Web-based education, although still in the early phase of development, has extraordinary promise. This endorsement comes from no less a body than the US Congress Web-based Education Commission in its report, The Power of Internet Learning. Now available at www.webcommission.org, the document reports that the power of the Internet to transform the educational experience is awe-inspiring.
This ground-breaking report has enormous implications for Ireland's aspiration to become a leading player in the information society. Besides the obvious technical aspects, including broadband access, the report highlights the need to invest heavily in the professional development and provision of technical support for teachers using Web-based education. It also calls for research into how people learn in the Internet age and emphasises the need to update and replace outdated regulations governing education.
With half of the estimated 377 million people currently using the Internet resident outside the US, it is rapidly bringing radical change into people's lives on a world-wide scale. In education, it makes it possible for more individuals than ever to access knowledge and to learn in new ways. From schoolhouses to college campuses and corporate training centres, it brings knowledge directly to students.
In the course of its work, the bipartisan, congressional Web-based Education Commission heard from hundreds of educators, policy makers, Internet pioneers, education researchers and ordinary US citizens. It concluded that the promise of the Internet lay in its unique ability to centre learning on the student instead of the classroom, to focus on the strengths and needs of individual learners and to make life-long learning a reality.
The commission heard how the Internet enables education to occur in places where there is none at present. It discovered how it extends resources where there are few, expands the learning day and opens the learning place. It experienced how it connects people, communities and resources to support learning. It saw how it adds graphics, sound, video and interaction to give teachers and students multiple paths for understanding. It learnt that the Web is a medium today's children expect to use for expression and communication.
It also concluded, however, that Web-based education is fraught with risk. It heard how the Internet could result in greater divisions between those with access and those without access to the opportunities of Web-based learning. Based on the evidence presented, it sensibly concluded that the Internet is not a panacea for every problem in education. Taking this and other factors into account, it identified the key barriers that could prevent the Internet from realising its potential for enhancing learning.
To overcome the problems of access, the report recommends that powerful new Internet resources, especially broadband access, be made widely available and affordable to all learners.
In Ireland, this means accelerating broadband connections to our schools, colleges, universities and libraries, as well as to private individuals and businesses.
In this context, the recent announcement of plans to invest Government and European Regional Development Funds to deliver broadband Internet services in every county, with particular emphasis on the less developed regions is a welcome development.
Having these connections in place will make multimedia content available on the Internet from video-enhanced Web sites, but there is more to access than the provision of broadband. "About 10 per cent to 12 per cent of teachers in about 35 per cent to 40 per cent of schools use the Internet at present," Seaghan Moriarty of the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) told The Irish Times. "Some individuals do excellent work but we need to make a huge investment in professional development and technical support to enable us to achieve the kind of access for students that the Americans are talking about."
The commission stresses the need for continuous and relevant training and support for educators and administrators at all levels. It sees the professional development of teachers, lecturers and administrators as the critical ingredient for the effective use of technology in the classroom.
The commission goes on to warn that if teacher education programmes do not address this issue at once we will miss the opportunity to enhance the performance of a whole generation of new teachers and the students they teach.
Allied to this initiative, it sees a need to research how people learn in the Internet age. They recommend the establishment of a benchmark goal for research and development investment in Web-based learning consistent with similar benchmarks for other industry segments.
The report highlights the need to develop high quality online educational content that meets the highest standards of educational excellence.
The expansion of Web-based learning needs a regulatory environment that encourages self-paced learning at all times, in all locations.
The privacy of learners also needs to be protected. The commission urges parents, the education community and the private sector to develop and adopt privacy and protection safeguards to ensure learners of all ages are not exploited while engaged in online learning.
The commission believes that filtering and blocking software is of limited value. Instead its opts for the creation of non-commercial high quality educational "safe zones" on the Web.
Governments need to sustain funding for traditional and new learning sources because both are going to run side-by-side for the foreseeable future. Unless adequate funding is available for the running, support and research costs, the systems will not get off the ground.
To realise the full potential of the Internet, the commission argues that policy makers at government; departmental and local levels; students and educators; parents; communities and the private sector will need to work together to implement the changes needed to achieve this goal. No one group can bring about this change alone.