By Minamur Chowdhury, University of British Columbia, ETEC520 Assignment, May 2008
E-learning methods are widely used in countries around the world to promote distance education and life long learning. It is an innovative approach for delivering electronically mediated, well-designed, learner-centered, and interactive learning environments to anyone, anyplace, anytime by utilizing the internet and digital technologies in concert with instructional design principles (Anonymous 2003, Hedge and Hayward, 2004). Applications and processes of e-learning include web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration, where contents is delivered via the internet, intranet/extranet, audio and/or video tape, satellite TV and CD-ROM. Today e-Learning resources on the internet provide numerous information that are designed to deliver information about distance learning and educational technology and to support and promote accessible alternative to school education and job training in the Americas, Europe, Asia and throughout the world.
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with nearly 140 million people within an area of 147,570 square kilometers. The country’s vast population could be a major resource of the country. However, in transforming a population into a productive force and ensuring a dynamic environment for social, economic and political development is a big challenge for its government. Though the official literacy rate is said to be 66%, but according to private survey the real rate is only 42%. Education, therefore, has been recognized as a priority sector by all governments since Bangladesh independence in 1971. Distance education is an important alternative for educating mass people in Bangladesh for many socio-economic reasons. More importantly, the opportunity for higher education is extremely limited in Bangladesh, and even students, who can afford to finance their studies, find it is very difficult to get admission into the universities due to limited capacity (Sadeq 2003).
In Bangladesh, e-learning was first introduced in 1956 by a radio-broadcasting program, later in 1992 Bangladesh established its first and only distance learning university, which is known as the Bangladesh Open University (BOU). The University’s learning technology is mostly traditional one-way media and the students are listeners with test papers. However, the ratio of dropouts in BOU is extremely high. (Information on BOU retrieved on March 2008, from http://www.bou.edu.bd/home.html and
http://www1.worldbank.org/disted/Policy/Institutional/man-01.html)
The reality in this part of the world is one where more than half of the populations do not have a phone. About one third of the population has never made a phone call despite the recent great success by a not for profit company the “Grameen Telecom”, an inexpensive but advanced mobile phone services for villagers of Bangladesh, a successful effort by 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and micro-credit concept (Information on Grameen Telecom retrieved on March 2008 from http://www.grameen-info.org/grameen/gtelecom/). Most importantly, Bangladesh’s barriers to technological development remained tied to the barriers to any economic developments. The culprits are the high illiteracy rate, old and cumbersome market restrictions, lack of progressive contract laws, too many state controls, customs duties, bureaucracy, and corruption.
Bangladesh can start implementing solutions to some of these problems through the Ministry of Education. This can be done by creating market-based competition for the e-Learning industry, a sensible set of regulations, ensuring respect for private local and foreign investments and the rule of law that would promote confidence in entrepreneurs seeking to employ new ventures relating e-Learning technology. Government can create benefits for private companies investing towards e-Learning with encouragements such as tax breaks, R&D grants and loan options. This papers attempts to suggest a serious government initiative that could be known as the “National E-Learning Promotion Package”.
For Public sector, government must have policies concerning the characteristics of the emerging knowledge intensive economy and social environment that encourages knowledge-intensive activities. Bangladesh Ministry of Education should prepare a list of attainable aims for accomplishments by public institutions. Also, the ministry should allocate funds for well-targeted, sustainable e-Learning projects for major public institutions of their own or encourage establishing collaboration with similar institutions in countries such as neighboring India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.
E-Learning and Challenges for Bangladesh
Applied e-Learning Technologies Today
The common e-Learning Technology likely to be used by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs under a “National E-Learning Promotion Package” is a set of courses consisted of many independent learning objects, or lessons, that could be combined, customized, and reused in any course depending on the course requirements. The modularity of this approach eliminated excessive duplication of course content, allowing for highly efficient course creation. This allowed for one topic to be taught in many different courses, regardless of context. The focus of this kind of e-learning initiative is to set the basis for a powerful online training program that would allow all e-Learning clients to create customized e-learning programs. In today’s e-learning market, there are two distinct systems that may or may not be implemented in conjunction with each other. The most popular solution is a LMS (Learning Management System) - a high-level framework used to manage the user’s learning curricula. On the other hand, a LCMS (Learning Content Management System) is a low-level framework that is responsible for administering, packaging, and launching course content on a small-scale level. Located in the middle of this infrastructure is the learning content. In order to interface with an LMS or LCMS, learning content is structured in the form of modularized “learning objects”. These objects should be implemented with accordance to a set of guidelines specified by various specifications consortia and standards bodies. The two most popular set of specifications necessary for learning object compliance are the Sharable Content Object Reference Model or SCORM Reference Model and the Aviation Industry CBT Committee or AICC set of guidelines. Both are heavily supported by most e-learning solutions. I believe that a LMS-LCMS combination should be implemented in order to maximize the efficiency and create a problem and project learning based learning initiative. Furthermore, the SCORM Reference Model should be adopted, for it is the most relevant and widely used e-learning standard in the industry today.
