Educational Technology & Society

Distance education has been widely spread across the developed as well as the developing world. The high population density, limited resources and infrastructure in the developing world make distance education an appealing alternative to deliver education to the vast number of people. Several distance learning technologies are being used in the world and number of technological advancements are being researched in the developed world. Due to the limited resources these technological advancements are not filtered into the developing countries. However, there have been many innovations in distance learning technologies carried out in the developing countries. Most of these innovations focus on getting the maximum benefit from the existing resources. This special issue on “Innovation in Distance Learning Technologies in Developing Countries” covers some of these innovations carried out in different parts of the developing world.

The paper by Prem Praksh and Madhulika Sinha looks at the distance learning technologies in the Indian context. This paper very concisely describes the different technologies being utilized in India to deliver distance education programmes. Ramos et. al. in their paper look at the technologies used to develop a distance education programme in Portugal. Fadde in his paper describes how peer assisted instruction can provide computer assisted instruction for students who do not have access to computers. He argues that peer assisted instruction can be developed in the same format as computer assisted instruction and conducted amongst peers, each helping one another. The fourth paper (by Wilson) looks at a project carried out in Brazil to exploit the characteristics of Advanced Internet in promoting the generation knowledge, developing human resources, and producing information technology projects geared towards education. Fox and Trinidad in their paper looks at rich assessment tasks, supported by technology, for distance learning which aims at preventing plagiarism. The next paper by Satar and Morshidi outlines a study conducted at Open University Malaysia looking into the web usability attributes of an in-house Learning Management System; myLMS. Amorim et. al. demonstrates how to overcome barriers due to low bandwidth Internet connections in developing countries. They demonstrated a system of text-based interaction to overcome the problem of low bandwidth for a target audience of one thousand teachers in Brazil.

“GUS program is a comprehensive and holistic approach to building smart and creative communities in developing countries for e-learning and e-healthcare/telemedicine”. Takeshi describes the GUS program and its initiatives as well as financing bodies. The GUS program is a global program open for any interested parties and will help in the e-learning developments for developing countries. The final paper (by Isabella) looks at an ongoing project, looking at the role of ICT in teacher training in Brazil. Overall this issue of the newsletter looks at the some of the innovative projects carried out in the developing world to overcome economic and technological barriers in delivering distance education.

Ali Fawaz Shareef, Ph. D

Senior Lecturer

Maldives College of Higher Education

a.f.shareef@gmail.com

Distance Education Technologies in the Indian Context

Introduction

Open and Distance Education in India effectively commenced with the Andhra Pradesh Open University (subsequently renamed B.R. Ambedkar Open University) in 1982 for higher education, and the National Institute of Open Schooling in 1989 for primary education. Distance Learning has progressed in rapid strides since then, and India is now home to some of the world’s largest open universities, with over 100,000 enrollments each, and deploying a variety of educational media that include interactive radio and television, teleconferencing, multimedia and the World Wide Web. This article briefly dwells on the major distance learning technologies coming into common use in the Indian distance education scenario today.

In its initial phases, the mode of distance education was primarily through print medium-based correspondence courses. However, thanks to the IT revolution and Moore’s Law, extensive use of electronic media has become a viable option, with most of today’s open and distance education programs going this way. This article aims to take a brief look at the various technologies currently in use for distance education in India.

Radio

There are over 200 radio stations in India, reaching out to over 98% of the population. Despite the advent of television, it is estimated that there are close to 125 million radio sets in India (about one radio to eight individuals, given the current population of just over one billion). The use of radio as a means of distance instruction received a fillip with the introduction in 2002 of the country’s first full-fledged educational radio station, Gyan Vani, (Hindi, translates into Voice of Knowledge) providing a wide range of educational programs. Ten Gyan Vani stations currently operate from different cities in the country, with more on the anvil in the near future. Major open universities like the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Delhi and the B.R. Ambedkar Open University (BRAOU), Hyderabad use radio slots provided by All India Radio to broadcast educational course modules, and also provide interactive radio time to their students, during which they can phone-in and discuss their queries.

Television

Though quite late as compared to many other countries, the advent of the television has been phenomenal, with over 80 million (and rising) television sets in Indian homes today. The government owned national network, Doordarshan, launched it’s first dedicated educational channel, Gyan Darshan (Vision of Knowledge), in 2000. Gyan Darshan-3, launched three years later, is a technical education channel that broadcasts lectures from leading institutes like the prestigious IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) to engineering students all over the country. While the use of television in educational broadcasts has become more popular, with universities like BRAOU launching their own KU-band channel and private channels like Zee starting the Zee Education Channel (ZED), it has been noticed that issues like telecast timings can have a considerable influence on dropout rates, as viewers have to compromise on routine chores in order to attend the courses.

Educational Videos

A common approach used by distance education providers is to set up well equipped study centers where students can view video lectures of the courses in the presence of a local instructor. A pioneering case to point in this context is the IIT, Kharagpur, which launched an off campus distance education programme in IT called "Electronically Networked Life Long Learning" or ElNet-3L in short. The ElNet-3L project followed a well researched academic model and at one point of time had nearly 110 study centers spread throughout India. More universities in India are recognizing the utility of such study center-oriented, video material based teaching methodologies : for instance, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, a mid-level deemed university based in northern India, has set up a distance learning center at M.T.V.Puram, a town in southern India, and is producing video lectures in vocational training for students at this remote center.

Satellite-based courses

Satellite-based communication has been in active use in India, ever since the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in 1975-76 was conducted with the American ATS-6 satellite. Satellite-based transmission for distance education is being used by premier schools like the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT, Bombay, whose distance education model aims at making lectures by IIT faculty available in real-time to students at remote centers through a VSAT network. With the entry of international educational groups into the country, this model is being increasingly for the distance education programs of several foreign universities in India like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and elite Indian schools like the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Bangalore and Calcutta.

In conclusion

The authors have endeavoured to present a very concise view of the technologies in use today for distance education in India. With the increasingly widespread availability of low cost and high speed broadband connectivity, there is strong evidence that web based distance learning and virtual classrooms will rapidly become de rigueur in the teaching-learning process of the near future.

V. Prem Prakash

Department of Information Technology

Anand Engineering College, Agra

India

vpremprakash@ieee.org

Madhulika Sinha

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Anand Engineering College, Agra

India

sinha.madhulika@gmail.com

ICT in a Portugal-Cape Verde distance education program in Multimedia in education and training

Program presentation

In 2004, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation invited the University of Aveiro to organize an education and training program in advanced ICT topics for Cape Verde. The target audience should be higher education staff, including teaching staff and technical support staff, and the topic focus should be on technologies to support development of distance education in Cape Verde, a strategic asset in an archipelago type country.

The distance education program includes a 2 years Master’s program in Multimedia in Education, and a set of 8 short duration training courses in topics related to multimedia technologies. The Master’s program includes the following main subjects:

Year	Semester	Course topic	Credits
1^st	1^st	Development of Educational Multimedia	3
		Communication Technologies in Education	3
		Distributed Learning Management Environments	3
		Educational Software Evaluation	1,5
	2^nd	Multimedia and Cognitive Architectures	3
		Distributed Learning Communities	3
		Seminar (dissertation project)	3
2nd		Dissertation	-

Each course topic has a duration of 4 working weeks, with the exception of Seminar that lasts for 8 working weeks, and includes two 3 daylong face-to-face sessions. Each course is pedagogically organised on a learner centred basis, achieved by an activity oriented work plan. For each activity an initial set of learning