Technological Infrastructure and Use of ICT in Education in ... - ADEA

Technological Infrastructure and Use of ICT in Education in Africa: an overview
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generally considered an ineffective use of the medium for education
(although this approach is widely used in the vast Central Chinese
Television University). Television comes into its own in a mixed-media
distance education course, used to demonstrate scientific or laboratory
experiments, to broadcast field trips, case studies, or performances,
and to help visualize dynamic processes and sequences of events. In
cultures where television viewing is passive and recreational, however,
it can be difficult for students to change their viewing habits and see
television as an educational medium. In addition, unless students
have access to recording equipment, at home or at local study centres,
the ephemeral nature of the broadcast must be taken into account in
determining its educational objectives and its place in a structured
educational course.
From an educational perspective, broadcast for immediate viewing is
subject to several limitations. The most notable of these are:
• Learners are required to gather at a certain place (where a television
is) at a certain time;
• Learners have no control over the pacing of the broadcast;
• Broadcasts tend to encourage passivity amongst learners (and
strategies employed to overcome this problem inevitably start
generating significant additional cost, usually leading to serious
financial inefficiency);
• Integrating other media with video broadcast live is very difficult to
achieve, and, when applied, very often leads to inefficient use of
both broadcast technology (an example of this might be leaving
‘dead’ spaces to allow students to consult a printed resource) and
the medium (this type of integration most often leads to quite boring
television); and
• Broadcasts tend to be organized in time packages that are much
longer than the time an average student is able to concentrate fully
on the television screen.
In summary, it is much easier to develop poor quality than good quality
educational television broadcasting. There is a very narrow band of
educational applications for video that is accessed by learners via a
broadcast signal.
Of course, broadcasts can be recorded using a videocassette recorder,
thus turning the broadcast infrastructure into nothing more than an
alternative distribution mechanism. Obviously, videocassettes can also
4. Characteristics of Different Media