UNESCO, Paris
5-9 October 1998

President: Agence francophone pour l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche (AUPELF)

Document prepared by
Didier Oilo
Co-ordinator of the Fonds francophone de l’information

with the collaboration of the
. Association of European Universities (CRE)
. European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU)
. International Association of Universities (IAU)
. International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE)
. UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE)
. United Nations University (UNU)

ED-98/CONF.202/CLD.18

Most of the technical and methodological solutions necessary to the development of the New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT), such as the Internet, have their origin in the scientific community. Yet, paradoxically, the education sector is the field which has benefited least from what these new technologies have brought. And the present information environment is characterized by the mass advent of digital solutions which are drastically changing established realities. Universities must now devote thought to these uses and to their inescapable penetration of the world of education and research.

Some consider that the concept of the industrialization of education is undergoing profound transformation. Are buildings, lecture rooms and auditoriums liable to be replaced by digital sites, virtual seats of learning? Will teachers be replaced by digital avatars, or will they be caught up in the whirlwind of change? Will they all have the ability to redefine their roles, or will they be subjected to the changes imposed by globalization?

The NICT are revolutionizing open and distance education and should enable it to emerge from arcane debate and the scepticism of educationists, and become a global industry. The concepts of ‘collaboration’ and ‘asynchronous education’ should gradually become established, more because they reflect the necessities of the evolution of society than for purely educational reasons. This change contains a veritable educational revolution in embryo, in which the traditionally rigid space-time-hierarchy structures will be shattered.

The concept of the virtual university helps to meet the challenges with which academics will be faced. It presupposes that the NICT will be used and that the various technological tools will be combined ‘in proportion’ with a view to radically changing the equation of the cost of education. The educational methods accompanying the new technological paradigm allow of a participatory vision of education by promoting asynchronous learning, a new inter-actor relationship and ‘lifelong’ education.

The virtual university may be regarded as a ‘meta-university’ which is intended to provide support for existing universities, and particularly those established in the countries of the South,

The mass advent of the NICT in the years that lie ahead raises the question of how the teaching profession can prepare for these radical changes. The ‘new teachers’ will have to master this new NICT environment and be mentally prepared for a radical change of role while adding to and updating their knowledge of their subject.

Information is becoming globalized; it is becoming a ‘market’. And the need is growing for action to defend freedom of access to information in the form of a universal public service intended in particular for the research and education sector.

The introduction of NICT in higher education does, however, present certain dangers. The economic imbalance between the countries of the North and those of the South disqualifies the latter. The scientific excellence of the industrialized countries will have to irrigate the poorest countries in a rationale of co-development. The risk of ‘infopoverty’ is one of the factors curbing development, and it is therefore essential that universities should be the main source of the circulation of knowledge in the service of shared collective intelligence.

When United States Vice-President Al Gore announced the opening of a new field of action, the information superhighways, in 1993, could we have imagined that we would be approaching a technological revolution affecting every sector of society? Universities, particularly those in the most developed countries, have contributed tremendously in terms of research to the emergence of the new information technologies. Since the invention of the Internet Protocol (IP) by Vincent Cerf in 1974, it has taken only 15 years to create the basis of collective intelligence. However, universities have been concentrating their efforts mainly on researching and prototyping new tools and have not been attending to the socialization of those tools. Little attention has been devoted to studying their uses. It is the education and training field, one of the essential activities of modern society, which has benefited least from the contribution of the new information and communication technologies.

And it is also this sector which, depending on the direction taken by the changes imposed by globalization and international competition, will either benefit or suffer from developments in terms of content, methods and resources.

The role played by education software in distance education increased in the period from 1985 to 1995 as it gradually replaced learner-controlled approach instruction or programmed education, in which traditional or audiovisual teaching aids were used.

