Stephen Downes pointed to the report cited below about DE trends in Canada and India. I was especially interested in the information about Canada because I've noticed what I believe is a greater receptivity among Canadian higher education institutions to the use of learning object repositories than is currently found among US institutions.
After my posting on Dec. 3 about Faculty Teaching and Learning Centers in the US I went on to examine how Canadian colleges and universities were covering (or not covering) the growth of online learning repositories. I looked at the Dalhousie University listing under
Canadian Teaching and Learning Centers. Interestingly, 5 of the 16 institutions on the list provided some coverage of learning repositories; that's 31% of the Canadian institutions compared to only 2% of the sampled US institutions. Additionally, the coverage by the Canadian institutions was much more extensive and sophisticated than the coverage in the few US institutions that showed anything at all.
I don't know how much to trust these limited comparisons, but I do have the impression that there is greater attention being paid to the growth of learning repositories by Canadian teaching and learning centers than by US centers. Perhaps that's because there is a greater penetration of distance education at Canadian institutions than at US institutions. Or perhaps it's simply easier to share information in a smaller country than in a larger country.
When I moved to Oregon from California, I immediately noticed that there was much more sharing among the Oregon colleges and universities than among the California colleges and universities; such sharing is much easier to facilitate in a smaller state. In Oregon it's possible to assemble all the players who are involved with distance education into one room at one meeting and to arrange that meeting in a few weeks; that kind of meeting is almost impossible in California. (California's population of 33 million is 10 times greater than Oregon's populations of 3.3 million. Similarly, Canada at 31 million is approximately a tenth the size of the US's 289 million.) Order of magnitude effects can make for large differences in communication and idea exchanges.
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A Comparative Study on Current Trends in
Distance Education in Canada and India. A relatively short overview of distance and
online learning in the two countries. From my perspective
the information about Canada is accurate, which bodes well
for the author's depiction of distance elearning in India.
The author notes that in both countries distance education
has expanded rapidly, but the needs and problems addressed
by the two countries are different. Interesting is the
author's observation about the "piranhas" that
plague both systems: "small topic or domain specific
niche players. These organizations will be more nimble and
able to take small bites out of the education market and
possibly leave little for traditional suppliers." By
Manjulika Srivastava, Turkish Online Journal of Distance
Education, October, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:06:24 AM 
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