Digital divide poses ‘biggest challenge’
EDUCATION’s biggest challenge today is bridging the divide between those born into a digital world and those who were not, says Steven Naudé, MD of Pearson Education.
Naudé said at the launch of the Pearson Online Media Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand yesterday research and experience showed traditional computer-based education was not very successful in dealing with the challenges of higher education in SA.
Many students were “digital natives” — people who had never known a nondigital world — while most lecturers were “digital immigrants”, not born into the digital world but fascinated by new technology and willing to adapt to using it.
Electronic learning — where student and teacher use online technology to interact — had failed because many lecturers resorted to simply putting their class notes on a computer without reinterpreting them in any way; testing had been in multiple choice; there were high licence fees for the software; and there was poor interaction between student and lecturer. All of this had led to low usage.
What was needed, and what the new media centre offered, was computer-based learning that included frequent self-assessment for students to determine where their strengths and weaknesses lay, and work on the weaknesses through the remedial “intervention” available.
Lecturers could view the students’ assessments, keep records of strengths and weaknesses, and generate reports on all of this.
Students and academics who used the media centre would also be able to view the websites of various Pearson companies, such as Penguin SA, Business Day, the Financial Mail, small business magazine Big News and Summit TV (all owned by BDFM, which is jointly owned by Pearson and Avusa), Financial Times.com and educational publisher Maskew Miller Longman.
Fatima Dada, Maskew Miller Longman chairwoman, said the company was the largest educational publisher in the southern hemisphere, printing textbooks in 60 languages and for readers from preschool to postgraduate level.
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