Distance and Blended Learning in Asia

Colin Latchem, Insung Jung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415994095
• eBook ISBN: 9781135848620
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Distance and Blended Learning in Asia is a unique and comprehensive overview of open, distance learning (ODL) and information and communication technology (ICT) in Asian education and training. Broad in coverage, this book critically examines ODL and ICT experiences from Japan to Turkey and from Sri Lanka to Mongolia – drawing conclusions from the successes and failures, and recommending ways in which planning, management and practice may be developed for the world's largest concentration of adult open and distance learners.

This pioneering book draws on Asian theory, research and practice to identify the strengths, weaknesses and challenges in all sectors of Asian education and training. It critically and insightfully discusses the ideas, skills and practices that are necessary to advance knowledge in leadership and management, professional development, innovation and quality assurance and research and diffusion.

Distance and Blended Learning in Asia provides an insightful, informative and critical review of ODL / ICT developments in schools, open schooling, colleges, universities, workplace training, professional development and non-formal adult and community education. The book is an invaluable reference for ODL / ICT professionals, educators and students anywhere in the world, and is essential reading for all of those involved in ODL / ICT in Asia.

1
Technology, E-readiness and E-learning Readiness

Traditional and New Technologies

In this book, we tend to focus particularly on applications of the newer information and communications technology (ICT). We do so because Asia’s open and distance learning (ODL) providers are gradually introducing e-learning into selected courses and in the case of some of the more recent institutions such as the Open University Malaysia and Virtual University of Pakistan, using online as their main means of delivery. However, it must be emphasised that for reasons of cost, access and equity, most ODL institutions still make extensive use of the traditional technologies dating back to the days of correspondence education, that is to say, printed study guides and set texts. For others such as China’s Radio and Television Universities and the Open University of Japan, broadcasting also plays a key role.

Audiovisual media, radio and TV are particularly valuable in countries with high illiteracy rates and/or with large distributed populations. This is why the Iranian revolutionaries of the 1970s used audiocassettes and today’s Islamist militants use CDs, DVDs and video and audio files on the Internet to promote their views (Miles, 2005). Radio is also seen as a personal, intimate and warm medium as well as a cost-effective and easy means of accessing homes and workplaces. This is why the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority has issued licences for a number of the country’s universities, including Allama Iqbal Open University, to run their own radio stations to teach their widely scattered students. Some other ODL institutions such as the Chinese and Japanese open universities have access to national networks that allows them to make extensive use of radio and TV. Indira Gandhi National Open University broadcasts its educational programmes nationwide via the Gyan Vani FM radio channel and round-the-clock digital Gyan Darshan TV channels. The Korean National Open University transmits lectures 19.5 hours a day over its public satellite and cable TV channel and three hours a day via FM radio. And Turkey’s open university, Anadolu University, draws on its bank of over 5,000 educational TV programmes to provide six hours a day of educational programming on weekdays and three hours a day at weekends over Turkish Radio and Television’s Channel 4. It also provides live interactive TV programmes with toll-free telephone, fax and email access for students prior to exams.

Institutions such as Indira Gandhi National Open University and Korea National Open University use videoconferencing to teach groups of students who are able to convene at set times in remote classrooms or study centres. Videoconferencing is also used for cross-border teaching and learning, for example by Anadolu University, linking classes in mainland Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and on occasion, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In Saudi Arabia, where the sexes are forbidden to mix, videoconferencing enables female students on the segregated university campuses to see, hear and interact with, but not be seen by, their male lecturers.

Open schools such as India’s National Institute of Open Schooling and Bangladesh Open University’s Open School mainly use print and audiovisual material in their teaching. Indonesia’s Open Junior Secondary School also uses TV and South Korea’s Air and Correspondence High School uses TV and radio. However, some open schools such as the Korean Air and Correspondence High School and Israel’s Aviv Virtual School also use the Internet to provide teaching and support. Wherever possible, ODL providers also employ face-to-face teaching and learning. Using the more traditional one-way media and means of delivery, this may provide the only opportunity for interaction, and help students more used to conventional classroom-based learning to develop the necessary self-confidence and understanding.

Asia’s ODL providers well understand the strengths and limitations of these various means of delivery. Indira Gandhi National Open University Professor Santosh Panda is not alone in expressing concern over over-emphasising the values of online delivery to the exclusion of traditional media. He advocates combining use of the older and newer technologies (Baggaley, 2004). Needs and circumstances will determine which technologies or mix of technologies works best in specific situations.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen does not foresee the Internet killing off TV. He argues that the sheer ergonomics of group viewing of a 320-by-240 screen imposes limits to receiving certain kinds of content online (West Australian, 2008). Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates admits that computing cannot benefit the world’s two billion poorest people. He says that the first need is a schoolroom, the second is a teacher who shows up, the third is electricity, and only then may it be appropriate to consider ICT (Benderdorf, 2008).

