Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Digital Colombo Plan

In a submission to the Australian Government's  Draft National Strategy for International Education, AARnet have proposed a “Digital Colombo Plan". Australian students would use video conference and collaboration tools, during and after their studies (as reported in The Australian). I proposed something similar in my paper "Chinese and Australian Students Learning to Work Together Online: Proposal to Expand the New Colombo Plan to the Online Environment" presented at the 9th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE). Vancouver, Canada in 2014. However, I suggest the emphasis should be on the skills the stud nets need to be able to work together effectively. AARnet's submission emphasizes having quality telecommunications links to university in the region, which would certainly help, but the staff and students need formal training in how to use the technology they have.  

ps: When teaching a couple of dozen students how to design web pages at the University of Samoa, my class managed to use up all of the bandwidth allocated to the entire university (fortunately the course was during vacation time). 

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