The Commonwealth of Learning

People are only as developed as the information they access. Look behind the prosperity evident in industrialised countries and you will find information about technique, process, and organisation.

The power of information is so great as to constitute – in and of itself – a sufficient condition for development. In addition to holding monetary resources, every nation is endowed with three kinds of fundamental assets: natural resources, human resources, and social resources. Information is the key to maximising a nation’s essential resources in a rational and sustainable way.

Technology can facilitate the creation of information affluence in nations that suffer from information scarcity. A newly-created broadcasting medium holds the potential to deliver information across the developing world in a highly economic fashion. This medium employs satellites and digital transmission to broadcast audio and multimedia programmes directly from space to personal, portable receivers. When this infrastructure goes into operation it will create a multitude of choices, around 50 to 70 channels of audio. In addition to audio, this digital system will be able to support broadcast of data, text, and even images.

Paper

At the outset, I want to thank our hosts - the Brunei Darussalam Ministry of Education and Universiti Brunei Darussalam - for all they have done to welcome us with such warmth and graciousness to this beautiful country.

This August forum brings together international leaders in education. You are top governmental officials, veteran teachers and influential theorists. My work is in the private sector, an arena distinct from government and the academy. Yet you have asked me - an entrepreneur - to join this distinguished gathering and share my views on technology for developing countries. I feel honoured and excited to present my thoughts this morning. I want to salute my friends from the Commonwealth of Learning for their work in realising this conference. I have a lot of confidence in the COL. My confidence comes from experience. Two years ago, WorldSpace Corporation joined forces with the Commonwealth of Learning to present a pan-African conference on distance education. It was a successful partnership. More than 200 educationalists - including 13 African Ministers of Education - gathered in Accra, Ghana to focus on how new technologies could expand opportunities of learning. The conference was an overwhelming success, in large part due to the expertise, commitment and brilliance of the Commonwealth of Learning. The distance education conference in Accra is just one of the many achievements of the Commonwealth of Learning during its first ten years. Founded in 1988, it came into existence inspired by the vision that the peoples of the Commonwealth must have access to knowledge, regardless of where they live or whether they are rich or poor.

This is a great vision, because it can truly improve our world. Open learning holds the potential of bringing better health, productivity, governance and even more peace to all humankind. Your discussions at this forum will benefit people ten generations into the future.

Open learning works. I suspect every person in this hall can tell success stories open learning from first-hand experience. History itself tells of the efficacy of learning, of the critical importance of information.

People are only as developed as the formation they access. Look behind prosperity and you will find information about technique, process and organization. This is true for the world today, and it was true 1,000 years ago. Looking back at European history for a 1,000 years, we see the flow of information triggered historic transformation. Beginning in the fifth century, Europe was in a prolonged period of ignorance, fear and brutality knows as the Dark Ages. Europe’s rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts led directly to an era called the Renaissance, which ignited intense creativity in science, philosophy, literature and architecture. This information flowed to Europe from Africa and Arabia. If an influx of information can trigger a historic transformation in 11^th century Europe, I am convinced it can do so in the 21^st century for the entire developing world. Indeed, I believe the power of information represents - in and of itself - a sufficient condition for development. One of the most effective ways to convey information to large populations is through open learning. Clearly, the Commonwealth of Learning holds a great vision. Yet as history has taught us, great visions always come with great challenges. So it is with the idea that people must have access to information, regardless of where they live or whether they are rich or poor. In a moment, I will attribute several superlatives to open learning as compared with other kinds of education. I want to be clearly understood. All education is important. Whether instruction comes from a parent at home, text in a book, a teacher in a schoolroom, a professor via a videoconference link or a voice over a radio receiver. All education is important. I cannot and will not assert that open learning is more deserving of support than other kinds of instruction. All forms of education must be judged on how they serve the needs of students and how they maximise societal resources.

