Educational opportunities
will be ubiquitous, for those who can afford the fees and access. Concerned
over those who can’t, global organizations and business leaders are ringing the
alarm for support.
At a recent summit in
Okinawa, leaders representing the “Group of 8” nations (Simms 2000) agreed to establish a “Dot
Force” task force to help developing countries reap the educational and other
benefits offered by new information technologies, helping to bridge the
“technological gap that separates the world’s haves from the have-nots.”
A report by a group of experts for this year’s United
Nations General Assembly recommended that the United Nations amass $2 billion
from its own funds, private industry and other sources to help poor nations
catch up across the “digital divide” (Billions on side, 2000).
The United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) has supported technical assistance projects such as the Network for
Democracy program operating in Hungary, providing “telecottage” access to the
Internet for impoverished citizens across the country (Telecottages in Hungary,
1998).
The World Economic Forum, comprised of business leaders
from major multinational corporations, prepared a 35-page recommendation on how
the world’s leaders might bridge the digital divide through public-private
sector initiatives (Drake, 2000; Yamada, 2000). WEF member Richard Li said,
“It’s really not a digital divide, it is an education divide, and information
technology is only a conduit to promote education.” Among the
WEF recommendations:
·
Provide high-level political engagement needed to give
real momentum and public visibility to the digital opportunity as a broad-scale
initiative.
·
Establish a high-level working group on the global
digital economy that would operate for at least three years.
·
Establish through the G-8 governments a special
financial assistance program to fund technology infrastructure development.
- Create a Peace Corps-style
volunteer group, and establish local technology community centers.
Other business leaders have pledged their personal
financial support for enhancing global educational opportunities (Loose 2000).
High-tech MicroStrategy billionaire Michael Saylor donated $100 million to
create an online university offering an “Ivy League-quality” education
cost-free for anyone in the world. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has pledged $1
billion in scholarships. America
Online’s Steve Case has provided more than $100 million to his own foundation.
The problem remains in how to transfer all this good
intent and educational content to the huddled masses yearning to learn free.
The
Technology
At the heart of
the digital divide is the technological divide. Only one in 20 people around the world are online, and
most of those (about 60 percent) live in North America, home to just five
percent of the world’s population. In all of Africa, there are a mere 14
million phone lines – fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo (Billions, 2000).
No one agency or
nation could afford the incalculable costs of providing universal Internet
access. However, many organizations, companies, and individuals are working to
bridge the gap one connection at a time through targeted and cost-effective
efforts.
Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former Newsweek
journalist, is bringing online education opportunities to one of the poorest
villages in Cambodia, devoid of electricity and phone lines. A satellite dish
provides a continuous 64,000-bits-a-second connection to a small group of
computers in the village, powered by a simple solar power system. The eventual
goal: to construct 200 rural schools in Cambodian villages, under a program in which donors contribute
$14,000 to build small school houses, with matching funds from the World Bank
(Markoff 2000).
In 1996, operating under a $400,000 grant from USAID, the
Network for Democracy launched the National Telecottage Program in Hungary. By
1997, the program had established 14 telecottages across the rural regions of
Hungary, providing “equal (access) opportunity for all” (Telecottages, 1998).
The telecottage centers provide public Internet access to local low-income
residents for information services including education and training, job
hunting, and local development assistance.
In Ukraine, where fewer than 5% of the people have
Internet access and the average monthly income is less than $50, Golden Telecom
Business Solutions has invested more than $20 million to expand its fiber
optic cable network and data services to each of the 26 regions throughout the
country (Sych 2000). The
telecommunications company is planning even larger investments, though the
prospects for short-term returns are slim. “At the moment the market may be
very small, but in the longer run, we view the Internet as an important growth
area,” said GTBS general manager Ashley Reid.
Though a telecommunication infrastructure conducting
online educational content to distant corners is expensive and high-tech, the
terminal computer can be very simple and old-generational. It doesn’t take a
top-speed computer processor to receive and transmit basic text and
graphics. As computer users in the
United States discard their older models, charities are seeking ways to
refurbish and distribute the toss-offs to needy recipients (Recycling old
computers, 2000). The National Safety Council
estimates that in the United States some 300 million personal computers will
become obsolete over the next four years, most of those adding to the
stockpiles of solid and hazardous waste. Goodwill International is now
receiving more than 100,000 computers a year and refurbishes many of them in
programs to train future computer technicians. Other organizations, such as National Cristina Foundation, work to match
computer donors with recipients.
