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Contributions from
the Column
InWEnt News
Startup help for Russia’s young businessmen
Sustainable Development Policy. The Rio-Johannesburg Process
Bundled knowledge on development policy
Opportunities to modernise industry
11/2003 |
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[ Third InWEnt E-Learning Specialist Conference ]
E-Learning: from euphoria to pragmatism
E-Learning has in recent years become a firm element of the German development cooperation education offer. This trend is also catching on at InWEnt. With its E-Learning platform Global Campus 21, planned originally only as an instrument for follow-up contact with former training course participants, InWEnt has created a broad offer for learning on the Internet.
Nevertheless, the widespread euphoria of the ‘founding years’ in assessing the prospects of E-Learning and virtual cooperation has given way to more a balanced judgment of their potential. This was clear once again at InWEnt’s Third E-Learning Specialist Conference held in Bonn on October 1. The conference, titled ‘E-Learning in Action – From the Idea to Implementation’, discussed many of the problems that arise in the development, application and marketing of Web- and computer-based training courses (WBTs and CBTs).
We are still nowhere near a worldwide learning community. The digital divide between rich and poor countries and cultural differences impede the development of global standards for E-Learning. Sorina Borggrefe-Moussavian, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Communication, pointed out at the conference the culture-specific aspects of designing E-Learning. She recommended that in the development of learning content, account should be taken of social-psychological and cognitive differences, such as those noted between Asian and western societies. The conference also heard that content providers such as InWEnt had to position themselves in an educational environment which more and more was being defined by competition.
Dr. Veronique Héon-Klein, of the InWEnt Health Division, presented an online training course developed for the subject of HIV/Aids, whose structure differs from region to region. A standard basic scenario is followed by four case studies in the health sector in German Development Ministry (BMZ) priority partner countries (Tanzania, Malawi, Indonesia and Vietnam). InWEnt Managing Director Bernd Schleich, though, warned against taking the intercultural aspect too far. „The designer should not attempt to portray the reality of another that he does not know,“ he said.
Content Solution Model is the name of a solution for a standardised Web-based training programme. Christina Neuhoff, of the time4you agency, explained how an in-company competence team is set up that compiles content for Web-based training and step-by-step makes the company independent of external service providers. „Money can be earned today with content,“ said InWEnt employee Siegfried Karwatzki. He said staff cooperation was still largely oriented on the „business model of a traditional transfer of know-how“ from the donor countries to the recipient countries. There was still hardly any reflection on „how the South can generate business and thus work and income“ from the knowledge. Karwatzki named as an example decentral knowledge centres („know-how-tanks“), which gathered local and regional knowledge and put it on the Internet. But there were also protests at the conference against converting knowledge into a ‘product’ to be marketed. The protestors said InWEnt’s goal must not be the marketing of E-Learning, but improving its quality.
It is not disputed that E-Learning has a future, as the statistics on participants in the InWEnt Global Campus show. While in 2002 there were only 4,800 active participants, the figure is now already 9,800. Jan Grabowski, Head of the InWEnt E-Learning Division, pointed to strong growth, particularly in the use of virtual working rooms. He said the picture was not yet as good in terms of participation in online courses. User numbers were relatively small, and only a few
InWEnt divisions were active in this sector.
Markus Dufner, freelance journalist and
proprietor of the ‘md public relations’ agency. markus.dufner@web.de
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