Week 7 blog

In China an innovative method of education is used. This is through television. It was introduced in the 60’s, as there were many parts of the country that couldn’t get to a school. This introduced new methods of learning to a nation that was in desperate need of education. After the ‘cultural revolution’ in 1976 in China there was a great need for education at a University standard to keep the country moving forward and to bring it up to a par and then further than that of Western cultures. This need was paired together with the system of education that had been in place before that. The television. This brought about the ‘Central Radio and Television University of Beijing’. This was the first university in the world that focussed solely on the education of its students via the medium of radio and television. It allowed people who could not reach a university to gain the education they might not have got if it were not available and gave more people the opportunity to prove their worth to the well oiled Chinese machine.

 Zambia University also offered a similar service. They gave students the opportunity to study from distance. It was modelled on the Australian methods, whereby students learnt via radio. However, from research I found that the broadcasts were only made in English and French, so if you did not speak either of these languages you weren’t in the best shape to learn from them. This however got much resistance from traditionalists, who claimed that it wasn’t beneficial and did not deserve a place in their curriculum. However from a study conducted on the Australian method, which is what Zambian methods were based on remember, this form of long distance learning was shown to be more intense.

Another interesting University I have found that provides long distance learning via the Internet is the University of Massachusetts, in the United States of America. This University, as of last year, offers e-learning facilities to China. Last year, there were officially only 68 universities in the whole of China that offered online services. UMass [uni of Massachusetts] has become one of these, and has been up and running for a few months now. This is quite an interesting development, as a non-Chinese source can now feed information to pupils from China. It could say something about how the online learning systems in China actually are still, even though it is forcing itself to be one of the most technologically gifted nations in the world.