African Council for Distance Education
2nd Conference
July 10-12, 2008
Lagos, Nigeria
Theme: Open and Distance Learning for Sustainable Development
eLearning on the Far Side of the Digital Divide
Sir John Daniel and Dr Wayne Mackintosh
Commonwealth of Learning
Introduction
It is a pleasure to be here for the second conference of the African Council for Distance Education. I have very good memories of the first one, held in Pretoria in August 2005.
History seems to be repeating itself. First, you have had the generosity to invite me to address you on both occasions. Second, on both occasions I was unable to be here for the beginning of the conference and you have accommodated me by asking me to speak towards the end.
Third, it was a pleasure to congratulate our hosts in Pretoria, UNISA on their tremendous achievements in recent years under the leadership of Professor Barney Pityana. Today I congratulate the National Open University of Nigeria and its Vice-Chancellor, Professor Olu Jegede, on what they have done to establish the University, not least by enrolling former president Olesegun Obasanjo as a star student.
Je suis très content d'être parmi vous et, puisque cette association regroupe l'Afrique dans son ensemble, je commence en français. Je félicite votre association pour les progrès effectués depuis sa fondation et depuis le premier congrès d'il y a cinq ans. J'ai pu assister à une séance du comité exécutif de l'association à Dar es Salaam l'année dernière où j'ai pu renouveler l'assurance de l'appui du Commonwealth of Learning pour votre projet visant à l'élaboration collaborative de matériaux pédagogiques. Ayant travaillé longtemps dans des universités francophones je trouve fascinantes les différences de mentalité entre anglophones et francophones, même en Afrique. Par exemple, j'ai reçu un courriel la semaine dernière du Professeur Jibril Touzi, un Camerounais qui disait que la notion de ressources éducatives libres n'entre pas dans la psychologie universitaire francophone.
Your first conference had the theme The Mobilisation of African Leadership and I gave a speech entitled Open and Distance Education for Africans and by Africans. It was prepared with my South African colleague Vis Naidoo, who later returned home to run the Mindset organisation. He is now working for Microsoft.
I have prepared this speech with Vis' successor at COL, Dr Wayne Mackintosh, who is also a native of South Africa but is unlikely ever to work for Microsoft because he is rooted in the open source culture. COL favours a diversity of approaches and attitudes among its staff.
Your theme at this conference is Open and Distance Learning for Sustainable Development. This time we have taken the title eLearning on the Far Side of the Digital Divide.
Our plan is to explore briefly the notion of the digital divide and argue that we cannot wait for it to be bridged before bringing some of the benefits of information and communications technology to those on the far side who are not now connected to the global internet. We shall then explore what is meant by eLearning and suggest that it can make an important contribution to reducing educational deprivation.
With that as background we shall then look at the practicalities of eLearning on the far side of the digital divide and address four obstacles in particular: connectivity, equipment, software and the training of people. In all this we shall draw on the experience of COL.
Members of ACDE are in the forefront of the attack on the digital divide. We hope that our own experience and reflections can help you overcome some of the obstacles that face you.
The Digital Divide
First then, let us reflect on the digital divide. The French term is fracture numérique, which sounds more dramatic.
The expression 'digital divide' appeared in the 1990s to refer to the lack of access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) by segments of the community. A first point is that digital divides run within countries as well as between them. Some people in the USA don't have good access to ICTs whereas here in Africa I imagine that most ACDE members are pretty well connected, even if that is not true of most of your compatriots.
There are various reasons for the digital divide - and the persistence of the digital divide. In some countries there are political obstacles because governments have not encouraged the spread of connectivity by liberalising their telecommunications markets.
The Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, led by the distinguished Ghanaian, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, is one of the bodies that are working to encourage governments to bridge the divide. They are making good progress because the developmental benefits of expanding access to ICTs are now well documented, especially where mobile phones are concerned. We shall come back to these in a minute.
There are obviously economic reasons for digital divides. Computers are expensive relative to the incomes of most of humankind and communications costs are a factor too.
Another facet of the digital divide is geographical. Towns are better served than rural areas, although gradually satellites and wireless are gradually levelling the playing field.
COL is working with the 32 small states of the Commonwealth to facilitate the creation of a network called the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. We shall return to this very exciting initiative that quickly taught us that there is a digital divide even in the smallest countries.