Distance education need not necessarily be online to be
effective. Computer-readable compact
discs can contain large amounts of data – entire encyclopedias and course
materials. “Software is going to replace classes as we know them,” said Roger
Schank, director of the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern
University (Green 2000). Software courses can provide multimedia simulations
not available in current online offerings. “When you look at online courses
now, what do you see? Text online with a quiz. We’re not taking a lecture and
putting it on screen. We’re restructuring these courses into goal-based
scenarios that will get kids excited,” rendering traditional courses – and many
professors – obsolete, said Schank. “New technology is going to give every
student access to the best professors in the world.”
The Financials
The costs of distance education can reach from the incongruently
high to the dirt-cheap. Duke University
charges $95,000 for its Global Executive M.B.A., a 19-month-long program that
mixes on-campus and online study from abroad. That is considerably more
expensive than tuition for the traditional two-year M.B.A. program at $28,200
per year. For the past three years,
Stanford's engineering school has taught 200 courses to students all over the
world – at 140 percent of the school’s normal tuition (Ellin 2000).
The initial development costs of online courses can run
quite high. UNext.com, a new Internet university, is
spending about $100 million on course development – as much as $1 million per
course – even before it opens for business (McCormick 2000). “UNext has an
opportunity to be the truly leading Internet university,” says Michael
Moe, Merrill Lynch’s expert on the education market. The company (operating as Cardean University with
cooperating schools including Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and
the London School of Economics) envisions a future student body of millions,
and is projected to charge tuition amounting to about 80% of that charged by
top business schools.
Some
business analysts (Weigel 2000) predict that through fundamental changes in the
economics of information wrought by the Internet age, the forces of competition
will drive the cost of information down to the marginal cost of its reproduction
– to the point that tuition for online courses will eventually be free, paid
for through advertising and other marketing strategies targeted at a captive
audience. Indeed, that is the model evolving for the Fathom distance-education Web site, owned by
Columbia University (Carlson 2000). The University
of Chicago, RAND, the American Film Institute, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution will provide content for the Fathom Web site available free to the
public.
Barnes & Noble University
is offering a free assortment of classes ranging from a one-day seminar to
12-week programs in subjects ranging from astronomy, to literature, to C++ computer
programming. Many of the courses will be based on books in the field, taught by
the books’ authors. It is “highly recommended” but not required to purchase a
book for participation in the courses.
The economics of e-commerce are evolving, devolving,
crashing, and rebirthing at a confounding rate. The global e-commerce market stood at $150 billion in 1999, and
is expected to rocket to $2-3 trillion by 2003 (Billions, 2000). Online content
providers – distance education fitting within that less-than-glamorous heading
– will be battling for market share as each scrambles to find the right
business model as Darwinian forces clear the ground and define the turf.
To
ensure distance education opportunities reach across economic borders, we need
to compile, mobilize, and coordinate international donor efforts: government
support through transnational agencies such as the United Nations, the Group of
8, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the British
Know-How Fund; private persons and programs such as the United Way
International, the Soros Foundation, C.S. Mott Foundation, Bill Gates, Steve
Case, Michael Saylor; university and foundation scholarships;
telecommunications industry investment in infrastructure development. With a long-term
vision and social perspective, the financials for global distance education may
well fall into place. Yes, it will be costly. But as the old bumper sticker
advised, “If you think education is expensive, try pricing ignorance.”
The Menace
There are a
number of threats to the successful development of access to global distance
education, and hazards if we fail, as well as new dangers that may be created
if universal access is indeed successful. Among these perils include knowledge
exclusion, oppressive despots, cultural intrusion, and the cheapening of
educational quality.
Globalization may be the new buzzword of the millennium,
but the concept of national isolationism is already rendered defunct by last
century’s nuclear age. Certain transnational phenomena respect no borders:
disease, political instability, radioactive fallout, poverty, refugee
migration. It’s become cliché that the solution to many of the world’s woes is
education. Now we have the means to make the theory a practice, if not for
humanitarian reasons, than for global self-preservation.
“In large parts of Africa today, young girls are more
likely to die before reaching the age of five than they are to learn to read,”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told a U.N. forum on information
technology (Billions, 2000). “To put it bluntly, until we see substantial
improvement in these figures, the dream of putting the world’s poorest nations
on a fast track to technology and growth will remain just that: a dream.” The
worry is that poor nations lack the education, infrastructure and political
policies to support the spread of a phenomenon which is boosting trade,
productivity, employment and private-sector wealth elsewhere. “This is all
about self-interest,” said Vernon J. Ellis, a member of the World Economic
Forum task force proposing means to bridge the global technology gap. “There is
nothing wrong with self-interest, as long as it is enlightened, long-term
self-interest” (Markoff 2000).