ICT and E-learning

Christensen (1997) classifies technologies as either sustaining or disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve ways of doing things or reduce the costs. Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, cause paradigm shifts, fulfil roles that older technology could not fill and displace the market incumbents. Thus, according to Christensen’s classification, computers are sustaining, because they help to improve existing teaching, learning and administrative procedures and do this more economically, while the Internet is disruptive since it leads to the creation of, for example, virtual institutions and international consortia serving new markets online.

The widespread adoption of e-learning throughout much of Asia is constrained by limited infrastructure and experience, high costs, slow Internet speeds, and viruses that crash computers (Baggaley, 2007a). Nevertheless, as the technology becomes more widely available and affordable and where there is need and opportunity for change, Asian providers are taking every advantage of digitisation. Universities such as Open University Malaysia and the Palestinian Al-Quds Open University are using learning or course management systems such as Moodle¹ to enable their students to access and download course materials, submit assignments, receive feedback, and interact with their teachers and fellow students. And Anadolu University and Thailand’s Ramkhamhaeng University are not alone in providing their course texts online, Anadolu in making its TV programmes available as streaming video, nor the Korea National Open University in delivering its radio programmes as MP3 files (Jung, 2007).

Asian governments are supporting ICT and e-learning development in the various sectors. ICT developments are also being helped by, for example, UNESCO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,² Intel,³ Canada’s International Development Research Centre,⁴ the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation,⁵ the Commonwealth of Learning Media Empowerment initiative⁶ and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.⁷

The infoDev⁸ inventory of low-cost computing devices for the developing world shows how technological breakthroughs and new, cheaper ways of exploiting these keep coming. Asian schools may soon be using the ultra-basic, ultra-cheap laptops without hard drives that run on free Linux software and in conjunction with central servers being developed by the One Laptop per Child organisation,⁹ Intel,¹⁰ India’s PicoPeta¹¹ and Taiwan’s ASUSTek.¹² In the Cambodian Internet Village Motoman project,¹³ solar-powered schools and telemedicine clinics in areas previously lacking ICT infrastructure can now browse the Web and send and receive emails via motorbike-mounted Mobile Access Points, satellite uplinks and cached WiFi intelligence (Brooke, 2004). In India, Indira Gandhi National Open University and other institutions beam their distance education programmes into study centres, colleges and schools by means of very small aperture terminal or VSAT technology. Asia is also closely involved in the development and use of satellite digital audio broadcasting to provide interference-free, near CD-quality sound and data transmission. South Korea was the first country in the world to launch commercial digital multimedia broadcasting, transmitting data, radio and TV to mobile devices. There are now often more mobile phone users than fixed line subscribers in Asia, raising the possibilities of mobile or m-learning. Smartphones equipped with cameras and Internet connection permit cheap localised multimedia resource creation and information exchange. And systems such as Skype and Jangl offer free or low-cost telephone calls, audioconferencing and videoconferencing over the Internet.

Wales and Baranuik (2008) observe that everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn, and collaboratively, everyone can help transform the way the world develops, disseminates and uses knowledge. The world now has the tools to enable anyone anywhere to use, assemble, contribute to, customise, update and share content with anyone else. They can do so using learning objects, open education resources and free Mediawiki¹⁴ software. The global e-learning standard Shareable Content Object Reference Model or SCORM allows institutions such as Universitas Terbuka, Sukhotai Thammathirat Open University, Allama Iqbal Open University, the International University of Cambodia and the Open University of Hong Kong to develop a digital depository of learning objects for Asian distance educators (Sulphiphat et al., 2007). Asian universities are also members of the Open Courseware Consortium¹⁵ and able to take advantage of the UKOU Open Content Initiative.¹⁶ In India, the National Knowledge Commission has promoted a national e-content and curriculum initiative to encourage the development and utilisation of open education resources by Indian institutions (d’Antoni, 2008). One outcome of this has been Indian science and technology institutes collaborating in the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning to improve engineering education by co-developing and sharing Web- and video-based courseware (National Knowledge Commission Working Group on Open and Distance Education, 2007). Bangladesh Open University and other providers are collaborating with the Commonwealth of Learning in developing WikiEducator¹⁷ teaching and learning resources for adoption or adaptation without cost or restriction.¹⁸ Nor is access to educational content any longer restricted to enrolled students. Sometimes it can be downloaded free of cost by anyone.

However, such approaches can be cost effective, offer greater flexibility and provide wider access to high quality courseware. Critics of such developments as learning objects argue that the materials can be behaviourist and didactic, present content out of context, and fail to allow for inquiry-based learning and problem solving (Akpınar, 2008). Moreover, recent Web development, sometimes known as Web 2.0, permits interaction and collaboration through weblogs (blogs), social networking sites, wikis, podcasts, etc. All of these offer new educational possibilities, although they also raise issues of copyright, intellectual property, the trustworthiness and authority of user-created content and the possibility of website vandalising as has happened with Wikipedia and YouTube.