The digital divide includes social and linguistic barriers. Although the number of new web pages in English is now outnumbered by the pages begin produced in other languages, there is still a feeling that getting into the ICT world means jumping a cultural barrier as well. But of course jumping out of the confines of a single culture into the global pool of information is part of the reason for bridging the digital divide anyway.
Authoritarian regimes are faced with the dilemma of trying to place a technical bridge across the digital divide without allowing the free flow of information over it. We believe that in the long term it will be impossible to resolve this dilemma and information will be freely available, but we are not there yet.
There is also a digital divide between teacher and student, or more generally between institution and learner. Access to the Internet, however inadequate, is almost always better in the offices of academics on campus than in the homes of their students.
You are the African Council for Distance Education: so this matters. You cannot simply tell distance learners to come and use the facilities on campus.
But we get ahead of ourselves. This ACDE conference is concerned with education. Bridging the digital divide produces general developmental benefits, but how does it help give people access to education of quality?
eLearning
Our interest today is in cultivating eLearning. If you look for a definition of eLearning on the web you'll find it described as the delivery of a learning, training or education programme by electronic means, involving the use of a computer or electronic device.
There's a major omission in that definition, which goes a long way to explaining why eLearning has a reputation for underperforming. The definition ought to refer to three 'D's, not simply the one 'D' of delivery.
A proper definition should refer to the design, development and delivery of learning programmes by electronic means. As we read them nearly all the discussions on the virtual conferences that preceded this meeting focused on how you design and develop programmes to build in quality.
Nearly ten years ago, during what was called the dotcom frenzy, some enthusiasts argued that all education would quickly migrate to the computer screen, making traditional methods of education, including traditional methods of distance education, obsolete. However, many of those who tried to create 'pure' eLearning programmes, by which we mean programmes relying entirely on the computer, either went broke or adopted a blended approach which mixed electronic learning with other forms.
Reflecting this experience, COL uses a broad definition of eLearning that embraces any distance learning programme that has an electronic component, even if most of the delivery is through the medium of print.
For example, some African distance learning programmes use mass SMS on mobile phones to communicate with students about their print-based studies. We consider that a form of eLearning.
But all forms of eLearning bump up against the obstacle of the digital divide. Even if the electronic component - suppose it is a laboratory simulation on a CD-ROM or DVD - is only a small part of the course, the student who cannot access equipment to play the simulation is disadvantaged. This is a fundamental challenge for the introduction of electronic media into distance education - and not just for Africa.
I well remember that when we were introducing more eLearning in the UK Open University in the early 1990s the powerful OU student association complained that we were penalising the many students who did not have computers at home. In that very egalitarian institution some held the view that 'if everyone can't have it, no-one shall have it'. Such a stance effectively blocks the introduction of any new technology into distance education unless the institution is rich enough to provide all students with the technology. The fact is, that they are not, and in any case the whole point of distance education is to rely as much as possible on the students' own technologies.
But to return to the UK Open University, quite soon the student association did a U-turn and urged the University to expand online learning and services more quickly.
Cynics would that say the University bribed them to change their minds by providing the members of the student associations executive committee with connected computers at home so that they could experience the benefits.
That proved to be something of a boomerang, or at least a double-edged sword, because as more and more students became connected, with numbers reaching 150,000 by 2000, it became very easy for the student association to monitor student experience and make well documented complaints about any shortcomings in our teaching and learning system. It was uncomfortable to have our noses rubbed in our weaknesses so effectively but it did help to make the UK Open University even more of a self-improving system.
We suggest that African distance education has to take a similar approach. You should be introducing electronic elements in your courses as fast as seems reasonable, while at the same time doing what you can to allow students on the far side of the digital divide to take advantage of them. How do you do this? We shall look at four obstacles: connectivity, equipment, software, and training.
Connectivity
The first barrier to eLearning on the far side of the digital divide is connectivity. ACDE members have little opportunity to increase that directly, but you can influence political decisions on telecoms liberalisation and taxation by publicising the developmental benefits of connectivity. And you can make more efficient use of the connectivity that you have.
Two figures are particularly telling (The Economist, 2008). First, studies find that in a typical developing country an increase in penetration of mobile phones of 10% boosts GDP growth by around one percentage point. Second, on average the mobile industry, which accounts for 4% of GDP, contributes 7% of tax revenue.
