Enrollments can increase quickly with online programs, but so do quality-control issues
It is hard enough for developing nations to build new brick-and-mortar universities to keep up with population growth, let alone with expanding enrollment.
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So in Beijing, Jakarta, and elsewhere, governments are ordering their large state-run distance-learning institutions to take up part of the slack by increasing enrollments fast.
But educators are finding a raft of challenges, including how to use online technology in countries where few people have access to computers or even phones, as well as how to ensure the quality of programs offered their citizens by online institutions from both inside and outside their borders.
The growth of distance education is being fueled by an urgent need felt by the poor countries to close the education gap with the rich nations. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, only about 3 percent of young people in sub-Saharan Africa and 7 percent in Asia attend some form of postsecondary education. This compares with 58 percent in industrialized countries as a whole, and 81 percent in the United States.
Many cash-strapped countries see investing in distance programs as a way to educate more people for less money. Although the cost of providing distance programs varies greatly, a report last year sponsored by Unesco and the World Bank confirmed this impression. It found that at the world’s 10 biggest distance institutions, the majority of them in the third world, the cost of education per student is on average about one third the cost at traditional institutions in the same country.
In China, where only one out of 20 young people receives higher education, distance learning is playing a central role. “China wants to move from elite to a mass education,” says Yu Yunxiu, vice president of China Central Radio and Television University. “Traditional universities can’t meet the demand, so we have to take part of the responsibility.”
China Central has 1.5 million students, two-thirds of them in degree programs, and caters to working adults. It was created in 1979 to help China catch up after the disastrous disruptions to education during the Cultural Revolution.
Since then, the booming free-market economy has created a huge need for better-educated people. Beijing has ordered the system to expand its total enrollment by 100,000 students per year.
China Central broadcasts radio and TV lectures at fixed times to students at 2,600 branch campuses and 29,000 study centers, as well as at workplaces.
Today, officials at China Central see their approach as too inflexible and have turned to the Open University of Hong Kong for help. That institution provides study materials -- in a variety of formats, including print and CD-ROM -- for each of its more than 25,000 degree students to use wherever convenient for them. Hong Kong also provides students with considerable individual contact with tutors by telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face meetings.
“They offer distance teaching; we offer distance learning,” says Tam Sheung Wai, president of the Open University of Hong Kong.
China Central’s standardized approach represents “very good resource sharing” for a large country with limited assets, says Zhang Wei Yuan, a researcher in distance and adult learning at Hong Kong.
But, he says, Hong Kong’s model has distinct advantages, both in flexibility of study schedule and content, and in producing graduates accustomed to independent work. “Especially for adults, self-learning is a better way.”
For two years, Hong Kong has been training educators from China Central -- so far, about 100 have gone to Hong Kong for 10-day seminars. The two institutions are also discussing possible joint courses in business administration, education, and nursing. Hong Kong’s Mr. Tam says the biggest obstacle is “bureaucratic hurdles” thrown up by conservative-minded officials at China’s education ministry.
China Central’s Ms. Yu says that with the support from Hong Kong, the giant system has already begun making its study programs more flexible. China Central has adopted a credit system, allowing students to accumulate credit for completed academic work, and to take longer to complete their studies if need be.
It is also experimenting with more multimedia and with putting more study materials online, especially in the big cities where Internet access is becoming more available.
Student-support services such as those that the Open University of Hong Kong provides -- which were pioneered by the British Open University in the 1970’s -- are a key to the success of distance education, says Sarah Guri-Rosenblit, a professor and head of the education and psychology department at the Open University of Israel.
Those services are even more crucial in developing countries, where many students may come from disadvantaged backgrounds, she says.
However, developing nations may stint on such support services, she says.
“The fear is that, due to problems of low budgeting, such support systems may be cut from the very start,” says Ms. Guri-Rosenblit.
Like China Central, major distance institutions in other developing countries are grappling with how to make their education more modern and relevant.
In Iran, for example, the University of Welfare Sciences and Rehabilitation uses distance education to provide in-service training to social workers, occupational therapists, and similar workers across the country.
The institution would like to use the Internet to supplement its reliance on printed materials and videocassettes. “Our biggest problem,” says Parvaneh Mohammadkhani, an assistant professor of psychology there, “is a lack of computer technology and training for teachers” in using the technology available.
At Technikon SA, a major distance institution in South Africa with 60,000 students, faculty members are debating how much effort to devote to putting materials online.
Like other institutions in the country, both conventional and distance, Technikon SA has been recruiting substantially more non-white students since the end of apartheid. The institution primarily offers correspondence courses.
Johannes Christian Welman, a psychologist and senior lecturer in research methodology there, says he is among those who have little enthusiasm for going online. “So many people don’t have access to computers.”
