The distant dreams of high-tech education

Distance learning across international frontiers from a home base has developed in parallel with the growth in conventional student mobility.

The tradition goes back to correspondence education and the concept of external students developed at the University of London and elsewhere. But it has been encouraged by the rapidly rising costs of physical student mobility because of tuition fee increases and the widening gap in the cost of living between rich and poor countries.

Developments in information and communication technologies permit radical departures from traditional patterns of study using distance-learning programmes and the internet. To an increasing extent, students can register for an international course without leaving home, using mail, telephone and the internet to interact with their tutors and other students. While generally receptive to the new ways of learning, the report sounds a cautionary note against relying on such technologies in less developed countries.

It recommends that Commonwealth governments seek ways of making new technologies more widely available in poorer member countries via Commonwealth economic development and scientific cooperation agencies.

"New technology is not available to everyone. Large parts of South Asia and Africa do not have reliable (or any) telephone services outside major cities, and the majority of the population in poorer countries do not have the equipment."

Access to phone lines ranges from 502 per 1,000 population in highly developed countries down to 4 per 1,000 in less developed countries, while for personal computers the range is from an average 204.5 per 1,000 to a number too low to be statistically significant. "For the poorer countries, high-technology distance education is meaningless."

There are less tangible benefits to real mobility - the chance to learn about another culture, to compare one country's situation with another at first hand, to build the skills of living in a foreign environment, to begin to become a citizen of the world. "For these reasons, the physical mobility of students should still be a central issue for the Commonwealth," the report says.

Global education schemes may undermine local and national knowledge and indigenous institutions. "A distance programme originating in, say, the UK or Canada may have no input at all from scholars in the learner's own countryI 'Global' knowledge is, in effect, knowledge accepted by the main owners of the technology - that is, the countries of the North," the report states.

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