For-Profit e-Learning Businesses
Today rapid development of newer technologies reflects changes in all societies in the world including Bangladesh, it forces to change corporate training and creates new learning paradigm in the context of life-long learning which describes the shift from training to learning. For private sector businesses worldwide, there are three primary e-learning markets seem to be most important source of Interest. Government ministries of related sectors need to establish a clear regulating guidelines for fair and profitable business for today’s e-Learning Market coupled with a comprehensive National E-Learning Promotion Package which would include encouragements - such as tax breaks, R&D grants and similar initiatives sustainable by the government of Bangladesh realistically. The three major private sectors to take advantages of the government package are:
The outlook for the market of world’s e-learning business is basically very strong forecasting 30% annual growth. Development of Corporate e-learning is one of the fastest growing market segments for Software Publishers. World’s online training development is expected to nearly double in size every year through 2015, reaching approximately US $19.5 billion by that time. The market trend predicted by industry experts is to continue well into the next century (IDC 2002).
The companies and careers of the future will utilize technologies that have not even been conceived of today. These technologies will require a whole new set of skills from the workforce. Learning to use the new technology will be important, and so will using those technologies to learn.
As the future market of e-Learning grow to billion-dollar industry, e-Learning become the mainstream application for educating people from early childhood through the twilight years. The electronic learning materials from all over the world including Bangladesh are being connected, making unrestricted access to specific knowledge and skills, creating business opportunities for profit seeking institutions and businesses.
Promoting Technology in Bangladeshi Institutions
In a developing country like Bangladesh, the term "literacy" evokes the concept of reading and writing, but by including “computer literacy” skills, the population can leap frog into the use of new technology. Defining the scope and substance of teacher training needed to integrate computing into schools, including the training required to make teachers themselves ‘computer literate’. Instructional technology and the World Wide Web offer powerful teaching resources that provide educators with a limitless wealth of information and shared professional knowledge. Instead of spending time mastering instructional technology, teacher could simply guide the process by knowing the rules but not necessarily be skilled in the details. Similarly, a teacher can act as the caretakers or moderator of the technology and let students master their subject of interest on their own in their preferred direction relying on the vast online resources available for free. It will take time before teachers could make the needed adjustments and developments to their new teaching philosophy and arrive at a middle ground where they feel comfortable and start applying constructivist teaching philosophy to create meaningful learning experiences for their students.
Although, the digital technology in general (including the Grameen Telecom network of Bangladesh) is brining different part of the country’s population together, same time it is creating a divide where huge percentage of the country’s population left without any access to digital world, and it is of little value if the a quarter of the population cannot read or write, or if it fails to deal with the life and death questions that affect the society. An obvious solution for that will be for the part of local governments and educational institutions to develop local contents and same time for the part of the central government to put in place the technical requirements in order to facilitate the presence and use of comprehensive text and images on the Internet.
Regardless of the success of NGOs and other non-profit organizations in Bangladesh, the government must start building IT infrastructure linking villages and communities, universities and primary and secondary schools, scientific and research centers, public libraries, cultural centers, museums, post offices, railway stations and archives, health centers and hospitals, and local and central government departments. Other targets include improving the availability of information in on the government websites, and ensuring that all government employees in the country has at least a periodical access to digital texts and communications. As a result, local communities and local government establishments alike, with digital links, and governance through it, will create a natural and an enthusiast trend which will lead the drive of developments in all other underdeveloped fields.
Encouraging the Public Sector
Bangladesh Open University (BOU) which has current enrollment of approximately 400 thousands, it provides higher education and professional training in wide areas such as agriculture, business, education, arts, and science. However, all their courses are based on traditional one-way media using national TV and radio-broadcasts and far behind to use modern computer based interactive technologies. Promoting new interactive and advanced mode of teaching is very important for today’s distance learning environment. It is also possible to utilize a mixed mode uses of several different media methods or deliveries such as video, CD-ROM and e-mail. “Single mode delivery systems do not provide enough instructional power to ignite the student's interest because they fail to provide student involvement” (Hirschbuhl et al. 1995).
