Going the distance

How do you take higher education to the masses when your country covers a huge expanse of the Earth and its population numbers a billion?

The Chinese government has decided that the Internet is part of the solution. It wants to have five million students attending as many as 100 online colleges within four years, says the China Daily. China's overarching goal is to get 15 percent of eligible citizens enrolled in some form of higher education, up from the 11 percent now taking classes. Currently, about 240,000 students are in degree programs at 38 online institutions. China is certainly adopting its distance-education program swiftly. It opened its first online school in 1997. That collaboration, between Hunan University and Hunan Telecom, has attracted about 3,500 students. The largest online college, offered by the People's University of China, has 6,000 students.

Michael B. Yahuda, a Chinese expert at London's School of Economics, says what the government is doing makes sense. Online universities offer China a means to reach a large and far-flung group of potential students, he says. "They have great potential."

There are problems, however. Lack of bandwidth and a cable infrastructure means that few Chinese students can receive the content they'll need at home. So most schools use a model based on Qinghua University, which beams content via a satellite to a network of teaching centers. Qinghua began its online program three years ago and expects to have 5,000 students this year. An online degree from Qinghua requires completion of 15 courses taken over two to four years. Cost of a degree at People's University's is between $1,000 and $2,000. At Qinghua, tuition is $480 to $600 a year. To Americans, China's online degrees must seem like bargains.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Oct 2001
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