Some Global Implications of Your Distance Learning Experience

Posted on October 2, 2008 by David Gray

UMassOnline CEO David Gray I’ve just returned from a week in China as part of our ongoing initiative to be one of the first foreign educational institutions to be approved by the Ministry of Education to offer online learning programs in China for China’s students. I’ll have much more to say and report about this in subsequent posts. For now, I can tell you that the power and reach of online learning has been much on my mind.

My main point in this post is to make sure you know that as an online student at UMass, you are living, working, and studying at a pivotal time in higher education. The technologies, methods, and processes you are helping to innovate are making a difference to people worldwide with an immense hunger for higher education, but who live in places where the barriers to learning are profound.

Maybe it is too much to ask that an online learner living and working and studying hard here in America should see and appreciate his or her part in this global educational revolution. It may have little immediate relevance perhaps against a backdrop of the very real demands in this culture on your time and energies. But I’ve just finished reading an article about a distance learning initiative in a country where the average life span is 45 years; where women are traditionally barred from the learning experience; where the air smells like refuse; and, where you can’t attend evening classes because at night repressive thugs roam the streets to intercept anyone trying to get ahead.

The article I’m referring to, entitled Vancouver professors on aid mission to Afghanistan, by Isolde Raftery and Tom Vogt, is about two associate professors at Washington State University Vancouver — Dawn Doutrich and Paul Thiers — and another school official — Maria Beebe, who is the director of global networks at WSU’s Center to Bridge the Digital Divide. They have gone to Afghanistan to participate in a distance-learning project that will link classrooms in Kabul with instructors on the WSU Vancouver campus, thanks in part to a $12 million grant awarded to WSU by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

I think to read about their ordeal, and to gain a better understanding of the common cause of education in uncommonly hostile regions, is to appreciate the global implications to you of your place and time in this evolving online learning movement. Yes, UMassOnline is chiefly interested in making sure you benefit from our specific program and course offerings. But an equally important component of what we must all achieve, in my opinion, is a sense of what we do and how we do it and what it means from a global perspective.

Comments

One Response to “Some Global Implications of Your Distance Learning Experience”

Eli S. on October 14th, 2008 4:53 pm

That’s a very progressive viewpoint on world education and I’m happy to see it expressed accompanied by some honesty about how the world works: It’s not that foreign and 3rd world countries are devoid of educational opportunities, it’s simply that they’re usually out of reach for 90% of their population (especially with a massive number of people like China has). For US-based educators to begin to look at the possibilities of having their resources available worldwide is the first step in what could be a global revolution. I look forward to hearing a lot more about progressive distance learning for the disadvantaged foreigner in the near future.

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