The bright side of institutions like BOU is that they offer considerable cost and sometimes quality advantages over conventional campus-based education in many developing countries, due to the economic of scale of the open universities (Bates 2002, National Strategies for e-Learning in Post-Secondary Education and Training).
It is time for Institutions including public institutions like BOU to apply new skills by collaborating with subject specialist and outside privately owned technology consulting companies or with Non-Government Organization (NGO) who already applied such technologies. At public institutes, new skills must be learned by selected faculty members to meet the needs of quality distance education (Sherry and Mores, 1995). Public institute like BOU already has well-trained and skilled academic and management staffs, most teachers and higher ranked officers received an advanced training in distance and open learning in home and abroad funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), (Anonymous 2002, BOU 1997). These skilled staffs could be the first wave of expertise’s to introduce and run newer technologies involving e-Learning.
Encouraging the Private Sector
For Bangladesh, to move forward with new technology, the government has to have a clear regulatory framework impacting e-learning. However, there are complex issues with so many contradictory factors (Garret, Matkin, Kumar 2005). As Internet is Global, so is the e-Learning. Regulating cross-border e-learning trend would be a challenging task for the government. There are number of tough issues to tackle for any governments all over the world and it is specially challenging for Bangladesh, which may find that tight control actually driving students increasingly rely on e-Learning solutions overseas.
It is the responsibility for the ministry off education to provide private educational institutions and businesses interested in investing into applicable technology in education with working knowledge of capital markets to domestic economic growth, and the role and responsibilities of government to foster such development. There need to be a very close connection between the public sector education development officials and private sector business communities interested in e-Learning. As private institution owners need experience in capital market matters, the ministry employees and public sector officials need to gain knowledge in this regard through government sponsored seminars or through collaborations depending upon projected goals of individual institutions. In general the ministry may expect that through seminars and various collaborations:
To begin with some of such examples, Bangladesh should follow examples set by the Government of Malaysia. Currently, Malaysia is in the process of transforming itself to a knowledge-based economy. The country’s government encourages companies to invest in knowledge-intensive activities, companies that qualify will be granted "Strategic Knowledge-based Status". This strategy fits well to private education sector. There are simple and clear cut rules for profit seeking educational organizations to follow in order to receive benefits set by the Government. (Malaysian Knowledge Based Economy, retrieved on March 2008 from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN013974.pdf)
The Funding Issue and Proposed Policy
Unfortunately, technology is wrongly considered as a rather luxurious commodity for the needy by many key government officials in Bangladesh. Spending money for health, education, housing or other projects - many of which have equal or greater merit but the nature of their funding means that development money spent on technology is not used for health, education, housing or other projects. Often, technology is seen as an end, rather than a means to an end. But overwhelming focus cannot be always on buying computers, and not on teacher training, curriculum design or actually improving learning. Without clear objectives, it is difficult to measure results.
As Bates (2001) points out e-Learning is not cheap and certainly it is not an alternative to face-to-face teaching. However, e-Learning may vary considerably in how it is designed, developed and delivered, and these variations in methods will affect the costs and the effectiveness of e-Learning.
In this regard one must agree with the functionalists, he following quote backs up the argument taken from University of British Columbia ETEC511, Unit 3: “A functionalist is preoccupied with how things work (rather than with why they work and whose interests is served). Functionalists are interested in exploiting technology for efficiency. There would be considerable discussion about cost/benefit analyses, doing more with less and the financial rewards of conducting education online. Functionalists often have an uncritical (sometimes unwitting) commitment to extant power relations and are prone to see technology as neutral.” (UBC ETEC511, “Discourses that construct Technology”, retrieved from http://www.webct.ubc.ca/SCRIPT/etec511_det/scripts/serve_home).
For Bangladesh government it is an opportunity to design and develop e-Learning infrastructure that is strategically beneficial to those in rural areas who were denied basic technologies that is being enjoyed by others in the country. Despite the country’s economy, which is based on agriculture and low-tech industries, it cannot afford to ignore that foreign e-Learning programs may represent a threat to national educational institutions (Bates 2001). On the other hand, it can be justified economically just as effective as the Grameen Telecom’s rural mobile phone services once the network is in place. The marginal cost of expanding student numbers through e-Learning may be much lower than building new campuses or campus buildings.