In other countries, education officials also are considering major investments in online programs. The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization is developing a project for a regionwide “virtual campus system.”
As businesses expand in the “tiger economies” of Southeast Asia, there is a growing need to upgrade the skills of employees, who often find themselves working stints outside their home towns, says Arief S. Sadiman, the organization’s director. “We need more flexible and open learning systems that can be accessed by people anytime they need it.”
If the regional virtual system gets off the ground, it will face strong competition from distance-education programs from Australia, Britain, and the United States -- provided by traditional universities, private businesses, and combinations of the two.
“Often, students are willing to pay 10 times more to have a degree from a Western institution,” says Marejk van der Wende, a researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, at the Twente University of Technology, in the Netherlands. “They assume it’s better.”
The problem for many countries is that even if they have quality-assurance systems in place for their own higher-education institutions, transnational distance programs “often operate completely out of any government control,” says Ms. van der Wende. “Students are not protected from low quality.”
Argentina and Chile have both put all distance education offered in their countries under the purview of their national university-accreditation agencies. An institution whose application for accreditation is rejected must inform students of that fact, and rejection could deter some potential students from enrolling.
As part of a quality-control effort, all foreign universities that want to offer distance education in India will soon have to register with the government. The University Grants Commission, India’s top body for higher education, said mandatory registration would help ensure that students are not exploited by unscrupulous players.
The commission has been under pressure to regulate the entry of foreign universities that offer degrees through distance learning. Foreign degrees convey a great deal of prestige in India, and private companies have moved into India to take advantage of the huge demand.
While no one knows how many Indian students are enrolled in international distance-education courses, the number of fliers, newspapers, and billboards advertising their programs is on the rise.
“The problem is that the student has no way of knowing if the ads or the tall claims are true,” said Maharaj Krishen Kaw, India’s secretary of education. “Is the school accredited in its home country? Is the fee too much? Who is the faculty? What kind of classes will they teach?”
“Our intention is to get to know who is coming,” said Mr. Kaw, a member of the University Grants Commission. “We don’t want to ban foreign universities, but we want them to operate in a regulated manner.”
Brazil has gone further. Last year, in a move that was criticized by many as excessive, the education ministry announced that no degrees earned from programs fully or partly sponsored by foreign institutions would be recognized.
“What really got the ministry upset,” says Frederic Litto, a professor of communications at the University of Sao Paolo, “is that many obscure universities and companies, especially in France and Spain, found local partners and began money-making ventures.”
Mr. Litto, who is also director of an institute at Sao Paolo conducting research into the use of computer technology in education, is very critical of the authorities’ harsh approach. Yet he admits to a certain ambivalence himself.
“Brazilian higher education is very uncreative,” he says. “It has few interdisciplinary programs. If American and European universities come in with their exciting distance-education offers, they’ll take over the market. I’m not sure that’s good for Brazilian society.”
With offers by both foreign and local providers, distance education appears to be taking off in Central and South America.
“Nearly all universities in Latin America are creating, or thinking about creating, distance-education branches” to meet the continually growing demand for higher education, says Marta Mena, a professor and director of distance programs in the school of economics of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s main state institution.
“It’s a business,” she says. “Universities think they can earn money with this.” However, she says, while better programs that attract many students can earn profits for their sponsoring institutions, “for others, it’s an illusion.”
Some institutions are even “trying to leapfrog and create virtual universities” to train distance students, she says. Yet even in Argentina, one of Latin America’s most developed nations, “these projects are for prestige, but they can’t attract large numbers of students” because few people have access to the Internet.
That didn’t stop her own institution two years ago from creating a “virtual” branch. The branch currently has 4,000 students in degree programs, compared with 16,000 in a more-conventional distance branch that uses correspondence classes, and 60,000 traditional students who attend classes.
Another Argentine state institution, the National University of Quilmes, created a “virtual” branch two years ago. That branch, along with Ceipo Foundation, a prestigious private business school in Colombia, is expected shortly to sign an agreement with the Open University of Catalonia, a successful, six-year-old virtual university based in Barcelona, Spain.
Even Africa, the least-developed continent, is trying a similar approach. The African Virtual University, a project financed mainly by the World Bank, is expected to begin full-scale operations next fall.
It will initially provide courses via satellite television and the Internet to 23 state institutions, and two private ones, across the continent.
Yet, at the same time, the World Bank is expanding its financial support for low-tech correspondence courses and radio programs to upgrade the skills of rural schoolteachers across Africa, in Brazil, and elsewhere.
Harry A. Patrinos, an education economist with the World Bank, says the important thing is to help countries use whatever methods will be the most cost-effective. “We want to make sure we’re not just bringing in the technology for the sake of it.”
Martha Ann Overland contributed to this report.
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