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How are computers and the Internet used in distance education?
Many higher educational institutions offering distance education courses have started to leverage the Internet to improve their programme’s reach and quality. The Virtual University of the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico uses a combination of print, live and recorded broadcasts, and the Internet to deliver courses to students throughout Mexico and in several Latin American countries. Similarly, the African Virtual University, initiated in 1997 with funding support from the World Bank, uses satellite and Internet technologies to provide distance learning opportunities to individuals in various English-speaking and French-speaking countries throughout Africa.
At the University of the Philippines Open University, course materials are still predominantly printbased but online tutorials are becoming a convenient alternative to face-to-face tutorials especially for students unwilling or unable to go to UPOU’s various physical learning centres. About 70-90% of UPOU’s degree courses offer online tutorials as an option, while in several of its non-degree courses tutorials are conducted only online.
But even in Korea, where infrastructure is among the best in the world, and government has put considerable financial and other resources behind an ambitious ICT-based re-tooling of its educational system, challenges to online education persist.
Internet- and Web-based initiatives have also been developed at the secondary education level. The Virtual High School is a result of efforts of a nationwide consortium of school districts in the United States to promote the development and sharing of Web-based courses. In Canada,Open School offers a wide range of courses and resources to grades K-12 teachers and students that meet the requirements of the British Columbia curriculum. Course delivery is done through a mix of broadcast and video, while some courses are delivered totally online.
The biggest movers in e-learning, however, are not found within academe but in the private sector. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, famously predicted that e-learning would be the next big killer application, and corporations are moving aggressively to fulfill this prediction.Merrill Lynch estimates that the combined higher education and corporate e-learning markets in the US will grow from $US2.3 billion in 2000 to US$18 billion in 2003, with corporate training accounting for almost two thirds of that growth. Indeed, the number of corporate universities have grown from 400 to 1,800 over the last 13 years. Corporate universities are primarily in-house organizations in large multinational companies that make use of videoconferencing and the Internet for employee training. If this rate of growth continues, the number of corporate universities will exceed the number of traditional universities by 2010. A parallel development in business is the growth of a new breed of companies that offer online training services to small- and medium-sized enterprises.