Rural Development in Asia through ICT-Supported Lifelong Learning
Paul Kawachi, FRSA
Institute for Open and Distance Education Research, Open University of China
This paper presents Modern Open Learning as the current state of the art at the forefront of a paradigm shift towards supported lifelong learning. The use of ODeL technology has moved in the past five years from administrative in distance education, to utilitarian in open learning. Modern distance education is characterized by policy-driven delivery of content for standardization and conformity, with students as objects of the teaching, while Modern Open Learning is characterized by preserving diversity and individualization, with the students as the subject of their own learning. The current Modern Open Learning model is highly cost efficient for nurturing growth in economic activities, particularly in rural under-developed regions in Asia. The model can be mapped as the village being inside a cloud of oxygen, where the cloud includes the open university, micro-banking, electrification, marketing, and reporting, and the village includes the target learners with an insider such as a school-teacher acting as a listener and communicator with the surrounding cloud services. The theory of transactional distance is used to explain how in practice psychological gap between teachers and learners in this model goes from far-distance through collaborative stages towards zero-distance which is learning.
The Modern Open Learning system works through responsiveness, which is the cooperative use of reusable learning objects on the shelf, and through empathy, which is the collaborative co-creation on-demand of new open educational resources (OER) by experts at the open university working with various stakeholders. Responsiveness and empathy have been previously identified as the Chinese characteristics of Modern Open Learning practice. This paper presents case studies of Modern Open Learning for rural development in Asia to illustrate how this has worked to bring about user-driven open learning and economic benefits. The system is easily scalable and transmissible to other regions. The intended outcome is that the system OER users, the short-course or degree graduates of Modern Open Learning, become job-providers, not job-seekers.