Online Options Seen as Key To Educational Change in Africa

While this news item, which comes courtesy of allAfrica.com and the Angola Press Agency, is rather quaintly written, its message is anything but old-fashioned.

Angolan deputy minister of Education for the Educative Reform, Pinda Simão Wednesday said, here, that distance learning is one of the tools that will allow the creation of better education and training opportunities in Africa.

For years, traditional world class colleges and universities based in the United States have sought a more global reach and fostered whenever possible a worldwide exchange of everything ranging from ideas to even students. But geographic and distance barriers have proved frustrating. It's big world.

Now, sitting as I do in a marketing role at a well-established, rapidly-growing institution offering world class courses, the world suddenly seems like it can be — and soon will be — a much smaller place… a place in which vast physical distances won't stand in the way of people anywhere in the from coming together to learn. On the one hand, of course, I think that's tremendous for people in countries where educational opportunities are not as abundant as here in America. But selfishly as a lifelong learner myself, I think the advance of global online learning opportunities will deliver eventually a cultural richness and diversity to the educational experience that heretofore has been almost completely impossible to achieve. A significant, but not insurmountable, challenge will be the establishment of meaningful linkages between American and indigenous institutions in other countries. Such partnerships will yield both a legitimacy and a sense of belonging that will be an important prerequisite to success in many venues. The benefits that will flow from such international education partnerships will be compelling indeed.