By the year 2000, this development process will have been transformed and broadened, relocating learners and teachers, reconstructing the underpinnings of natural course progression (through the multimedia, for example), channelling reliable and enriched material through the data transmission networks, combining the necessary documentation with lectures, and enabling teachers, researchers and students to exchange information via electronic mail and forums and thus globalizing knowledge.

The current information context is characterized by the mass advent of digital solutions, which are drastically changing established realities, and by a major risk of the hegemony of one single language to the detriment of multilingualism and of one single culture to the detriment of plurality, in particular through the very rapid development of the Internet, by the atomized development of the new technologies at different paces in different countries and regions and, finally, by the reduced visibility of non-digitized material for ever-growing communities. And, in parallel, needs are steadily expanding in terms of information and of methods and tools for producing, organizing, disseminating and consulting it.

Most of the technical and methodological solutions necessary to this circulation of information, such as the Internet and related standards, have their origin in the scientific community, which must now devote thought to its uses and its inescapable penetration of the world of education and research. Past experience will have to be analysed in the light of the impact of the digital, particularly on the circulation and transmission of knowledge.

Some consider that the concept of the industrialization of education is undergoing profound transformation. Are buildings, lecture rooms and auditoriums liable to be replaced by digital sites, virtual seats of learning? Will teachers be replaced by digital avatars, or will they be caught up in the whirlwind of change? Will they all have the ability to redefine their roles, or will they be subjected to the changes imposed by the global economy?

The educational act must be viewed today like the medical act. The teacher becomes the mediator of knowledge.

Distance education already has a long history of research and achievements, from correspondence courses to systems supported by distance audiovisual aids (which are generally satellite-based). The NICT are revolutionizing this discipline and should enable it to emerge from arcane debate and the scepticism of educationists, and become a global industry. Whereas the question of the didactic quality of distance education is still the subject of much debate dividing ‘traditionalists’ and ‘specialists’, the NICT are beginning to introduce all the factors of what amounts to an educational revolution, in which the teacher-learner and the learner-learner relationship will change radically. The concepts of ‘collaboration’ and ‘asynchronous education’ should gradually become established, more because they reflect the necessities of the evolution of society than for purely educational reasons. This change contains a veritable educational revolution in embryo, in which the traditionally rigid space-time-hierarchy structures will be shattered. The main argument in favour of this change is, of course, economic; but it must be borne in mind that distance education fees are still as high as those charged for traditional education, since the mass economies that will offset an initial outlay higher, in every respect, than that involved in traditional education, have not yet been achieved. This will change radically as the mass application of this technology becomes established - which could be the case after a transition period of several years.

There are, of course, still many challenges to be faced:

The large number of different terms and expressions used in the context of distance or virtual education warrants semantic examination so that they can be classified, misunderstandings can be avoided and the major past and future trends highlighted.

• Correspondence courses: characteristic of the first applications which merely used the postal services to overcome distances.
• Distance education: used mainly by education experts, existed before the rapid development of the NICT, and seems to be resisting technological change. The term might suffer from the fact that a number of education experts are lagging behind in the technological field, but it should retain its status as a term of reference.
• Distance teaching/distance learning/distance-teaching university: characteristic of the audiovisual (televised) stage of distance education and facing a serious threat from the novel contribution of the NICT.
• The open university: places emphasis on the collaborative and global aspects.
• The collaborative or co-operative university: places emphasis on the aspect of collaboration, both between teachers and learners and between education partners.
• Asynchronous education: places emphasis on one of the fundamental aspects of the new style in education which technology has made possible, i.e. studying at one’s own pace with no constraints as regards time.
• The global university: places emphasis on the geopolitical vision.
• Computer-mediated education and distributive learning are used by technology specialists.
• The Internet university: technological and commercial. Often a ‘meta-university’ which sells logistic apparatus (software and the Web) with which the purchaser can produce educational material intended for distance distribution.
• The virtual university: characteristic of the advanced technology approach (Internet). Sees itself as an integrative concept of the new paradigm, in which physical space and the need for synchrony disappear. One could add a semantic restriction towards higher education, however, whereas in the new paradigm the education field tends to reduce the boundaries between the various types of studies (primary, higher and vocational).
• The virtual campus is a variation of the above, perhaps less open.