As I see it, open learning demands the best from us. It demands the best pedagogy. It demands the best of our respective societies. And it demands the best technologies. The unique pedagogical challenge that faces open learning reminds me of a woman I met at UCLA. As you know, Los Angeles is a centre for motion pictures and television. This woman worked in the entertainment industry in L.A. - writing soap operas - those serial programs on daytime television filled with domestic intrigue and melodrama. She told me a good soap opera script would always do two things: one, capture a viewer’s interest regardless of when he or she tunes in; and two, enable that viewer to understand what is going on very quickly.

So it is with your enterprise. Open learning programs - especially those intended to reach the broadest possible audience - must captivate a potential student and they must offer multiple points of entry at times convenient to the learner. This is a challenge worthy of the most creative people information to as many individuals as we possibly can. If we give people the power of knowledge, we must give them the freedom and mobility to use it. To do otherwise is contradictory, and it is cruel.

At this conference we are resolved not to let mountains or deserts or poverty get in the way of education. As we remove physical and economic barriers to education, let us not ignore other barriers. Freedom is the freedom to learn. When we build societies that are stable and fair, we give opportunities to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or religion. Producing the best pedagogy is the responsibility of educators. Producing the best societies is a responsibility that falls upon all of us.

What about the best technologies? Who is responsible for meeting this demand that distance learning makes? There is no single answer. Technologies are tools. We must select the ones that will do the job in the most effective and economical way. Of course, the environment in which we work and the nature of the task will guide our choice of tools.

I come from a private enterprise firm that created a new technology for developing countries. In this enterprise, like open learning, we must consciously work to produce systems that are appropriate for their setting and will truly work for the end user. We at WorldSpace Corporation share some fundamental commonalities with the participants of the Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning. In many cases, our environment - our region of service - is the same as yours. And the goal of WorldSpace Corporation is nearly identical to what many of you are working to achieve. In light of these similarities, I would like to tell you about our choices of technologies.

The goal of WorldSpace is to create information affluence for the developing world. This is our commitment, it is our sense of purpose which we approach with unfathomable zeal. To realise this goal, we have created a new electronic medium: broadcast of audio programs and multimedia services directly from a satellite in space to hand-held portable radio receivers. Over the next 12 months, the WorldSpace constellation of three geostationary satellites will go into operation, serving Africa and the Middle East, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The first of these satellites, AfriStar, is already in space. Over the past four months we have conducted rigorous tests of both AfriStar and the new WorldSpace portable satellite radio receivers.

At this point in my speech, I must tell you this is a special moment in my life. For years, I have stood before audiences and communicated our vision of delivering information affluence to the developing world via digital satellite broadcasting. I described how powerful satellites would broadcast digital signals to vast geographic areas. And I explained how listeners would use compact, portable radios with small antennas to receive a multitude of high-quality audio and multimedia programs. I have given this speech for nearly one decade. Details have changed over the years. But the essentials - information affluence, satellites and portable receivers - have remained constant. There was one other constant: I always spoke in the future tense ... until today.

Here in Brunei, before the Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning, I reach a great milestone. This is the first speech where I no longer have to talk about how the WorldSpace system "will work" It does work. Teams of engineers definitively proved it in Cairo, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Toulouse, France. And in mid-January I heard the sounds from the satellite myself as far up in London, hundreds of kilometres north of the primary service area. At this very moment, you can hear our test broadcast throughout all of Africa by using a WorldSpace receiver. Furthermore, those signals would come to you via the first satellite designed, built and launched specifically for Africa. The era of satellite communications began with Telstar in July 1962. It has taken more than 36 years for Africa to get a satellite of its own.

As someone who was born in Addis Ababa of a Sudanese father and an Ethiopian mother, I am proud to tell you that Africa will be the first continent to enjoy this new medium. An individual anywhere on the continent will be able to receive programs directly from the AfriStar satellite using only a compact, portable receiver. No dish is necessary, just a small built-in antenna. It gets better than that...

