Distance Education as enabler in crossing the digital divide : will the Phoenix fly?

Abstract

Education, powered by technology, has been hailed as the silver bullet for empowering developing communities and helping them to cross digital divides. The path to success becomes obscured by the complexities of crossing these divides, but the objective remains paramount. Our focus is on distance education and the particular challenges of designing technology for this context. For many students distance education is the only feasible option of gaining an education. The ideal approach would be to study the adoption of these approaches in developed countries and then leapfrog over the problems encountered – effectively learning from their experiences. This assumes a linear adoption path towards success and sustainability. In contrast, existing literature shows a ‘rise-fall-plateau-rebirth’ progression that has been likened to the mythical Phoenix bird that is supposed to die by fire in order to be reborn from its own ashes (Romiszowski, 2004). It is possible that the pitfalls sabotage the adoption process to such an extent that the entire process appears to terminate, before re-emerging once again, quite unexpectedly, later. This raises the question: “Can ICT supported education benefit from the experiences of others, effectively leapfrogging over pitfalls and sustaining a steady adoption process, or will it have to follow the same Phoenix-like pattern of adoption?” In an attempt to shed some light on this conundrum, we consider the adoption of a learning management system by distance education students in South Africa. The main contribution is theidentification of factors that could be useful in supporting e-learning in developing contexts. The identified factors and issues will be of value to researchers in the field of Learning Management Systems (LMS), administrators and faculty who have to choose an appropriate LMS and manage the adoption thereof. Other beneficiaries could be distance learning course developers interested in more effective knowledge transfer.