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Distance Learning If the child is the father of the man, then education is the father of our nation. The problems we face today are the result of mistakes made in the past.
The greatest danger is that South Africa will slip further behind the developed world in terms of skills and knowledge, perpetuating the economic problems that already keep us down. But technology may offer us an opportunity to play catch-up with the first world by making the most of the skills we have. It's called distance learning. Says Henrietta Potgieter, Telkom Market Development : "Distance learning is a process where the education process is enhanced by means of technology and that can be done with both computer based technologies as well as communication based technologies."
One way to do this is by using the Internet. By downloading multimedia files, students can read text, hear the spoken word, and watch video. But the real benefit is that anyone with a desktop will have access to the best libraries and teachers in the world. But the cost of supplying every pupil with a desktop is prohibitive. And the lack of computer literacy makes it difficult to teach students using computers. It's a chicken-and-egg scenario. The solution for a developing country such as ours may be something called real-time distance learning.
Using this technology, it's possible for teachers to broadcast lessons to remote areas in real time. The students assemble at a collective point, in this case a mobile classroom, where they can see, hear, and ask questions of an expert who may be giving the class from the other side of the world.
In South Africa, many corporations have already embraced real-time distance learning, inheriting the shortcomings of schools, and facing the additional challenge of keeping abreast of developments in their fields, more businesses have turned to distance learning in order to keep up with "Jones and company". Paul Lowther, MD at Lowther Technologies: "We need to look at technologies and investments that have been made to date and we need to determine what we can add on to those existing investments and then leverage a used communication technology to actually create an environment. It is so multi-flexible - not only for training, it is for interaction, it incorporates aspects like application sharing. For example, a sales and marketing company that happen to use the same technology could use it for training in the morning to train sales people around the country and in the afternoon the management team, located nationally and internationally, could actually sit down and update their sales with their projection figures, and so on, incorporating the very same technology." Distance learning has already revolutionised corporate training, but will the private sector put their shoulders to the wheel and get behind the initiative to extend this technology to schools?
But are these technologies a viable option for Africa - a continent with limited capital resources and infrastructure? Can we hope to get high quality education to the remote outlying areas where it is desperately needed in order for us to match our European counterparts?
People make history, but in order to do that, they must have access to the accumulated knowledge of our species. By providing that access, distance learning may open a window onto a better future.
CONTACTS:
Andre Furstenburg
Paul Lowther
Glynis Hyslop
Paul West |
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Created and maintained by Intekom works Copyright © 1998 Intekom |
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Contents and images © 1998 All rights reserved |
Over the past decade, the ideological problems that beset education have ben peeled away to reveal their economic basis. Many South African schools, particularly in rural areas, continue to suffer from overcrowded classrooms, a lack of textbooks, and a shortage of good teachers.
Distance learning is not a new concept. Video conferencing has been around for years, Using a variety of technologies, distance learning seeks to extend this principle to schools and homes, taking the oral tradition of teaching into the cyber-age.
Henrietta continues: "The way that the Telkom network is developed at present, gives more coverage to urban areas than to rural areas. Sixty percent of the population reside in rural areas. Those are the areas that usually don't have the qualified and skilled teachers in subjects like Science, Maths and Technology who would instantaneously need services or educational and training services in those areas. The fastest way to give them the infra-structure is to start looking at alternative technologies such as satellite or wireless technologies to deliver those services to really remote areas currently lacking the required infra-structure at present."
Andre Furstenburg from SpaceNet explains: "The way we apply the technology - we have a central studio in which a lecturer presents his lecture, the same as he would in a normal classroom. We broadcast that out by satellite and the satellite delivers a "footprint", which is a whole area. In that area we install a dish which allows you to receive a signal and you have the lecturer in the classroom. The response from the student to the lecturer, which is a necessity in education, is via software packages, specifically designed for that purpose, where the student then asks questions and write tests. In real time that goes back via the satellite, into the studio and it really puts the lecturer in the classroom."
Glynis Hyslop, MD Videre :"Disadvantages schools often have a problem in that they a minimal infra-structure anyway. I believe the way in which to solve South Africa's problems is to combine distance education, in community centres, with Tele-medicine, so that the same equipment can be used for many different applications."
Says Paul West, Director Technikon SA : "Technology in Africa, typically differs to other first world countries and first world parts of the world. Because we are at the moment so far behind, it means that we can leapfrog technologies. Typically we can jump fifty years or more in technology in one go. We are very unlikely to see landlines as the way of technology communications in Africa. The likelihood is more that we would be using satellites to ground communications. That is much faster, much more effective and one doesn't have to put up all the land, the terrestrial infra-structure that is necessary."