Many Asian institutions like Anadolu University and the University of the Philippines Open University now place their administrative and information services online, which, as Wong and Ng (2001) observe, both streamlines procedures and reduces costs. In South Korea, where individual universities operate different selection systems and all high school transcripts, students’ photos and teachers’ comments have to be transferred to the universities by secured broadband, the administration of enrolments has now been outsourced to commercial operators who provide admissions information and online simulated testing services and accept applications and payments online with total security and privacy.

M-learning

Two rapidly emerging technologies in Asia are mobile telephony and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access or WiMAX which provides wireless data over great distances as an alternative to cable and digital subscriber line. While much of Asia has relatively low computer-Internet penetration, it is witnessing high mobile network growth. Asia has one billion of the world’s 2.7 billion mobile users and the world’s fastest growth in number of subscribers. The extent of this mobile revolution becomes clear when it is recognised that there are only 1.3 billion fixed landline phones and 1.5 billion TV sets worldwide and there are now more mobiles than PCs in use across the globe (Ahonen and Moore, 2007). To understand the implications of this, consider Cambodia. Despite international assistance with Internet development, this Least Developed Country has very few fixed lines and the lowest Internet penetration rate and the highest call rates in Southeast Asia. However, it became the first country to have more mobile phone than fixed line subscribers and now has the world’s highest ratio of telephone users using wireless. Such technological leapfrogging can help developing countries gain access to online learning and information and establish links with other online communities.

Asians have rapidly accepted the use of mobile phones for texting and taking and sending photos as well as voice messaging. And smartphones—mobile devices that include operating systems and act like pocket computers—are becoming cheaper and more common. With their small screens, sometimes spotty network connections, tiny or virtual keyboards and excessive per-minute charges, these tools are currently unsuited to writing or receiving long documents or receiving complex and time-intensive multimedia programs. And without a dominant operating system, developers must write their programs for particular systems, so PCs are still better suited for certain applications. However, these mobile devices are encroaching on PC processing power and in Japan, home use of PCs is reducing and younger people are using mobiles far more than PCs.

At one Japanese university, Thornton and Houser (2005) found that all of the students had mobiles which they used primarily for texting, exchanging some 200 messages per week, each averaging 200 Japanese characters (about 70 English words), mainly for study purposes. By contrast, the students only averaged seven voice calls a week and only 43 per cent emailed using PCs, on average sending only two messages a week. The researchers found that periodically emailing short lesson inputs and prompts to students via their mobiles resulted in better learning outcomes in English vocabulary lessons than providing identical material in print or via the Web. They also found that most of the students preferred m-learning to computer-based learning for their vocabulary learning.

Institutions such as the City University of Hong Kong (Vogel et al., 2007), Shanghai Jiao Tong University and University of the Philippines Open University also find that PDA and smartphone learning can enhance performance. Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s E-Learning Lab has trialled an m-learning system that enables on- and off-campus students to receive textual, audio and video broadcasts of lectures, take these live or download them for later use, and interact with their teachers and peers by SMS, or short message service. The tutors can periodically receive screenshots of the students’ mobile devices, monitor their progress, test their understanding, and obtain feedback on their teaching. This system has been found to be cognitively, affectively and socially effective and the development team is now developing courses that can be delivered on Apple iPhones with their larger screens and rapid text entry features (Shen et al., in press).

Fozdar and Kumar (2007) suggest that SMS may prove to be an inexpensive, accessible and reliable means of improving student-teacher contact and student retention in countries like India where postal systems are slow and unreliable and using computers and landline telephones can be costly and problematic.

So widespread are mobiles in the Philippines that the University of Philippines Open University is supplementing face-to-face teaching with m-learning in its community health, nutrition, literacy and numeracy programmes (Bandalaria, 2007). Schools are also using mobiles in learning. For example, PDAs and smartphones are used on schools’ geography field trips in Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong (Flint, 2007). Given their educational potential, education authorities such as the Hong Kong Education Bureau (2007) are now questioning whether they should continue to ban mobiles in schools. The rise and popularity of these handheld devices leads Baggaley (2007b) to speculate on whether Asia’s pioneering work in exploiting mobiles will make it a world leader in m-learning.

In practice, ODL providers often use both high and low technologies for independent study and interactive learning. For example, China’s Jiangsu Radio and Television University combines online learning activities, email and chat, video-on-demand, videoconferencing and telephony with oral and written presentations and assignment work (Zhang and Hung, 2007). The important point to bear in mind is that whatever technology or mix of technology is used, this on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Technology, E-readiness and E-learning Readiness
• 2 Open Schooling, SchoolNets and ICT Integration in Classrooms
• 3 Higher Education
• 4 Lifelong Learning, Workplace Training, Professional Development and Non-Formal Adult and Community Education
• 5 New Providers and New Markets
• 6 ICT Integration In and Beyond the School
• 7 Instructional Design, Learner Support and Assessment in E-learning
• 8 Leadership for Educational Change and Innovation
• 9 Quality Assurance and Accreditation
• 10 Staff Training and Development
• 11 Research, Publication and Translating Research into Practice
• 12 Conclusions
• Notes
• References