Baggaley & Hoon (2005) give an overview of a range of distance education initiatives in eleven Asian countries. They note several dimensions of difference from North American institutions, and conclude that technical innovations driven by necessity in the developing world will address less keenly felt needs in the first world.

The driving force for employment of technology can be a shortage of teachers to meet a country’s national development agenda, the scale of service needed in massive urban centres, the distance between schools and centres of higher learning, or the need to learn skills alien to the local context.

The expectation must be high to overcome skepticism and suspicion. “In each of these countries, public opposition to the very notion of [Distance Education] is voluble, and sometimes extends to high ministerial levels” (p.8).

The authors assert that the large Open Universities in Asia “are relatively new to using the Internet for course delivery and they harbour relatively few prejudices about different DLTs, as long  as  they  are  cost-effective.” (p.7) Delivery technologies employed include:

• PDAs – cheaper than computers and less dependent on permanent infrastructure
• SMS – text messages are much cheaper in many countries than in Australia or USA, and the mobile phone infrastructure is relatively reliable in some places that have no broadband service
• Broadcast television and radio – for mass audiences
• Satellite-based audio/video-conferencing
• Audiotapes and Videotapes – for far-distant learners
• CB radio – for truck drivers
• Open Source software or home-grown software to allow localisation and to minimise costs, and avoid entanglement with major American commercial providers.
• Yahoo Messenger – where it is ubiquitous, because it requires little bandwidth
• Ready-packed server as portable software on a CD and flash-drive
• Web-casting
• Learning-object repositories
• Educational train (and vans) – a travelling collection of exhibits and activities to visit outlying regions

Baggaley and Hoon make some forward projections:

• First-world institutions which assume high-reliability broadband will be unable to attract many developing-world students. (p.10)
• Growth of spam may render email useless, forcing educators to use other media.
• Telephone-based applications can lower cost.
• m-Teaching methods are needed to support m-Learning
• Local problems cannot be understood without local experience.

“The evidence shows that distance educators of the developing world have now surpassed their first-world counterparts and, with thrift, ingenuity and determination, are dictating the next developmental phase of learning, media and technology internationally.” (p.13)

Evaluation

This article gives a very rapid overview of diverse projects. The selection of projects seemed to be dependent on community and government excitement, and solutions were shaped by cost-effects, including existing infrastructure, culture and institutions).

I was disappointed in two respects. First, the authors describe cutting-edge programs under extraordinary circumstances and seem to contrast those to the commonest forms of distance education in Western universities. This probably gives a falsely optimistic colour to their picture of Asian development.

Second, the driving motivations and their interaction with pedagogy were barely touched. National and international political consequences of bulk improvement in literacy in India, or of propagation of programming expertise in China, for example, probably shape elementary curriculum in those countries.

Reference

Baggaley, J. & Hoon, M.N.L., 2005. PANdora’s box: distance learning technologies in Asia. Learning, Media and Technology, 30(1): 5-14