Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Pacific-Rim Colleges Consider Prospects for a Virtual University By DAVID COHEN A new "international cyberuniversity" is under discussion by a consortium of colleges spread across 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific region. The university's enormous geographic reach would set it apart from other distance-education efforts by Asian and Pacific institutions. Prospects for the university were discussed at a meeting of government and university officials held recently at Ewha Womans University, in the South Korean capital, Seoul. At the meeting, officials attempted to resolve technological issues and linguistic roadblocks. Their vision of a virtual campus envisions using the Internet and teleconferencing to deliver courses to their respective students. The technological aspects of the virtual university would be overseen by Ewha. Degrees would be awarded jointly by all of the participating colleges. Along with Ewha, the colleges involved in thediscussions include: Japan's Keio University, in Yokohama; Chulalongkorn National, Chiang Mai, and Khon Kaen Universities, in Bangkok and northern and northeastern Thailand, respectively; and Vietnam National University and the Hanoi University of Technology. The Pacific-Asia Consortium for Research and Human Resources Development is the driving force behind the cyberuniversity, according to Kye Woo Lee, an economics professor at Ewha who has worked with the group since its inception four years ago in Japan and South Korea. "It has taken some considerable work for us to get to this point," Mr. Lee said in an interview. It would take "considerably more work" for the group to achieve its hoped-for goal of creating a pilot version of the new institution by early next year, according to Mr. Lee. Lynn Thiesmeyer, an associate professor in information studies at Keio University, said the "whip-crack of an impending deadline" was helping the group. But, Ms. Thiesmeyer added, the planners face enormous challenges -- for example, in ensuring that the same hardware and compatible bandwidths are made available to all learners. The languages of instruction would be English and, in some cases, Chinese; several other languages would be used as well. But that in turn could cause many Web browsers to crash if the correct characters and fonts were not properly installed on the computer systems being used, said Ms. Thiesmeyer. Despite such obstacles, Pedro Loureiro, a historian at Pomona College, which has tested the use of teleconferencing with Keio, predicted that the new venture would succeed in opening and would, in time, attract other American institutions to join. Saying that "a good 30 or 40 percent of U.S. universities are not up to the technological level of their Asian counterparts," Mr. Loureiro bemoaned "a clouded vision" on the part of many American educators when it comes to reaching eastward. The technological savvy demonstrated by many Asian universities ought to be an important focus for academics involved in distance learning, said Mr. Loureiro, "and, with ventures such as this, maybe it will become more important still." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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