The concept of the virtual university is the most widespread at the present time. It meets traditional universities’ need to provide new services and to find new modes of relating to learners.

The ingredients of success:

In the area of possibility we can distinguish between an economic revolution democratizing education and the tendency for the compartmentalization of the various forms of education (primary, secondary, university, adult, vocational, and continuing) to disappear.

In the technology area, the NICT are at the top of the hierarchy, but it must be realized that unless these technologies are applied with the appropriate teaching methods, they will add nothing to education but confusion and mistaken objectives. If, on the other hand, they are mastered, the change of paradigm which they will bring will allow of nothing short of a revolution in teaching, marked primarily by the abandonment of the vertical form of education (vertical transfer of knowledge) in favour of a ring structure, in which the teacher becomes the facilitator of a process which is focused on the learner and on his or her ability to discover knowledge at his or her own pace and in collaboration with other learners and facilitators. Secondly, as the result of an asynchronous mode of operation, this new form of teaching will ease the constraints of space and time. By losing its verticality, learning becomes a process of collaboration and partnership among various groups.

The teaching area is undergoing far-reaching changes. Some recent inputs have been disqualified to a certain extent by technological change, and concepts are currently being revised from the point of view of means and objectives. The major challenge is to devise a new form of teaching which is based on and transcends technological devices without adopting the attitude of a technologist or mythifying technology. The challenge appears to be less contradictory whenever the sociological aspects accompanying the technological revolution are emphasized.

After several years of slow and difficult progress, this discipline has entered a ‘push technology’ phase, which could come to maturity in less than two years and could give way to a new global market-driven phase, in which market shares will grow significantly in less than five years. We are in a situation similar to that of the Internet in 1992; we are going through a two- to three-year period of transition, which will be followed by a period of tremendous expansion.

The following are the three key factors in the ‘push technology’:

On the bases thus obtained, the market will then begin to direct options along several lines, which will not necessarily be coherent:

No project has as yet proved supreme in all aspects of the virtual university (technological level, range of technological means in due proportion, level of teaching, sociocultural vision, economic vision, geopolitical vision, strategic vision). Some projects have attained a very high level in some of these aspects, but generally show deficiencies in other essential parameters of NICT-based distance education. The most promising projects are those which are based on an infrastructure and a historical development and which have succeeded in keeping abreast of technological advances (the Open University in the United Kingdom, Canadian projects, etc.).

A distinction must first be made between virtual university projects and projects which are intended to serve such projects. The latter, which we term ‘meta-projects’ are to be found in several different areas:

We note the GTU/GTTI (Global Telecommunication University/Global Tele-communication Training Institute) project of the International Telecommunication Union, whose Virtual Training Center offers short-term courses.

Furthermore, UNESCO is establishing a UNITWIN chair in open and distance education in Lomé in the Republic of Togo.

Internet 2

The National Science Foundation, which supported the Internet international telecommunications skeleton for many years, suspended its efforts in 1993 to give way to the commercial Internet. After three years of discussion of the importance of allowing the market to take over advanced development, Internet 2 marks the return of the university initiative and, ultimately, it is a question of organizing the transmission band in order to make distance education possible. The Europeans have projects which are similar - DANTE in particular - but which are perhaps less geared to building up the infrastructure for distance education.

This network of geostationary satellites for digital radio is under construction. As of 1999, it will cover all countries with emergent economies (in Africa, Asia and Central and Latin America), that is to say, a total of over 4 billion people; 10 per cent of the channels will be devoted to education and training, a fact which will make it the most powerful educational instrument in the service of developing countries. The persons responsible for higher education in the countries concerned will be invited to take part in the measures to define and establish appropriate programmes, to assist in the development of appropriate methodologies suited to this new digital technology, and to turn it to good account in all of their fields of competence, particularly that of teacher training.