One of the possible benefits of e-Learning is that it may encourage more students to take part in courses if the overall cost is less comparing with courses taken in colleges and campuses. Furthermore, part-time or working adults who already have computer, e-Learning could result in considerable cost-savings such as traveling and lost work time. For Bangladesh government, most important task now is to support the national technology infrastructure, and provide education and training to institutions on the issue of the costs and benefits of e-Learning (Bates 2001).
The Proposed Policy
Bangladesh has four separate school boards based on its geographical structure. Each school board has several districts; public institutions are managed autonomously through each district head. However it respects all policies set by the divisional school boards. Under a “National e-Learning Grand Project”, the government needs to set up a list of sustainable tasks to promote e-Learning nation-wide. Once the rules of engagement is set up, the project representative in each school boards would carry out the mandate of the ministry in coordination with the divisional head. Each school board should further set achievable e-Learning goals for all public and private institutions in their own districts. It must be done through collaboration with business communities in the respective district as well as with other stakeholders such as community leaders and BT&T Co. (Bangladesh Telephone and Telephone Company). Public post-secondary institutions could coordinate efforts to overcome challenges of cash flow and shortages of technical staff through divisionally allocated fund which is to be allocated for e-Learning development related projects only.
Private companies could set up special arrangements with For-Profit e-Learning businesses which in turns can join in and apply for the government’s National E-Learning Promotion Package which includes tax breaks, R&D grants and more. The divisional government could add more options to create benefits for private companies developing e-Learning products so further exploring of the new technology in the market could flourish under a defined rule of law for this specific growing industry.
The ministry also should have fund for a special technical support team to support pioneering faculty members who develop appropriate e-learning content and experiment. All district entities under each school board would need to participate in implementing e-Learning infrastructure, developing and using content, and ensuring teachers have the skills and tools needed to take advantage of this government initiated opportunity.
Conclusion
Bangladesh is facing significant challenges in its effort to catch up with the rest of the world in term of improvement of the living conditions of its general population. The only way the country can do so is by transforming the population into a productive force. The Government of Bangladesh need to embrace an innovative strategy to address these challenges; central to this strategy is a requirement to improve the education and skill of the people, at all levels. E-learning has the potential to help address these challenges.
In Bangladesh, barriers to technological development remained tied to the barriers to any economic developments. In order to carry out a successful e-Learning strategy, the country desperately needs to get rid of these barriers and implement progressive laws that encourage free markets. Bangladesh should start implementing e-Learning solutions through the Ministry of Education. This can be done by creating market-based competition for the e-Learning industry, a sensible set of regulations, ensuring respect for private local, foreign investments and the rule of law that would promote confidence in entrepreneurs seeking to employ new ventures relating e-Learning technology. Government must create benefits for private companies investing towards e-Learning with encouragements such as tax breaks, R&D grants.
For Public sector, government must have policies concerning the characteristics of the emerging knowledge intensive economy and social environment that fits into the knowledge-intensive activities. Bangladesh Ministry of Education should encourage a list of attainable aims for accomplishments by public institutions. The ministry should also allocate funds for well-targeted, sustainable e-Learning projects for major public institutions of their own or encourage establishing collaboration with similar institutions in neighboring countries.
References:
Bates, A.W. (2002) National Strategies for e-Learning in Post-Secondary Education and Training Paris: UNESCO/International Institute for Educational Planning
Bangladesh Open University (BOU), March 2008, retrieved from http://www.bou.edu.bd/home.html and http://www1.worldbank.org/disted/Policy/Institutional/man-01.html
(GrameenTelecom, March 2008, retrieved from http://www.grameeninfo.org/grameen/gtelecom/)
International Data Corporation (IDC) 2002, IDC 2008, from http://www.idc.com/about/about.jsp)
ETEC511, Unit 3 Discourses that construct Technology. Retrieved from http://www.webct.ubc.ca/SCRIPT/etec511_det/scripts/serve_home
Malaysian Knowledge Based Economy, retrieved on March 2008 from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN013974.pdf
Sadeq 2003, Hedge and Hayward, 2004, Hirschbuhl et al. 1995
Sherry and Mores, 1995
Bullen, M. & Janes, D. (Eds.)(2007). Making the Transition to E-Learning: Strategies and Issues. Hershey, PA: IDEA Group.