Thousands of kilometers from Kuala Lumpur in Cameroon, doctoral student Michael Nkwenti Ndongfack attends his Open University Malaysia classes online and hopes to defend his final thesis by Skype.
A government worker, Ndongfack could not find the instructional design and technology course he wanted in his own country, so is paying a foreign institution about $10,000 for the degree instead.
Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia, where growth in technology and Internet use is matched by a deep reverence for education.The Raw Story
“I chose e-learning because it is so flexible,” Ndongfack, 42, told AFP via Skype from his home in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde.
Online universities blossom in Asia
Agence France-Presse
2 comments:
Tom,
Do you have any concerns wrt all of this "on-line university" stuff will deprive our young of the true university experience?
ie the social passage to adulthood?
Is not the "person to person" or institutional environment of the university missing? Where our young can transition to adulthood via a SEMI independent, somewhat supervised institutional structure?
I know "it's cheaper", "we can't afford it", etc..
rsp,
Yes and no. First, no. The digital revolution is here and this is the coming thing. No sense resisting it. Better to make the best of it. It will make a good education available to just about everyone everywhere inexpensively enough for most to afford.
Moreover, there is already enough free stuff of high quality online to pursue an education just about anything informally, if someone is motivated. Khan Academy, now funded by Bill Gates, is an example. MIT already has its courses online and is being joined by Harvard in the project. This is really high quality stuff essentially for free.
Yes, in the sense that in many fields the subject matter is a lot less important than learning how people of experience and insight think and conduct themselves. This is difficult through text and lectures alone and requires interaction.
However, digital media can handle personal interaction, so this is not a huge obstacle to overcome. Where it shows up in contact with really superior people, which is why the most prestigious school attract the best students on a selective basis, too.
But this generally happens only in grad school now, and face time with tip profs is decreasing since they also do a lot of "more important" things. So the old model of the university is passing out of existence anyway.
There could actually be more interaction structured into a digital experience than is currently available personally in most university settings.
So I think it is net positive.
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