A number of experiments are being carried out in Latin America. They can be divided into four main categories:

This is a series of courses of instruction in scientific disciplines offered in the form of university bachelor’s and master’s degree courses and continuing education units, and is common to many countries. It is placed at the disposal of African countries against payment of a fee. The project uses the NICT, particularly satellite broadcasting from the United States via INTELSAT 515. The courses are divided into three sub-series - English language, Portuguese language and French language. The World Bank has initially appealed to France, Belgium and Switzerland in the case of the French-language section, and a pilot experiment is under way.

Two examples:

The first is the Institute for Information Technology in Education, which was set up in Moscow by UNESCO and the Government of the Russian Federation in February 1997 at the conclusion of the International Congress on Education and Informatics. Its main objective is very ambitious - that of elaborating a model of global continuing education for all.

The second is Swiss, and aims:

‘to promote the conveyance of information to society. The FU.NT group proposes to create a Swiss virtual campus. According to this concept, institutes of higher education should, on the one hand, be encouraged to redesign some of their courses to make them accessible in electronic form and, on the other, they should be invited to allow their own students to obtain credits through the network by taking courses whose quality will have to be guaranteed by an accreditation process.’

By 2000-2003, it should be possible to achieve important objectives through joint action by institutes of higher education at Confederation and Canton level, such as action to improve the quality of the educational experience for students, to transform university teaching and to provide new opportunities of access to higher education (independent of the constraints of space and time), to reduce costs - at least per student, and to provide a better supply of further education.

The Open University in the United Kingdom - the historic European ‘leader’ in the field - should also be borne in mind in this context.

Penn State University: the American historical reference

The virtual campus of Stanford University

Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, one of the major Canadian projects

A national university education network is being built up in Canada, which, it is planned, will operate via the Internet and interactive videoconferencing, thus linking the 12 Canadian establishments and gathering all of their programmes together with a view to providing young French speakers with as wide a range of studies in French as possible. The driving force behind this project is the University of Ottawa; this showcase of official bilingualism is situated in the province of Ontario, the home of half of the French speakers outside Quebec, and offers a very rich palette of programmes.

Furthermore, the University has been running a distance education network extending throughout the province for the past five years. The UFHQ of Eastern Canada, which are fairly well equipped, have also already offered and received distance courses.

By the very nature of the concept, the French-language virtual university cannot be seen as another virtual university project but rather as a meta-project, a sort of ‘French-language virtual meta-university’, which, depending on the means available and the strategic options defined, could provide a backup for existing French-language universities in terms of:

The principal challenges of the French-language project, in addition to optimal management of the means/objectives equation, are:

There are detectable signs of an imminent paradigm shift for education, which is evolving through three successive models:

Table of the three models of education

The conditions are now ripe for a model based on knowledge.

Technologies (mainly the NICT) are playing a key role in this paradigm shift.

The key factors in the paradigm shift are as follows:

Table of the key factors in the paradigm shift

As this trend develops, the distinction between ‘attendance-oriented’ and distance education will become blurred, and the foregoing concepts will also apply to ‘local’ forms of education.

The advent of the NICT in the years that lie ahead raises the question of how the teaching profession can prepare for these radical changes. Structurally, distance education is much more demanding as regards teaching ability. The ‘new teachers’ will have to master this new NICT environment and be mentally prepared for a radical change of role while adding to and updating their knowledge of their special subjects.

Appropriate training in the NICT, providing an integral vision of the discipline with emphasis on the ‘information culture’, is a key factor in the successful preparation of teachers.

It will provide a means of accompanying the psychological aspect and of reassuring teachers as regards keeping abreast of developments (either because they can use the tool to do so or simply because greater awareness of the plethora and obsolescence of knowledge will make them less apprehensive).

