Educational technology eroding national borders

Abstract

Businesses are continuously forced to reeducate and train their new workforce before they can be productive. The existing employees also need to improve their skills or retrain for promotion/growth. To cater to this breed of students "schooling business" is also faced with an inescapable demand to design new programs/courses. The growth in educational technology is also influencing academic institutions to redefine their endeavors in terms of producing learning while providing instructions. With the growing demand for higher education such endeavors are crossing the physical boundaries of many countries. We are using online and hybrid learning models to attract traditional, distance and international students. A major component of this model is the web-based course management system that provides an environment for teaching/learning and interaction 24/7. This model optimally combines interactive-classroom, web-based lectures and traditional instructions and has successfully offered courses at SUNY-Fredonia with students registering from around the globe. This model is presented and the opportunities and challenges of web technologies in education are discussed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.