Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia

Updated on: Monday, September 03, 2012

Thousands of kilometres from Kuala Lumpur in Cameroon, doctoral student Michael Nkwenti Ndongfack attends his Open University Malaysia classes online and hopes to defend his final thesis by Skype.

A government worker, Ndongfack could not find the instructional design and technology course he wanted in his own country, so is paying a foreign institution about USD 10,000 for the degree instead.

Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia, where growth in technology and Internet use is matched by a deep reverence for education.

"I chose e-learning because it is so flexible," Ndongfack, 42, told AFP via Skype from his home in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde. Web-based courses dramatically boost opportunities for students and are often cheaper than those offered by traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.

But online learning has also caught the eye of some of the world's most prestigious universities, with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently teaming up to offer free courses over the Internet.

"With the improvement in technology, the number of institutions offering online education has increased, both in terms of numbers and the kind of classes offered," said Lee Hock Guan, senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

The Malaysian government said about 85,000 people took online courses in the country last year, both at web-based institutions and traditional universities offering Internet teaching.

In high-tech South Korea more than 1,12,000 students at 19 institutions are taking web-based classes, all of which have begun since 2002. China embraced the concept of online learning in the late 1990s to expand access to education, particularly in its vast rural regions, and there are now scores of providers, with
1.64 million people enrolled in 2010.

More than 80 per cent of South Koreans and 60 per cent of Malaysians have online access, but in China the rate slips to about 40 per cent and it slumps to around 10 per cent in India.

Other criticisms include inadequate regulation, allegations of poor-quality teaching, student cheating, and the fact that online degrees are still not as widely
recognised as traditional ones in the marketplace, say industry experts.

Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia

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