Technology and Global Capacity Building: How Do Local Contexts Affect Learning?

In the last decade, distance education has become an established mode of education in U.S. post secondary institutions. In 2009, over a quarter of total college enrollments were in online programs, with an annual growth rate of 17%. New technology such as Facebook, Twitter and Wiki, and the pervasiveness of cell phone technologies have made it possible to offer complex and rich interactions between students and faculty. These technologies also offer tremendous promise for building the skill of the global public health workforce by offering professionals access to international educational programs. Barriers to connectivity are rapidly diminishing worldwide as fiber-optic and mobile technology become ubiquitous. But instructors offering education across national boundaries need to understand how organizational, operational, social and cultural issues affect online learning and how these issues might manifest differently based on students’ gender, language skills or organizational level. This talk will describe the effect of these factors on engagement in online learning, based on the experience of employees of NGOs in India, Cambodia and Ethiopia who participated in several distance learning courses offered by UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. The cross-country comparison will present common and country-specific factors and will elaborate on the local contexts that contributed to similarities and differences in student experience and participation. Implications for engaging students effectively in learning using new technologies will also be discussed.