Presentation for ContactNorth/ContactNord, Ontario
Why and How Ontario Colleges and Universities
could/should Collaborate with Developing Countries
in the Area of Online Learning
15 December 2011
Sir John Daniel
Commonwealth of Learning
I strongly encourage Ontario’s postsecondary institutions for collaborate with developing countries in online learning. It may well be that Ontario has more to learn from developing countries than the other way around.
Let me give a few examples.
First, in his recent book Global Education, Athabasca University professor Jon Baggaley finds that some developing countries in Asia do online learning more effectively than institutions in North America because they remember the lessons of the past.
What he means is that in the big open universities of Asia online learning co-exists and is blended with older forms of distance learning through print and multi-media. These institutions live the experience of these methods and remember the research conducted on them, most of which is directly relevant to online learning.
In North America, by contrast, many of the thousands of teachers engaged in online learning have no knowledge of earlier approaches to distance education – indeed, many think it only started with the Internet.
As Santayana observed, ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. They therefore make all the old mistakes, which explains the generally dismal quality of online learning in North America that Tony Bates observes in his study of online learning in 2011.
Second, developing countries have to struggle with less sophisticated infrastructure than people in Ontario, which tends to make them more inventive and more purposeful. My PhD supervisor once remarked to me, ‘if we have less money then we must think harder’. Practitioners of online learning in developing countries have to think their way around the obstacles of low bandwidth and a lack of high end equipment. This leads them to focus more tightly on the student experience and how to enhance it. Putting it another way, in Ontario’s rich media environment there is a tendency to say ‘technology is the answer, what was the question?’ whereas a course developer in a developing country starts with the question because she cannot be profligate with the technology.
Third, developing countries may be better at collaboration. A case in point is the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, which my organization, the Commonwealth of Learning, helps to facilitate. This began in 2000 because the Ministers of Education from these 30 countries of less than a million inhabitants realized that each of them did not have the critical mass of expertise or equipment to go it alone in the eWorld. But rather than turn to the developed world, they decided to crack the challenge collectively and created the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth – the VUSSC.
This is not a new institution but a mechanism for collaboration. Over the last six years hundreds of people in these countries have acquired high-level online learning skills through the VUSSC, and course materials, created as Open Educational Resources, are available for worldwide use, including in Ontario.
Furthermore, within the VUSSC framework these 30 globally distributed developing countries have developed a Transnational Qualifications Framework to facilitate course sharing, something which bigger developed countries have as yet failed to do.
I shall stop there. I am sure that there is much that developing countries can learn from Ontario’s institutions, but since you probably assume that exchanges will be primarily in that direction, I have concentrated on what you can learn from them – if you are prepared to go into the experience with a little modesty and humility.