IT improves educational opportunities by enabling educators and students to overcome barriers of distance and by enhancing the content of instructional materials.

The use of IT to deliver lessons or training from instructors in one location to students in another is frequently called “distance learning.” Distance learning has been around for a long time. For many years people have listened to recordings of classroom lectures or other educational presentations, and millions of people have watched educational programming on public televisions channels. In a 2006 study, it was observed that more than 96 percent of the largest educational institutions (>15,000 total enrollments) have some online course offerings. Community colleges, for example, increased their distance enrollment by eight percent in 2007.¹⁴

Figure 5 further highlights the popularity of online courses among college students, showing that more than 75 percent of those taking online courses do so as a part of the undergraduate experience.

Source: Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States 2008, Sloan Consortium¹⁵

Both the emergence of the Internet and developments in educational software has vastly enhanced distance education over the past decade. The geographic reach of distance education has been extended. There has been a substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of educational material available over the Internet or through the use of satellite video and audio linkups.

Over the past decade, computers and Internet connections have been widely deployed in classrooms, from pre-K through the university level. Lessons delivered through computers can be interactive, which gives students real-time feedback on their work and enables them to work at their own pace. Kids often enjoy  working with computers, so when they are intelligently integrated into classrooms, computers can create excitement about learning among students.

The Internet provides an extraordinary opportunity for students to extend the reach of their learning. Before the Internet, the resources available to students were largely those that could be found in their classrooms or in public libraries. The Internet enables students to reach well beyond the physical confines of their classrooms and gain access to virtually unlimited quantities of information on the topics or events they are discussing in their classrooms. The use of the Internet for school assignments also encourages students to give free rein to their curiosity and strengthens their research and investigative skills.

IT offers especially valuable educational opportunities for poor people in developing countries. Students and other residents of poor countries are increasingly using the Internet—often in community Internet centers—to gain access to information and communicate via e-mail. Doctors, scientists, and other professionals, for example, can achieve cheap or free access to journals and other professional publications that are too expensive to afford in hard-copy versions.

Government aid agencies, foundations, and private firms sponsor numerous distance education programs designed to teach skills to a wide variety of developing country professionals, government officials, engineers, scientists, and businesspeople. Internet or satellite connections enable students from developing countries to take courses offered in foreign institutions. In these and other ways, technology-enabled educational programs can help strengthen the people who will be called upon to provide leadership in developing countries in a wide variety of social welfare, economic, and political fields.

Improved technology and the accessibility of open source projects have improved the field of education, as well. On average, traditional textbooks are updated once every several years, making a lot of the information within fields such as science outdated by the time it hits school bookshelves.  Editors and publishers are weary of constantly putting out new editions of books because the cost of reprinting is cumbersome.  For students, the price of purchasing textbooks adds to their financial burdens and can often lead to people dropping out of school because book costs exceed tuition at some community colleges.

Indeed, open source helps to fill in the gaps and fix the flaws of textbooks by providing free material that can be accessed anytime via the Internet.  The “Open Education” revolution offers “print-on-demand” articles and the possibility of using legal material and incorporating new changes, and hopefully even tailored material for individual students.¹⁶

Colleges such as Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have even started the option of taking “Open Courses” that are open to the public. All class material is uploaded online, along with video feed or audio files of lectures.  Although the course selection is still relatively limited, it is beginning to take shape on other campuses around the United States.  Open courses will hopefully help break down barriers of socioeconomic factors and the hierarchy of schooling to provide everyone the opportunity to learn from top institutions.

To learn more, visit our Education Issue in Depth.