Thursday 24 November 2011

Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution

A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education by Philip G. Altbach, Liz Reisberg, Laura E. Rumbley. (Link to PDF)


Focusing on section 10: Information and Communications Technologies and Distance Education, the report outlines how there has been a growing need globally for higher education that cannot be met without the aid of distance learning.

Overall the report focuses not on the nice shiny tech that we have read about in the previous activities but more on the digital divide that exists between 'us' and 'them', the them being countries where the electricity supply is not robust enough to consider much of the new innovations being laid out before the developed world. It makes fascinating reading and helps to keep your educational feet on the ground. 

Notes
more than 20 terms which describe the employment of the new technologies in education, such as:
Internet mediated teaching, technology-enhanced learning, web-based education, online education,
computermediated communication (CMC), telematics environments, e-learning, virtual classrooms,
I-Campus, electronic communication, information and communication technologies (ICT), cyberspace learning environments, computer-driven interactive communication, open and distance learning (ODL), distributed learning, blended courses, electronic course materials, hybrid courses, digital education, mobile learning, and technology enhanced learning.

I should of course add to that list Online and Distance Education!



Distance education [..] more as a "method of delivery than an educational philosophy," while "distance is not a defining characteristic of e-learning"

ICT resources-like e-mail, instant messaging, and online social networking spaces-provide avenues for academic collaboration, joint research, and personal and professional networking.

[..] development and use of OER has picked up significant momentum, making notable inroads onto the agendas of the higher education sectors in less-developed countries.

Unfortunately, in the face of a very real "digital divide" between richer and poorer countries and institutions, the capacity for implementation often appears to be inversely proportional to the perceived need and strong desire for access to these resources.

It has been suggested that this disconnect between hopes around ICT and what they have proven capable of delivering hinges on several false assumptions that were highly pervasive during the initial ICT "craze" of the 1990s. Key among these erroneous beliefs were that

  1. time and space were globally problematic in higher education;
  2. that the desire to broaden access was essentially universal;
  3. that the advantages of the new technologies coming out were self-evident;
  4. that there was no significant difference between accessing information and constructing knowledge in higher education;
  5. that contemporary students of traditional university age were naturally inclined to like and respond well as learners to emerging ICT; and
  6. that the purveyors of the new technologies could not fail to achieve economies of scale and make profits on their innovative products and services.
In Africa, for example, despite considerable growth in enrolment numbers in the last decade, the gross enrolment ratio there hovers around 5 percent, with considerable disparity by country and subregion.

In many countries around the world, the need for continuous learning and ongoing skill upgrades has become increasingly apparent. In countries where nations struggle to cater to the traditional-age cohort of 18-to-24-year-olds, the challenge of providing lifelong learning opportunities for broad swathes of the adult population via traditional delivery modes of delivery is daunting. In many places around the world, distance education can and has already played a growing role in filling this gap.

Teledensity-"a term commonly used to describe the number of telephone lines per some unit of the population", which can also shed light on the degree to which a community or nation has access to computers, the Internet, and e-gadgets-is not uniform around the world and is an important indicator of the immense divide between "haves" and "have-nots" across the globe.

A greater reliance on cooperative arrangements, such as consortia, to leverage resources and share costs inherent in implementing ICTs in higher education, may occur. And more and different kinds of dual-mode universitiesemploying both ICTs and traditional program delivery methods-may emerge.

The future:
There are exciting possibilities for the ways in which m-learning may open up access in some of the world's poorest countries, where Internet access is most limited and unreliable.

"immersive education" offers one window on the next generation of educational technologies, focused on virtual and simulation technologies, 3-D graphics and interactive applications, and gaming approaches. 

Finally, strengthening capacity in regard to technology issues and open and distance learning is an extremely important objective in a global context characterized by profound inequity.

No comments:

Post a Comment