Abstract:

Asia's population has been increasing dramatically over the last ten years, and has been the most problematic issue of most Asian countries in terms of human resource development. Distance education (DE) opens up the potential for most Asian countries to address these problems. Furthermore, due to their considerable contribution towards increasing the flexibility and quality of the D,!! process, the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is rapidly increasing. More and more DE providers use ICT-supported or ICT-based instruction either as their primary or supplementary delivery system. The combination of all these technologies, as applicable to distance learning, is referred to as Distance Learning Technologies (DLTs). Nevertheless, despite this history of acceptance of DE as an access model for education in most Asian countries, DE is still a new phenomenon in the newly transifioned economies like Mongolia, Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam. The previous research projects conducted through the support of both IDRC-PAN and other donor agencies have revealed several common sets of issues that need to be addressed collective/y, as they are found in almost all distance learning settings within the region. These issues define the research framework for the Pan-African Project reported in this paper, and may be enumerated as Infrastructure / Access, Software, Instructional Design, Content, Assessment Strategies, and Policy. This paper describes a framework of a collaborative research and development project among 14 institutions in 1 1 Asian countries, which is intended to address those main issues. The project's general objective is to support developing countries in the Asian region in converting their ample human resources into human capital for improving their socio-economic status. Towards this objective, the project aims to support tertiary education that is deploying appropriate emerging distance learning technologies (DLTs) to deliver accessible and affordable distance education to the masses.