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'Bandwidth Divide' Could Bar Some From Free Online Courses
An anonymous reader writes "The Bandwidth Divide is a form of what economists call the Red Queen effect referring to a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass when Alice races the Red Queen. As the Red Queen tells Alice: 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Keeping up with digital technology is like that race — it takes a continual investment of money and time just to keep up with the latest, and an exceptional amount of work to get ahead of the pack. 'The question is, What is the new basic?' said one researcher. 'There will always be inequality. But 100 years after the introduction of the car, not everybody has a Ferrari, but everyone has access to some form of motorized transportation through buses.' Well, not everyone, but even fewer people have the online equivalent. Colleges considering MOOCs should remember that."
Simple as that.
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
Depends on what you mean by "available". If you mean "geographically available", then I can think of a few dozen people I know who are limited to slow dial-up or spotty satellite that doesn't work half the time due to weather. If you mean "financially available" then I can think of a few dozen people that might be able to scrape it together each month, but it would be a really poor financial choice.
I've taught courses online for a regional university in Appalachia and had to design the courses specifically with bandwidth limitations in mind. Of the students who had home internet access, some were limited to dial-up or very slow DSL. Many students rely on internet access at public libraries and thus I had to create materials they could bring home for study. I could never assume constant access on the student's part. I made heavy use of public-domain sources as primary texts (I'm a historian), knowing these could be readily transferred to any machine, even a cell phone if necessary (of course, cell phone access can kind of suck out here too).
Courses can still be taught under these conditions, but a teacher cannot use multimedia as a crutch and must focus instead on course structure, careful selection of readings, and heavy use of lower bandwidth tools like message boards. I made any multimedia material optional and supplementary.
The question of technology, however, is not the chief problem with online courses in these circumstances. The chief problem is that the courses themselves are being used to advance the notion that education is a series of hoops, the easier to jump through the better. They're an administrator's dream. More degrees generated at lower cost.
I have been taking some excellent coursera courses which are probably somewhat typical in overall bandwidth needs. The only real bandwidth hog would be the videos which I usually download to my iPad. So short of a 56k Modem I might have to wait for these videos but with only minor delays almost any crappy bandwidth would allow me to take these courses. Also keep in mind that determined people also have sneakernets. That is someone in my group of friends will grab the data and then using USB memory sticks will distribute the goods around. I remember in the early days of the Internet one friend would grab something and then burn the amazing hundreds of megs to CD. And before that one person would grab 3 or more floppies from a BBS and then we would all faithfully copy them. Before that it was pure floppy to floppy movement of data. So saying that you are on the wrong side of a bandwidth margin is just bizarre.
So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.
Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.
And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.
If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.