Online universities blossom

AFP 09 September 2012

Thousands of kilometres from Kuala Lumpur, in Cameroon doctoral student Michael Nkwenti Ndongfack attends his Open University Malaysia classes online and hopes to defend his final thesis by Skype, reports AFP. Online university education is expanding quickly in Asia, where growth in technology and internet use is matched by a deep reverence for education.

A government worker, Ndongfack could not find the instructional design and technology course he wanted in his own country, so is paying a foreign institution about $10,000 for the degree instead. “I chose e-learning because it is so flexible,” Ndongfack (42) told AFP via Skype from his home in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde.

The Malaysian government said about 85,000 people took online courses in the country last year, both at web-based institutions and traditional universities offering internet teaching. In high-tech South Korea more than 112,000 students at 19 institutions are taking web-based classes, all of which have begun since 2002.
Full report on the Dawn site

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