The new teachers will emerge from the isolation of the classroom and receive considerable logistical support, and it is up to them to be able to co-ordinate and use it: they must have production specialists at their disposal for both audiovisual means and the Web, so that they can achieve high-quality results as regards form and can concentrate on content, i.e. on the educational material.

The realization by university authorities of the need to provide teachers with a set of support functions is a key factor in successful educational production.

As regards the optimal course of procedure of the virtual class and the emergence of the group learning process - the group constituting the creative centre in the new set-up - the management of the virtual community linking teachers and students is the crucial factor. Our examination of the experiments which have been conducted has revealed that this aspect is considerably underestimated and that the process is seriously disrupted as a result. Yet it is one of the least onerous factors in the economic equation.

The utmost attention must be devoted to the methods, procedures and software underlying group communication. Over and above any other logistical element, this factor is the key to the successful dynamic of the virtual class, whereas it is one of the lesser investments.

The production of interactive multimedia as personal learning tools complementing network-based tools seems to be reserved for industry for the time being, and distance universities are slow to apply themselves to this field. Yet there is basically no economic reason for this. Web-based educational sites are to be observed which have excellent graphic models but response speeds which are too low to serve as an educational tool - a fact which argues in favour of producing interactive CD-ROMs and implementing intranets rapidly.

Moreover, the emergence of digital radio (DAB) has made it possible to found new hopes on the mass dissemination of knowledge at low cost and in acceptable conditions. This technology is particularly suited to developing countries.

UNESCO recommends that ‘design templates’ be created for educational software. Thus, the suppliers of course material will be able to offer programmes in the language of their choice, regardless of the region of the world. Each producer will be supplied with a compendium of examples of good practice in using NICT-related software. This action should enable the countries of the South to develop good-quality open and distance education rapidly.

Information is becoming globalized; it is becoming an inescapable market framed by strict laws. The need is growing for measures to defend freedom of access to information in the form of a universal public service intended for the research and education sector in particular. Considerable efforts to put informal literature, reports and theses on line are becoming a matter of priority. The same applies to free software designed according to the ideas of the producer groups; the LINUX operating system and the CDS-ISIS documentary software can be quoted as examples.

Multilingualism is an important point in the defence of cultural pluralism as opposed to the monolingualism of information. Automatic translation tools must be implemented rapidly.

The purpose of virtual reference libraries and electronic libraries is to provide all scientists, researchers, teachers, and students with a virtual information site through which they can access all the products necessary to their education, training and research work.

The concept is based on the provision of a series of services which are not conditioned by distance or time. Various types of product can be provided:

Directories of teachers and researchers and directories of establishments and training courses are supplemented by specialized databases, indexes of theses and grey literature, and all of the databases available in the French-speaking world. These databases cover all fields of science, the economy, technology and the press.

Numerous knowledge bases have been structured and are available, but they are scattered throughout the world. They must be identified and located so that they can be made available to the scientific world.

Students who have prepared dissertations can benefit from the SDD programme, through which, once the user’s need has been analysed, every user can be provided with a profile for the diffusion of updated or retrospective data pertaining to his or her research.

A number of scientific books and journals have been or are in the process of being digitized. They must be made available to universities free of charge.

There are many documents of this nature in the informal literature. They are necessary for updating knowledge and development, yet they are often unexploited. Once validated, the compilation of these documents should provide a means of circulating research work more usefully.

The aim is to make known and disseminate the tremendous amount of knowledge contained in these documents, which are rarely published. Researchers will thus be able to find partially-produced theses in databanks and then obtain the documents in full or in part. A global digitization site must be launched without delay.

It will be possible for the collection of written documents to be tele-edited. Tele-editing is a means of disseminating a document on request without incurring printing and delivery costs.

There is a plethora of software, freeware or shareware, often created by universities and available on the networks according to the acquisition rules specific to this type of tool. An inventory will have to be drawn up to begin with and the scientific products will have to be analysed.

