Beyond the Diploma Mills

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Beyond the Diploma Mills
The only hope of closing the literacy gap in developing countries lies in extending the reach of online education.
Sarah Garland
NEWSWEEK
January 25,2009
Many kids play hooky all day, every day. More than 40 percent of children old enough to attend secondary school are not in the classroom, many because of violent conflict in their home countries. Another 800 million adults are illiterate. Efforts to reach these people have stumbled because of a lack of teachers, poor governance and declining foreign aid. Educators are coming to believe that the only hope of closing the literacy gap in developing countries lies in extending the reach of online education.
Once disparaged as the jurisdiction of "diploma mills" and profiteers, the Internet is reforming this image: there's an explosion of new Web-based teaching tools made available to struggling school systems, from free open-source curriculums to online networks for refugee children trying to keep up with their classwork.
UNICEF is working with Roundbox Global, a U.S. software company, to refashion a program originally created to help an Ohio charter school work with teenage mothers and other at-risk students.. India's Open Schools, one of the largest and oldest distance-learning programs in the world, is now distributing course materials online, adding flexibility and lowering costs, says Sir John Daniel, director of Commonwealth of Learning, an international education-technology group
Distance learning via the Internet has also become a tool for training millions of new teachers needed to fill schools in underserved areas. This is especially important in primary schools, where lack of teachers is a big reason why 75 million children who should be in the classroom aren't attending. In Africa, international agencies and local universities use distance learning through the Internet and mobile phones as a primary way of preparing the nearly 4 million teachers needed in sub-Saharan Africa to fulfill the agency's universal education goals.
There are limits to how much technology can contribute to the efforts to close the education divide. Distance learning is proving not to be a useful model in primary education; for kids this young, interacting with a real, live teacher is irreplaceable. And "no one's going to want to read 'War and Peace' off their mobile phone," says Daniel. Computers, online wikis and open-source software and curricula are also not much use if teachers don't know how to use them. Sheldon Shaeffer, the UNESCO director for Asia, says several countries have fallen into the trap of investing in new gadgetry without thinking ahead about the costs and logistics of training educators to use it.
Nor has the problem of diploma mills that dupe students into paying for useless online degrees gone away completely, even as online education acquires a more benevolent image.. Online education "is not a panacea," says Shaeffer, "but it has huge potential." Despite the hiccups, international education experts believe the use of the Internet and other sorts of communication technology for education is likely to become the primary vehicle for education aid in a few years..

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/174539
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