KUALA LUMPUR: Thousands of kilometres from Kuala Lumpur in
Cameroon, doctoral student Michael Nkwenti Ndongfack attends his Open
University Malaysia classes online and hopes to defend his final thesis
by Skype.
A government worker, Ndongfack could not find the instructional
design and technology course he wanted in his own country, so is paying a
foreign institution about $10,000 for the degree instead.
Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia, where
growth in technology and Internet use is matched by a deep reverence for
education.
“I chose e-learning because it is so flexible,” Ndongfack, 42, told
AFP via Skype from his home in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde.
Web-based courses dramatically boost opportunities for students and
are often cheaper than those offered by traditional bricks-and-mortar
institutions.
But online learning has also caught the eye of some of the world’s
most prestigious universities, with Harvard and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology recently teaming up to offer free courses over
the Internet.
“With the improvement in technology, the number of institutions
offering online education has increased, both in terms of numbers and
the kind of classes offered,” said Lee Hock Guan, senior fellow at the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
The Malaysian government said about 85,000 people took online courses in
the country last year, both at web-based institutions and traditional
universities offering Internet teaching.
In high-tech South Korea more than 112,000 students at 19
institutions are taking web-based classes, all of which have begun since
2002.
China embraced the concept of online learning in the late 1990s to
expand access to education, particularly in its vast rural regions, and
there are now scores of providers, with 1.64 million people enrolled in
2010.
A new type of learning
Online courses are changing the way students learn, educators say,
placing less emphasis on the rote learning that has long characterised
education in parts of Asia, and harnessing modern consumer technologies.
And “open” universities, which typically offer courses primarily
through the Internet, allow anyone to enrol for online programmes
regardless of prior qualification or degrees.
At Kuala Lumpur-based Asia e University, students download course
materials from an online forum and virtual library. They are in contact
with teachers and fellow students mostly through email, online chats,
phone and text messages.
Assignments typically include illustrating what they have learned
with videos and other presentations made with smartphones, iPads or
other devices and uploading them to YouTube.
Academics say such interactive learning helps students engage with
the material more than they would sitting passively in a lecture hall,
and opens a window to learning through a medium they know and love – the
latest gadgets.
“Everyone is a front-row student,” said Ishan Abeywardena, who
teaches information technology at Wawasan Open University, based in
northern Malaysia.
Students who might be too shy to ask questions or otherwise engage
with their class in a traditional setting are much bolder online, Ishan
said.
“Can you imagine the iPad, iPod and iPhone generation today, who are
going to enter the university say, in 15 years’ time, going for a
chalk-and-talk kind of model of learning? You learn by doing,” said
Ansary Ahmed, Asia e University’s president.
But even those in favour of online learning admit face-to-face
interaction – which can also help keep students motivated and personally
engaged – is lost.
Ndongfack, whose web-only institution opened in 2000, said online
studies were not easy, leaving him feeling isolated. “There is no one
there to give you instant support,” he said.
The growth of online degree programmes is also constrained by poor Internet accessibility in parts of Asia and beyond.
More than 80 percent of South Koreans and 60 percent of Malaysians
have online access, but in China the rate slips to about 40 percent and
it slumps to around 10 percent in India.
Other criticisms include inadequate regulation, allegations of
poor-quality teaching, student cheating, and the fact that online
degrees are still not as widely recognised as traditional ones in the
marketplace, say industry experts.
But Asia e University’s Ansary says such teething problems will be
addressed over time, and in a few decades students will no longer attend
just one university but several, picking and choosing from online
offerings.
“These are early days,” he said. “The window is just opening.”