This software has several functions: a learning-aid function, a simulation function and an evaluation function.

The human factor is one of the major factors curbing NICT penetration of higher education. Before any technological action can be taken, training programmes need to be defined at various levels for various target groups.

Plans must be made for training technicians and engineers to back up technology within institutes of education and research, for training teachers, and for training decision-makers. The latter is a sine qua non if the NICT are to enter the scientific world. It is essential to convince the political and institutional authorities that these technologies are justified as a factor of development and modernity.

One approach to development is to train instructors in the NICT by using the NICT.

Three objectives can be envisaged through the training of specialists:

• demonstrating NICT potential and promoting the appropriation of these technologies in the regions;
• achieving the critical mass of technical specialists in a given sector for a given region;
• increasing teacher potential by contributing a methodology and education tools which can be re-used by trainees who are later called upon to become trainers themselves.

The principle of the workshop is to train technicians by practice in a field of NICT implementation.

The third target group is that of teachers, who will have to integrate the NICT into their future professional practice. Unless these technologies, which are one of the factors for redefining the teacher’s role, are apprehended before they are introduced in any way, they will be doomed to failure. The countries of the North have long established national policies for training teachers in the NICT, but this is not always the case in the countries of the South, which are liable to lag farther and farther behind - a factor which will exacerbate the imbalance between North and South.

Sustainable action

Training workshops must meet the expectations of the academic world in order to help it to master the NICT. To do so they must go beyond the strictly technical context as part of a more comprehensive plan for sustainable development. In these training courses just as much importance must be attached to content as to form and the role and mission of the trainers must be explained so as to create a real climate of technical and cultural co-operation. The courses must be based on lectures and case studies and take the form of training/action.

Various factors must be taken into account when the NICT are being introduced into higher education - an undertaking which is not without risks. The economic imbalance between the countries of the North and those of the South disqualifies the latter. There are several factors which determine this imbalance:

Universities are today in a position to take up the challenge of the new information and communication technologies. To do so they must launch a process of collaborative work in which the least developed countries have an important place. The scientific excellence of the industrialized countries will have to irrigate the poorest countries according to a co-development rationale. The risk of ‘infopoverty’ is one of the factors curbing development, and it is therefore essential that universities should be the predominant sources of the circulation of knowledge in the service of shared collective intelligence. They must be prepared for the validation of acquired skills and knowledge and the awarding of diplomas, for which the procedures will have to develop further, with a view to achieving ‘transnational knowledge’.

In their new position, universities will henceforth have to function in two modes, traditional and modern, in which the traditional dimension and the contribution of the new technologies are complementary.

When one acknowledges that the mass advent of the new information and communication technologies in all activities in our societies is an inescapable fact, it becomes vital for the education and training field to benefit rapidly and as a priority from what these NICT have brought. These technologies will revolutionize teaching on an economic, cultural and social basis. Furthermore, since training is becoming a market in the context of globalization, the following aspects must be taken into account when broaching the problem:

The following aspects will have to be incorporated into the new forms of transmission of knowledge in the near future:

As a mediator of knowledge, the new teachers must thus be placed in an effective logistic environment so that they can concentrate on the expertise of learning the scientific content of their discipline. This idea must be taken fully on board by those in charge in the academic world if the production of education is to be successful. The management of the virtual community must be based on strong logistics regarding methods, procedures and software, which will facilitate the transmission of knowledge as well as the inter-actor relationship.

Decision-makers must be sensitized without delay and the actors must be trained in the use of these new technologies and in their uses for transmitting knowledge. The ‘template’ software tools must also be defined jointly and must be free and easy for the scientific academic community to appropriate; thought must furthermore be devoted to defining research projects in connection with this new field of problems.

Finally, influence must be brought to bear on institutions to ensure that the new role of the teacher is taken into account and recognized by the various administrative departments.