Distance learning

The Covid pandemic led to the closure of schools, colleges and universities across the world during the last two years. It also brought into focus the importance of high-quality open distance education.

In the last two years, the study-from-home phenomenon became a norm through both live interactive lectures and recorded video lectures that have been available for the last two decades but were never widely used.

When I was the federal minister of science and technology and later the founding chairperson of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) during 2000 to 2008, I realized the importance of distance education in a country with limited resources such as Pakistan. I therefore established Virtual University with its headquarters in Lahore to provide quality distance education for colleges and universities. We also placed a satellite at 38 degrees east in space and made a transponder available to the university to facilitate distance education.

After obtaining permission from MIT, we created a mirror website of MIT OpenCourseware in Pakistan and gave its free and easy access to the country’s academia. In one important initiative, all MIT computer science courses were vetted, modified to suit our needs, copied on 10,000 CDs and freely distributed to all university computer science departments through the kind efforts of Prof Naveed Malik, the rector of Virtual University, providing a historic boost to computer science education in the country.

Pakistan thus became the first country in the world to use MIT OpenCourseware in this manner. When I was the federal minister heading the information and telecommunication division, I flew to Hong Kong to meet the CEO of Intel at an international conference and persuaded him to train 25,000 school teachers in 70 districts of Pakistan for free. These students were given access to Khan Academy courses as well. Intel also installed internet kiosks in all major airports in Pakistan free of charge, a facility that was not available at most European and US airports.

These massive open online courses (MOOCs) are now being offered by hundreds of top universities of the US, Europe and Australia and are being widely used to provide quality education through distance learning. Stanford, Harvard, Yale, the University of California and other universities offer tens of thousands of these courses, many of which can be accessed at www.videolectures.net.

FutureLearn, based in London, is a digital education platform founded in December 2012 by Open University and SEEK Ltd. It now includes about 200 UK and international partners and offers thousands of courses in many disciplines in English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Chinese languages. Similarly, Udemy, founded in May 2010, is an American online learning platform which offers 196,000 courses to 52 million students with 68,000 instructors teaching in over 75 languages. There have been over 712 million course enrollments.

Coursera established by Stanford University has 92 million users with about 150 universities offering some 4,000 courses on this platform. Khan Academy was founded in 2008 by Salman Khan. It is also a US-based company that offers free school- and college-level practice exercises, instructional videos and a personalized learning dashboard. It has had about 80 million users, and its videos on YouTube have been viewed about 2 billion times.

About 3,000 Khan Academy courses have been translated into Urdu through the monumental efforts of Bilal Musharraf, and they are now available at the Khan Academy website as well as at www.lej4learning.com.pk, the first integrated version of MOOCs. This website was created by us at the Latif Ebrahim Jamal Science Information Center located within the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS) at Karachi University. This exciting initiative allows individuals from anywhere in the world to benefit from tens of thousands of excellent courses without registration or payment.

These free courses have created a positive international image of Pakistan. The ICCBS has been designated as a centre of excellence by many international organizations, including UNESCO, the WHO, the World Academy of Science (TWAS, Italy), COMSATS and the OIC. Hundreds of foreign scientists come to this institute each year, and its faculty members have been awarded 19 civil awards so far.

To promote open distance learning, the Higher Education Commission is now planning to introduce quality distance education in selective universities, and an open distance learning (ODL) policy has been prepared for implementation. According to this policy, universities offering distance learning must ensure that a robust learning management system (LMS) is first implemented, which is capable of hosting course content, ensuring efficient student-teacher interactions through a properly managed mechanism for question-answer sessions as well as grading and feedback of homework assignments. Details of other requirements in terms of quality of courses offered, bandwidth needed, etc have also been laid out.

To promote distance education in universities, the Technology Driven Knowledge Economy Task Force, of which I happened to be vice chairman, approved a Rs6 billion project for Virtual University. This is presently under implementation, and it offers a wonderful opportunity for colleges and universities in Pakistan to introduce an integrated system of education so that our students can benefit not only from their own teachers but also from faculty members of top universities in the world.

Despite the efforts made by the HEC during 2002-2018 to promote faculty development and send thousands of students abroad for PhD and post-doctoral studies, we still suffer from an acute shortage of qualified faculty. There are only about 12,000 PhD-level faculty members for 1.4 million students in the higher education sector. This makes a dismal ratio of one PhD-level faculty member for every 120 students. The ratio is 1:6 in Cambridge University and 1:3 in National University Singapore.

We need at least another 100,000 PhD-level faculty members, which will cost tens of billions of dollars. The answer lies in benefiting from the MOOCs available and integrating them into school, college and university courses and holding exams based on those course materials. The Higher Education Commission can play a critically important role in making that happen.

The writer is the former federal minister for science and technology and former founding chairman of the HEC. He can be reached at: ibne_sina@hotmail.com