We give you these figures for mobile phones because the connectivity for other ICTs, such as laptops, will grow on the back of mobile telecommunications. What governments need to do is to foster a lively and competitive telecommunications market and not to tax it too heavily because mobile-specific taxes reduce demand.
One calculation suggests that if governments did away with mobile-specific taxes and charged only value-added tax (VAT), total tax revenues from the mobile industry would be 3% higher by 2012 and the average penetration rate would increase from 33% to 41%, which would, as we just mentioned, increase GDP growth by one per cent.
You can also do things to use more efficiently the limited connectivity that you have. COL has published advice on how to do this (see for example Daniel & West, 2005). One example of better use of bandwidth is provided by COL's WikiEducator, a collaborative website for developing Open Education Resources (OER). It shows teachers how to use the open source software OpenOffice for authoring content offline. It can be exported into the wiki format and uploaded onto the site when teachers have the opportunity to connect to the Net at their place of work, community media centre or Internet café.
Equipment
eLearning on the far side of the digital divide obviously requires equipment. This is becoming more widely available: rapidly in the case of mobile phones, less rapidly in the case of computers. However, the cost of computers, in relation to their processing power, is dropping steadily and there are many schemes to recycle good used computers from richer countries. If sending organisations ensure that the equipment they donate is in good working condition it can be a godsend for local NGOs and other bodies. Responsible people on both sides of these deals should check that electronic junk is recycled properly in the rich country and only good working equipment is shipped to developing countries.
The Tuxlab project is an African innovation where computer laboratories running on the GNU/LINUX free software operating system are installed in schools. It is a smart project because it connects refurbished computers as dumb terminals to a new server, which is far cheaper than installing a new laboratory. Schools need only maintain one installation of software and teachers can be taught to wire and set up the lab themselves (http://www.tuxlabs.org.za/). SchoolNet Namibia has widened access to ICTs using a similar model.
Another trend is the attempt to make a functional laptop for less than $100 and make it widely available in the schools under the One Laptop Per Child or OLPC programme. This initiative, launched by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spawned a brisk competition to create viable machines.
There are now close to a hundred of these on the market and COL is involved with UNESCO and the World Bank's Infodev in doing an assessment of them. The chances are that within a few years equipment will be much less of a problem as costs continue to fall.
COL has also been instrumental in developing what we could call a virtual printing press. Technically speaking this is software, but its potential impact in widening access to print-based learning materials could be compared to Gutenberg's invention of printing. Although an increasing number of teachers have access to the Internet at work, the majority of learners in the Commonwealth will not have connectivity in the foreseeable future. COL therefore made it a priority to develop an eLearning technology to produce customised print materials from any Mediawiki software installation.
We worked with the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which oversees Wikipedia, the largest free content repository in the world, and a company called PediaPress to develop an open source technology that allows educators to build their own print collections from different pages to give them a unique print-based study guide.
The materials are produced in portable document format (pdf) which can easily be reproduced locally and mailed to learners through more conventional means. You can experiment with this technology on COL's WikiEducator. The potential impact is huge because at a technical level we now have the means to provide access to a free encyclopaedia in print format for every teacher and learner in the world. In this way COL is helping to connect the unconnected.
Software
Software is the enabler. It is the means to achieve our educational aims of designing teaching learning interactions and developing content. Software should support what educators do best rather than constrain them. COL respects the freedom of educators to teach with the technologies, curricula and learning materials of their choice whether that involves proprietary or open source software. Teachers and institutions should choose the best tool for the job in the light of their own circumstances.
In any case, in this fast changing world educational institutions have more pressing challenges than personal software choices. One is the interoperability of digital content among different systems and the use of open standards. The reason that the Internet grew exponentially was because of interoperable technologies, such as specifications, guidelines, software, and tools.
For example, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an open specification administered by the World Wide Web consortium that defines the basic building blocks of a web page. Open standards enable private software companies and open source developers to speak the same language, which leads to a wide choice of browsers, editors and authoring tools that produce interoperable content.
There is an encouraging trend towards greater openness, for example in the area of word-processing with the introduction of the Open Packaging Convention. COL urges all concerned to work through the issues so that we can exchange documents more freely between systems. This is not a game of winner take all, but rather of finding the best answers for all the world's computer users. We believe there is enough maturity and technical skill to accomplish this.