This electronic device will be the gateway to a multitude of choices, approximately 60 - 100 channels of crystal clear digital sound. In contrast to short-wave radio, this mass medium will be free from noise, distortion, fading and interference. The digital architecture of the WorldSpace system also means flexibility. In addition to audio, users will be able to receive information in the form of text and data, i.e. fully blown multimedia without connecting to a telephone line. One year from now, AfriStar, AsiaStar will all be in operation, broadcasting to a potential audience of over 4.8 billion people. Satellites, silicon chips and digital coding are our technologies, the tools we have selected to achieve our goals. To look at our goals is to understand our choices.

We conceived of the WorldSpace system as a response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. The idea was to use public health information to slow the spread of the HIV virus. That information would be delivered via satellite radio. The technology matched the environment and the nature of the task. Satellite delivered radio would cover Africa’s vast geography and surmount natural barriers. This system would provide information in harmony with the harmony with the oral traditions of Africa and it would do so in an economical way. By placing the broadcasting infrastructure into space, it becomes possible to serve a far larger population at lower costs than today's earthbound systems. And this infrastructure will be in place for sooner and far cheaper than terrestrial alternatives

Our end is service: broadcasting to people who need information to survive and want information to enhance their lives. Our means is digital transmissions of audio and multimedia transmitted from satellites directly to portable receivers. This happens to be the best way of doing it. If I could do this by using animal horns, I would. Indeed, it might well be easier. I have known horned creatures that are more understandable than certain electrical engineers I have had to deal with to get this far.

For us, satellite digital radio began as a means to improve public health. But we quickly envisaged how it could also be a means of providing distance education to Africans who heretofore have been untouched by electronic media. We saw how this tool could be a practical way to get commodity prices, weather forecasts, and advisories on soil conservation techniques to millions of farmers in South Asia. We understood it could address a broad range of concerns facing the women of Latin America. And after reading our children to sleep, it didn’t take a great leap of imagination to see how satellite radio could tell wonderful stories to children throughout the world.

Of course, we intuitively recognised the potential of this medium to become a profitable business. By studying the media market of Africa, Asia and Latin America, we verified our initial perceptions. The potential of satellite radio in developing countries is most trenchantly expressed by the disparity between two statistics:

• In industrialised countries there is an average of one radio station for every 30,000 people.

• In developing countries - on average - there is one radio station for every 2 million people.

Hundreds of millions people across Africa, Asia and Latin America want more choices of entertainment and information. Information is an extremely valuable commodity in people’s lives. The developing world is a vast, untapped communications marketplace, and the laws of supply and demand will work there as well as any other place. WorldSpace will establish a thriving business by giving consumers more choices of information and entertainment and providing them with better quality programming.

In order to ensure that our humanitarian vision was not lost in our business, we made the decision to create the WorldSpace Foundation. We endowed the foundation with 5% of our total channel capacity on all three of our satellites for social development and education. This was significant decision for our company and marks our commitment to educational issues. The WorldSpace Foundation is beginning its work in Africa by providing channel capacity to indigenous groups that want to broadcast educational material across the entire continent, thereby not only promoting wider access to education but also promoting regionalizing and better communication among countries. I urge those of you who are interested to contact the WorldSpace Foundation.

The key to our vision of information affluence and our business of earning profits in the global media industry comes down to a single word. It is a word that expresses the principal demand open learning makes on technology. This is the principle demand everyone interested in Open Learning wants from technology.

The word is access. The challenge of access recalls the philosophical question posed by Bishop Berkeley: If a tree falls in an uninhabited forest does it make a noise? The content we produce, however excellent, will have no impact if thousands and millions of people do not receive it. As I see it there are three dimensions of this challenge: geographic access, practical access and economic access. Does an information system reach the people who need it? Is the technology easy to operate? Can it deliver information in a way that is clear and readily understood? Finally, is it affordable?

