to bridge the technological obstacles to the spread of knowledge and educators are beginning to take advantage of these routes of information flow. Unfortunately, capacity without content is useless; obstacles to development of information and limitations on the distribution of that information must be addressed simultaneously with issues of technological and political capacity.
The road blocks to the development of robust e-education programs are many. First, there are institutional roadblocks. One of the most prominent of these is undeveloped or nonexistent physical infrastructure. Many local schools do not have computers, and many students have no access to them either. Even the most basic network infrastructure – the wires, cables, towers, and transmitters of intra- and inter-nets – may be lacking. The commitment of local institutions may be another institutional roadblock. The development of e-education programs may seem an unaffordable expense. Indeed, decision makers are often simply unaware of the benefits of e-education.
A second set of roadblocks are abstract and mostly external to educational institutions. They stem from protections of intellectual property and related rights. These include copyright laws and related exceptions and limitations, as well as broadcast regulations and rules protecting digital rights management measures.
This panel will focus on both sets of roadblocks, as they work in conjunction with one another to block access to e-education. The panel will examine the specific ways in which both institutional infrastructure and legal regimes currently impact e-educators and their students. We will also explore the potential options for improving access, which might include fostering public-private partnerships to build infrastructure and amending existing exceptions and limitations to increase access to content.
Speaker Presentation Slides
Remote Questions for Panelists
Notes
Making Education Accessible: Are the Digital Technologies Going to be Instrumental in Overcoming the Social Divide and Making Education “Free For All”?
During their “early days”, digital technologies (e.g. the Internet, mobile communications etc.) were looked upon as ultimate solutions to make education more accessible to people who were not able to attend University and college classes due to various limitations and restrictions such as luck of funds, difficulties in accessing the learning materials and resources and social isolation.
However, no dramatic shift of the paradigm for education to become less “exclusive” has occurred. Benefits of the e-learning have been obvious but they’ve failed to bring education to the so-called “disadvantaged groups”. E-Learning does not usually make education any cheaper, nor has it led to a significant increase in the learner satisfaction levels.
Ever since 1990’s Cost Reduction has been one of the best-publicized (and rightfully so) benefits of the E-Commerce. However, it has not affected the educational sector. Very few of the training providers lowered prices significantly after moving courses online.
In many instances, taking an e-course means paying exactly the same amount as one would have to pay if he is to study through a traditional mode of delivery. For example in Australia, a group of the leading Australian Universities joined forces to establish a so-called “Open University” (www.open.edu.au). The courses offered by the Open University range from Certificate courses to the Master degrees and they cover many of the vocational fields. However pricing structure for these online courses does not offer any “extraordinary” perks for the learners.
Neither governments nor training providers usually subsidize online courses for low-income earners or others from a disadvantaged background. Since the courses are developed on a purely commercial basis, they are being run with the aim of increasing the training providers’ profits rather than with the aim of increasing accessibility of the respected courses. In other words, the courses do nothing for making the education more accessible!
There is no point in looking for the ‘guilty party”. It is unreasonable to expect profit-oriented organizations (and Universities do need to be profit-oriented in order to survive and stay afloat) to sacrifice its pragmatic goals for the sake of making this world a better place. Business comes first! However, if universities are not going to become socially-conscious, then who will?
Note 2
Getting Online: Are the Australian Training Providers Utilising Benefits Achievable Through the Online Communications to the Full?
Australian training providers have been among the first to adopt Electronic communication channels for training delivery. Back in 1987 (long before the World Wide Web had come to life), the Australian Army started using E-learning applications for training delivery (Newton and Ellis, 2005). The outcome of this experiment turned out to be successful since electronic training delivery has proved to be fit for the purpose. Consequently, when the World Wide Web (WWW) came to life, the Australian training providers already had some positive benchmarks to look back at.
By now, all Australian Universities and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges and the majority of the private providers of accredited training courses have established Web presence in one form or another. For example in the State of Victoria, all of the nineteen TAFE colleges have at the very least a permanent URL (Website address) and can be contacted online (via E-Mail) (TAFEVC Virtual Campus, 2005).
The extent of Web presence varies depending on the training provider’s operational objectives. Some of the Australian providers of educational and training services established Web presence with a simple aim of promoting their products and services online. These providers appear to have little intention to get proactively involved in e-learning. However, their benefits from having a strong Web presence are also transparent since they are able to utilise the WWW to promote offline training programs.
The author believes that the greatest obstacle that the Australian providers of online educational programs are currently faced with is lack of integration between the programs delivered online and the traditionally-delivered programs. Training providers eagerly adopt e-learning and invest a lot of time and money into its development but nevertheless fail to view online delivery as part of the overall institutional development.
One typical example of disintegration occurs when a training provider offers complete courses (e.g. MBA) online and has all the facilities necessary for the online delivery (e.g. Blackboard or Turnitin e-learning platforms) available but does not utilise its facilities to tailor other courses to the learners’ needs.
Will this paradigm shift in the near future? It probably will! However, given the competitiveness of the educational marketplace, training providers should try to accomplish the integration between online and traditionally-delivered programs ASAP!
Resources and papers
Articles
Books
Web Resources
Indian Government announces plans for free wireless broadband
One Laptop Per Child Beta Roll-out