Beware of claims that eLearning is cheap. Like all distance education the major cost is the time that teachers, learning designers, graphic artists and editors spend developing high quality learning materials. Having made that investment you want to ensure that it transfers between software.
Interoperability protects your investment by requiring content to be stored using open standards and open file formats. In COL's policy work, we advise governments and institutions to assess all implications of their choices when making software procurement decisions. They should take a long-term view of flexibility, cost and vendor dependency.
Training
No combination of connectivity, equipment and software does any good unless people can use it. Although the teach-yourself approach suits ICTs because training is often built in, it is still helpful to seed that process with some formal training.
This is one major purpose of the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (COL 2008a, 2008b, West & Daniel, 2008) which COL is coordinating on behalf of the ministers of education of 30 small states, eight of them here in Africa.
The other main aim is to produce eLearning materials as Open Educational Resources on a variety of skills-based postsecondary topics chosen by the ministers in order to reinforce the offerings of the existing tertiary institutions in these states. The VUSSC, as we call it, is not a new tertiary institution but a way of networking the existing ones so that they can raise their game in eLearning.
To launch the development of eLearning materials in each new subject COL convenes a three-week workshop in one of the small states and all the states who are interested in developing that subject send experts to the workshop. At the workshop they get training in methods of distance education design and development, collaborative development strategies and tools, and a range of different technologies that are used in eLearning development. Participants acquire these skills while working on real courses.
COL has organised five of these workshops since 2006: on Tourism & Entrepreneurship; Teacher Development; Life Skills; Disaster Management and Fisheries. Over this period we have achieved a progressively better blend of training and course writing. An important requirement is that VUSSC workshop participants train colleagues when they return home. Nearly 100 people have now attended VUSSC workshops and we estimate that they have trained another 400 colleagues between them. This is quite a significant increase in the pool of ICT-trained professionals in these small countries.
The natives of North America, what we call in Canada the First Nations, have a proverb: "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me, and I'll understand". This inspired COL's Learning4Content project. With funding support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, COL is providing free training for lecturers, teachers and trainers in developing OER content on WikiEducator. Their contribution, in return, is to share their knowledge freely by making available as an OER a lesson on a subject of their choice.
Learning4Content is a partnership. We aim to schedule at least two face-to-face workshops in each Commonwealth country. COL will identify and support a facilitator for each face-to-face workshop but participating ministries or institutions must provide access to a computer lab and underwrite all local country costs.
We also offer a free online version of the workshop every month and extend a warm invitation to educators in your countries to sign up for this training opportunity. To date COL has trained more than 870 people in this way and we are aiming to reach 2,500 by the end of 2008. We have already done face-to-face workshops in Ghana, India, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Zambia (COL, 2008c).
Conclusion
It is time to conclude. You will, of course, have noticed a glaring gap in this presentation. What about courseware?
At the heart of eLearning - as of all distance learning - is courseware, the learning materials which, together with student support and logistics, are central to successful learning. We have said little about this because it is a huge topic and has already been a major focus of the conference already.
Courseware is expensive and throughout the four decades of modern, multi-media distance education there have been appeals for greater sharing of learning materials. So far these appeals have had disappointing results partly because it was physically difficult to share and adapt materials until they were in digital formats, as eLearning materials are.
The movement to create a global intellectual commons of Open Educational Resources therefore has great potential. But the movement is still in its early days and only time and experience will show us whether OERs will result in genuine multi-directional sharing and adaptation. However, some of the early signs are hopeful.
COL is committed to making the OER movement a success because we see it as key to getting the cost of distance learning within the reach of the four billion people at the bottom of the world economic pyramid. Only if we achieve that will we be able to claim success for the campaign to take eLearning to the far side of the digital divide.
References
Commonwealth of Learning (2005) J. S. Daniel & P. West Digital Divide to digital dividend: What will it take? Address to Online EDUCA Berlin http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/3580
Commonwealth of Learning (2008a) J. S. Daniel, The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth: What is your vision for the future? http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/5235
Commonwealth of Learning (2008b) J. S. Daniel & P. West, The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth: What can it contribute? http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/5221
Commonwealth of Learning (2008c) Learning4Content http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content
The Economist, (May 29, 2008) Mobile Phones: Halfway there
P. West and J. S. Daniel (2008) The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, Open Learning tbp
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