At WorldSpace, we created our system to meet the needs of developing countries. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an electronic mass medium has been designed expressly for developing nations. The environment of the developing world gave us our basic technical specification. By covering vast territories, the WorldSpace system goes beyond cities to reach towns, villages and even remote settlements.

By delivering information primarily in the form of audio, our technology conveys knowledge in a format that is well known and well understood by nearly everyone. But this system can also be connected to a computer to deliver multimedia service in PCs.

An old axiom tells us that knowledge is power. Of course, with any broadcast technology, one must first have electrical power aims are inadequate and batteries are exceedingly expensive. Practical access means electrical power that is sufficient and inexpensive. Recently, WorldSpace made a strategic investment in BayGen, now aptly named Freeplay. This South African company manufactures the renowned Freeplay radio that generates its own electrical power through an ingenious windup mechanism. Turning a crank for 30 seconds will generate enough electricity to power the Freeplay radio for nearly 30 minutes. The digital circuitry of the WorldSpace digital receiver requires more power than conventional radios. When WorldSpace took out a ten-percent stake in BayGen, we earmarked this investment to be used for research and development of a system capable of powering our receivers. The R&D efforts are progressing very well, and we are confident the engineers at BayGen will realise their objective in a matter of months.

WorldSpace will provide geographic access and practical access. What about economic access? After all, my talk is entitled, "Affordable Technology for People in Developing Countries."

Cost has always been a critical consideration for WorldSpace. Economy is central to our vision.

How can a man whose company is spending over 800 million dollars to launch satellites talk about "economy?" In a phrase, with complete conviction. Look not at the totality of our costs, but at the totality of the WorldSpace service. The beams of AfriStar, AsiaStar and AmeriStar will radiate upon more than 4.8 billion men, women and children. Satellites make this possible. By putting transmission infrastructure into space, we save energy, effort and money.

A satellite gets its power from the sun. This saves earthly resources, and it allows precious electrical energy to flow in the service of other human needs. Yes, it takes thousands of person-hours to construct and launch a satellite. But consider the sheer amount of labour necessary to build broadcasting stations that would serve as many people with a volume of information equal to what the WorldSpace satellites will provide. Such an effort would be staggering and the costs would be nearly incalculable.

The WorldSpace medium will transmit information to more people at a lower cost than any other system. But transmission is only half the equation. People in developing countries need an affordable means to receive our broadcasts. When our service begins later this year, WorldSpace receivers will go on sale throughout Africa and the Middle East. Depending upon the model of the receiver and the country where the transaction occurs, they will sell for 250 to 350 dollars.

At these prices the WorldSpace satellite receiver is a remarkable bargain, reasonably affordable and terribly expensive. It is a remarkable bargain. Consider the new digital devices for open and distance learning: personal computers, video conferencing, satellite television, and Internet terminals. All of them are more expensive than the WorldSpace satellite receiver. It is affordable. We have done extensive market research, which shows millions of people in our three satellite coverage areas can afford the WorldSpace receiver. After looking at income levels and high-ticket consumer electronic items, we conservatively estimate that more than 25 million households in sub-Saharan Africa can afford this product. By offering information and entertainment that will enhance their lives, we will induce many of these households to buy the WorldSpace receiver.

Finally, it is terribly expensive. These receivers are far more costly than conventional radios on the market today. For millions in our service area, it would take months to earn enough money to purchase one of these units. To satisfy the dictates of the WorldSpace business and the aspirations of the WorldSpace vision this price must come down. We can make this happen, and we will. Several powerful forces will advance our cause. One of these is the economies realised by large-scale production and advances in electronic technology. Think about it: every electronic product that you own or use costs less than it used to. Radios are less expensive, so are televisions, cassette recorders, CD players, mobile phones and computers. What is even more remarkable is that as electronic devices get less expensive, they also become more powerful. The result is products that are cheaper and better. Not so long ago we marvelled at this phenomenon of the Information Age. But now this phenomenon is so reliable and so commonplace that it has become mundane. Do we buy a computer now or wait several months in order to get a superior machine that will cost 25 percent less?

