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

98 Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning
Box 8: ICTs
at the University
of Namibia
The University of Namibia
has a campus in the capital
city Windhoek and also in
Oshakati, a much smaller
town in the North of the
country. Many of the courses
offered at Oshakati are
offered through distance
education. Video-conferencing
technology is available
(the first in Namibia), so
a lecturer in Windhoek can
teach students in Windhoek
and Oshakati at the same
time. The Oshakati campus
has its own library that is
connected to the Internet,
although the connection is
often slow. Library users
in Oshakati have access to
the University of Namibia’s
Online Public Access Catalogue.
They can also access
tables of contents of
various journals, as well as
full text articles in certain
cases. In addition, the local
community of Oshakati is
also allowed access to the
library and can make use
of the Internet for a charge
of approximately US$1.50
per hour. A new library resource
centre is currently
being constructed which
will have many computer
access points and two computer
laboratories with 15
computers each.
Source: Levey (2002)
Perhaps the most well-known and commonly cited example of an
initiative to make use of ICT for expanding access to, and enhancing
quality of, tertiary education is that of the African Virtual University (AVU),
a project of the World Bank (see Box 9 below).
One of the components of open learning is that of collaborative learning.
ICT provides new opportunities for collaboration and facilitates collaborative
learning within distance education. An interesting example of such
collaborative learning is the Global Graduate Seminar: Globalization and
the Information Society, which is described in Box 10 below.
10. ICT and Tertiary Education
Also of importance for a discussion of ICT and tertiary education is the
role of the university library in the context of open learning. Saint (1999)
notes that libraries and librarians will be central in efforts to improve
higher education quality using ICTs and in helping higher education
institutions to adapt to the information society. This is the case because
it is no longer possession of information and knowledge that is most
important as an outcome of education, but rather the ability to find
information and to be able to adapt it for new applications—that is, to be