Project Code Name: E-Learning - international developments in electronic learning

Training & Development, Sept, 2000 by Donna J. Abernathy

You can thank the Russians for e-learning. Well, in a really twisted way

For those of you unfamiliar with the Great Space Race (and hula hoops), Sputnik was the world's first man-made satellite, launched in 1957. In response to this Soviet flight breakthrough, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency to boost technology advancements in Department of Defense activities.

Military and academic experts powwowed on new ways to communicate, way before dot. Whatever was cool. The new push for technology spawned packet-switching networks, protocols, email, and LANs that fed into the Internet and an e-revolution.

Governments worldwide are still big players in Net initiatives, and that greatly affects progress in e-learning. Here's a look at some trends in dot.gov and digital learning.

Uptake Down

A new report from Andersen Consulting claims that, overall, global governments are slow to adopt Net services.

The governments of Australia, Singapore, Canada, and the United States are leaders in providing online information, but they rarely surpass 20 percent maturity, according to the report. The French government offers the most comprehensive online services, and more than one-third of its sites are interactive; compare that to 8.3 percent of U.S. sites.

The report identified privacy fears and an overall lack of Net savvy as main reasons for the slow uptake.

FYI www.andersen.com

More Broadband, Please

One of the most active areas in U.S. government e-learning efforts is the push for increased bandwidth. The partnership of academia, industry, and government is continuing with Internet3, but the U.S. government's own Internet project is called Next Generation Internet.

The key distinction between NGI and Internet3 is that NGI is led by and focuses on the needs of such federal agencies as the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, and National Institutes of Health. However, because of the great deal of overlap between universities and federal agencies in terms of network infrastructure, applications, and the researchers working in both communities, there's also a great deal of synergy between the two projects.

According to 12 researcher Alex Latzko, all of the research should begin making an impact relatively soon. "This [12] technology will be available within the next year. Some of it already is. If you've got fat enough pipes, you can watch a lot of the streaming video (that's] available."

The big question for e-learning proponents is still, "When will we be able to stream TV-quality live training to the masses painlessly via the Web?"

You can sign up for free 12 news updates at www.internet2.edu. NGI updates are found at ngi.gov.

Wired U Gets Gov Backing

Citing Britain's rich reservoir of experience and expertise, government officials in the United Kingdom say that it's time to establish a new virtual university to catch up with American e-universities.

The new institution will focus on instruction, not research, and it may help realize a promise made by Prime Minister Tony Blair to enroll at least half of the country's young people in higher education by the time they're 30.

Sir Brian Fender, chairman of the Higher Education Funding Council says, "I am quite clear about what this will look like. It will not be a correspondence course; this is the Open University of the 21st century." He estimates that the initial cost of the e-university will be $604 million ([pound]400 million).

Consortia of institutions will be invited to bid on creation of the new virtual university, which will offer bachelor's degrees and a new two-year degree under development. Britain's pioneer Open University is likely to lead the bidding, but the government hopes that research groups will also become involved. Partnerships are also being considered with non-British institutions.

Source Chronicle of Higher Education

Back to the Future

Radio as effective e-learning? According to David Walker and Gajaraj Dhanarajan, you betcha, if governments are interested in reaching disadvantaged groups.

In "Education for All: The Mass Media Formula," they write: "If education for all is to be achieved, then the potential for radio as an effective delivery device to disadvantaged groups will have to be harnessed. This can only be achieved with the commitment of governments to allow for the development of community broadcasting. The benefits that radio can bring to the welfare of a nation are potentially great. It is economically the best solution for reaching a large number of people with information and educational content. The tools for education for all and the infrastructure and skills for delivering education are readily available if governments are willing to allow radio to proliferate at the community level."

What's needed for that to happen? Government deregulation of the airwaves, for one thing. But that may be a challenge in some areas. According to Walker and Dhanarajan, there are proposals in India, for example, to circumvent government regulations of community radio by rebroadcasting Web- streamed audio via speakers mounted throughout villages.