The formula has been proven time and again. Large-scale manufacture of electronic devices, plus advances in technologies, equals better products at lower prices. The question is not whether the price of the WorldSpace receiver will come down, but when and how quickly. It is certain to happen because of mass production and advances in electronics. But there's more at work here than the invisible hand of market economics and the cold precision of micro technology. Much more.

Ultimately, the force that will make WorldSpace truly affordable for people in the developing countries is human. It will take scores of alliances and thousands of partnerships to enable this medium to deliver information to millions of people. In a word, it will take co-operation.

And that gives me boundless confidence that we will succeed, because co-operation is an intrinsic attribute of human beings. I say this, notwithstanding all the ways that plaque our planet. Author Matt Ridley has written a fascinating book on this subject entitled, The Origins of Virtue. In it, he presents a convincing case that co-operation is at the heart of natural selection. Co-operation is what makes one species more resilient than another. Whether we are parents sharing our love, teachers sharing information, workers sharing tasks, business partners sharing risk or soldiers sharing danger, our nature predisposes us toward co-operation. Mr. Ridley goes so far as to assert that society is not a conscious invention of mankind, but rather it is the expression of an inherent inclination to survive. He says we co-operate because we want to survive. Bet on co-operation.

At WorldSpace that’s exactly what we have done. Our business is based on co-operation. We have turned to others to build our satellites, ground control stations, chipsets, receivers and supply programming. Guided by a sense of self-interest, we entered into co-operative agreements with many organizations. I stand here before you and imagine ... join me, it is free to imagine ... I stand here and imagine what our co-operation with the people in this room can do for the Peoples of the Pan Commonwealth.

The WorldSpace Foundation exists to work other entities. It is the custodian of a remarkable resource, namely five percent of the capacity of a global broadcasting system. The goal of the Foundation is to share this access with organizations that will use this medium to improve the lives of millions of people. Imagine, as John Lennon would say, that we all join hands together and make our world as one!

I care deeply and passionately about my company’s socially responsible vision. Central to our vision is your work in distance and open learning. We can only achieve our shared aspirations through co-operation. WorldSpace Corporation is meeting you half way. We have created a foundation to forge relationships with the distance learning community. And we have endowed the Foundation with five percent of our capacity, an asset whose market value will approach one billion dollars over the 15-year life-span of our satellites. This is our offer on the table. What is yours?

I feel the urgency of time. In only a matter of weeks, WorldSpace will commence commercial operations. I want content - excellent content - for open and distance learning on the AfriStar satellite as soon as possible. In less than four months we will launch the Asian satellite which will also require content.

I also feel a sense of urgency beyond my company. It is an urgency driven by a shift of historic proportions, and this shift threatens to drastically widen the gap between information-rich and information-poor countries. For nearly all of human history, access to information has been characterised by a condition of scarcity. In antiquity, there were only so many clay tablets and sheets of parchment and only a few literate individuals who could use these media. The centuries passed, but scarcity remained. There were only so many books, so many broadcast frequencies, and so many classrooms and lecture halls. Now, seemingly overnight, the Internet has created pure abundance, and instead of being concerned about scarcity we are searching for filters to shield us from an onslaught of data. Suddenly we have access to too much information ... at least that’s the case for those of us who live in industrialised countries.

The information gap, already large, threatens to become permanently insurmountable. The need to bring information - cheaply, quickly, and effectively - to the developing world is more important than ever before. Through co-operation, we can succeed in creating affordable information technology for people in developing countries. Let us not fixate on price; ours, together, is a roadmap for universal access to information. Ladies and gentlemen, what better patrimony can we bequeath to our progeny? What is the price, the value of that!

In an exchange from one of Oscar Wilde’s plays, one character asks, "What’s a cynic?"

He received the famous reply: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."