If it’s true that knowledge is power, then certain
totalitarian regimes are bound to feel threatened by an educated and empowered
public. According to the human-rights organization Freedom House, at least 20
countries – including Myanmar, Cuba, North Korea and Iraq – thoroughly restrict
their citizens’ access to the Internet (Kaplan 2000). The Chinese government
has been fervently attacking online access and media freedoms. It’s unlikely
they will respond with greater tolerance of online academic freedoms. “Enemy
forces at home and abroad are sparing no effort to use this battlefront to
infiltrate us," said a recent editorial in the Communist Party's national
newspaper, The People's Daily. The Chinese government has shut down Web
sites for posting “counterrevolutionary content,” a euphemism that often means
nothing more than criticism of the government (Smith 2000). In Myanmar – a country of 48 million people
– access to the World Wide Web is strictly banned, and unauthorized use of a
modem is punishable by 7 to 15 years in jail (Barron 2000).
Providing online access is
not necessarily a worthy end in itself, as witnessed by some of the pitfalls
found in introducing technology to village life. Cotopoxi men remote in Ecuador
used their aid-provided computer equipment to access online pornography rather
than crop information, much to the dismay of Cotopoxi women (Romero 2000). And
when impoverished women of the Wapishana and Macushi tribes in Guyana began
making “big” money by marketing their hand-woven hammocks over the Web, the
threatened male hierarchy drove them from their homes. Strategies for providing
Internet access must coincide with developing content schemata suitable for and
beneficial to global needs.
Nor is simply providing educational content a necessarily
worthy goal, unless the content is viable, valid, credible, and appropriate.
Some are concerned that internationalizing education may actually mean
Americanizing it, since the United States is the dominant online-education
purveyor (Statland de Lopez 2000). “Americans are not yet aware of the
different learning styles and expectations in other countries,” said Vivian
Antaki, dean of Endicott College’s Mexico City campus, providing distance
education degrees in cooperation with online education portal Virtualstudent.com.
Others are concerned that instructors will lose control
over the courses they teach, and their lessons will be modified or prepackaged
into a one-size-fits-all lecture by someone at an online institution (Ellin
2000). Educational content innovation may be impeded over issues of
intellectual property, like who owns and who should control content that
appears online. Online education may take a technocratic rather than Socratic
turn: instructors, students, and content reduced to modular components,
installed, formatted, and executed. Ultimately the threat of distance education
might be to education itself – will we sacrifice academic quality for the sake
of quantity?
Conclusion
Some anti-globalists have protested against support for
providing online education to poorer nations, rightly observing the obvious:
“Poor people can’t eat a laptop” (Thomas 2000). This is true. Poor people can neither eat a fishing pole, nor a
hammer, nor a textbook. But these are recognized as valuable tools in reducing
poverty. Distance education should not be an either/or proposition, but a
this/that solution. Bread and modems. Health care and computers.
Shoes and wireless access.
No aspiring child need live in ignorance; no inquiring
soul need go uninformed. The calling of
our age is to engage the will to make it so.
We must first advance through the challenging social, political, and
economic spheres. Each of these challenges may prove terminally
problematic. The fiscal tyrannies of a
competitive market may well deny the commodity of knowledge to those people
living beyond the margins of a profitable business plan. And despotic governments may inhibit
information flow to their peoples under the guise of national security. But the greatest hurdle could well be within
the social sphere: do we truly believe that universal education for its own
sake is a worthy aim and a fundamental right, and are we willing to pay the
costs?
Once the general intention is unleashed, the specific means
may well and inexorably come in bits and bytes. As said the successful social slogan of the 80s, “Now that we
can, we must.”
Additional
Research
This paper unavoidably raises more questions than
provides answers. There are a number of
research areas worth investigating further:
- Validity of distance
education: further research is needed comparing traditional learning methods
with the long-term benefits and shortcomings of online learning within and
across academic disciplines.
·
Maximized cross-cultural effectiveness: how
should educators in various (and poorer) cultures be involved with the
institutions developing the cognitive and cultural presentation of educational
content?
- Transnational
government reaction to online learning: conduct surveys (similar to G.A.T.E.’s online survey) measuring
various governments’ reaction to online learning and development of
Internet access; survey foreign ministry officials for government
reactions.
·
Financial models for online education: monitor
developments in popular press and academic journals relating to various models
developed by distance education providers.
- Financial assistance
for global distance education and infrastructure development: compile database of
government, institutional, industry and private support sources for
distance education development and scholarships.
- Viable and valuable
content:
survey global target audiences for types of educational content desired
(e.g., third-world villages).
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