introduction
What challenges need to be addressed in the areas of language and content?
English is the dominant language of the Internet.An estimated 80% of online content is in English. A large proportion of the educational software produced in the world market is in English. For developing countries in the Asia-Pacific where English language proficiency is not high,especially outside metropolitan areas, this represents a serious barrier to maximizing the educational benefits of the World Wide Web.
Even in countries where English is a second language (such as Singapore,Malaysia, the Philippines,and India) it is imperative that teaching and learning materials that match national curriculum requirements and have locally meaningful content, preferably in the local languages, be developed. This would ensure that the Web is a genuinely multicultural space and that peoples of different cultures have an equal stake and voice in the global communities of learning and practice online. Particularly vulnerable to exclusion of this sort are isolated, rural populations, cultural minorities, and women in general.Thus attention must be paid to their special needs.
One encouraging trend has been the emergence of national and regional school networks, or SchoolNets, that facilitate the sharing of content and information-curriculum guides, teaching and learning resources, telecollaborative project registries, school and teacher directories, training curricula and materials, research and policy papers, technology management guides, and start-up toolkits, among others. Countries like Australia, France, Finland, Japan, Canada, Thailand, Ghana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, to name a few, all have national SchoolNets.The Enlaces programme in Latin America has linked schools from Spanish-speaking countries like Chile, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Peru. In Southeast Asia,efforts are currently underway to pilot SchoolNets in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos,Myanmar and Vietnam, and to link these to existing national SchoolNets to create a region-wide ASEAN SchoolNet.
In Web-based learning, technical standardization of content has also become a pressing issue. Standardization allows different applications to share content and learning systems. Specifications in content, structure, and test formats are proposed so that interoperability may exist between different management systems, resulting in some cost-efficiencies. Standards must be general enough to support all kinds of learning systems and content. Worth mentioning are initiatives conducted by the Instructional Management System (IMS), the Advanced Distributed Learning /Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model (ADL/SCORM) initiative, the Aviation Industry Computer Based Training Committee (AICC), and the European ARIADNE project, since some of the standards they have proposed are already being widely applied.