Sub-Theme: E-learning in the economic, cultural and social environment
Format of the paper: Critical analysis paper
Accepted for presentation and publication at:

e-Education for all
when the national IT policy lacks pedagogical spirits:
A case of e-Thailand
By Snea Thinsan

Introduction: e-Thailand & global and regional forces

            Following the 1999 ASEAN Summit hosted by the Philippines, ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations) agreed to implement its shared visions and measures stipulated in the e-ASEAN initiative, which essentially aims at improving member countries' ability to compete in the world economic arena through enhanced use of IT.  In response, Thailand, on September 19, 2000, appointed a special committee to develop its national IT policy called e-Thailand, or IT2000, which, in 2002, became IT2010.

            The e-Thailand policy by NITCS, or the National Information Technology Committee Secretariat (2002) is based on positive premises that IT can bring about new ways to build economic strength and social harmony, a more effective rural development and wealth distribution program; a better environment and natural resources conservation effort; and a well educated population and a well-being society. Thailand has also been ambitious of becoming a modern regional hub in Southeast Asia for financial services; manufacturing and commerce; transportation and tourism; and human resources development.

The e-Thailand efforts aim at tackling three prerequisite tasks: build National Information Infrastructure (NII); generate a well educated populace and adequate IT manpower; and improve governmental services and innovative information industry, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Based on an initial analysis of the tasks undertaken so far by the different agencies involved, the efforts and achievements are predominantly clustered around infrastructure establishment and e-Government projects.  Thus, e-Education, as depicted in Figure 2 below) is regarded as the mission of lower priority.
Figure 2: IT-2010 Flagships

Source: http://www.nitc.go.th/it2010/IT2010%20publish%20version.pdf   

How is e-Education strategized in the e-Thailand master plan, then?

The envisioned essence and gaps

 The e-Thailand policy (NITCS, 2002) includes e-Education to serve the Invest in People goal, within which there are two major specific goals:

§         Accelerate the supply of IT manpower at all levels to eliminate critical shortage and to meet the expected huge demand growth in the future; and

§         Make IT an integral tool in education and training at all levels, and in both science and technology, as well as in humanities and the arts.

Now, what are the specific recommendations suggested in this policy document?

Manpower issues

Strategically, the Thai government tries to take on the immediate need to produce IT manpower in all areas.  The specific goals regarding manpower strategy include the following:

§         Producing technicians and engineers in IT, with a projected increase of 200% in five years;

§         Upgrading curriculum and facility in IT courses at college and university, and fiercely recruiting and retaining faculty staff in critical areas of shortage, as well as importing experts from overseas; and

§         Encouraging private sectors to provide IT-related, secondary and tertiary education and training.

     These strategic goals are thoughtful and appropriate for Thailand. It is important, however, for these goals to be translated into more specific action plans, with details of what, why, when, and how to do certain tasks at different levels. The critical shortage must be healed immediately. Upgrading curriculum and facility in IT courses at college and university is crucial.  IT Technologies, in terms of hardware and software, as well as Netware, are rapidly developed and upgraded.  To catch up with the trend and to ride the waves as leader in the IT world, state-of-the-art technologies must be sought and explored whenever possible.  However, all has to be done with considerations of whether they would be of true use in a long run and thus worth investing and of how to make the IT courses successful in helping the students see how applicable the technologies can be in specific areas of use.  The third goal of encouraging the private sectors to help provide IT-related education at secondary and post-secondary education is strategically great. Again, specific measures must be elaborated as to what the government will do to ensure the participation by private sectors in IT education.

For more discussions and suggestions, please see the Recommendation section.

Education-related issues

National Information Technology Committee Secretariat (2002) lists three major tasks to be carried out:

§         Give all teachers, college lecturers and professors, all school children and college students opportunities to learn to use IT so that the can access information and gain knowledge through self-paced learning, or through interactions with teachers and fellow students;

§         Link schools, colleges, universities, and libraries electronically to provide students, teachers and lecturers an enriched environment in which distant resources can be manipulated fully electronically; and

§         Use IT and distance education to promote continuing education and skills upgrading to all citizens in equity.

These major educational goals are very important, and efforts must be made to achieve them.  Unfortunately, the policy appears to ignore the importance of the pedagogical aspect of IT use. The three items only focus on equipping basic IT using skills for teachers and students and linking resources.   The literature in e-education indicates clearly that challenges emerged in e-education for both teachers and students are different than those found in traditional face-to-face, or chalk and board mode (see for example Gibson, 2003; Garrison, 2003; and Granger & Bowman, 2003).  Learning to use IT for the sake of technical skills alone, especially for teachers, is not adequate.  The lack of pedagogical spirits in these plans leads several points in Recommendations section.

Specifically, NITCS provide more specific action plans through two proposed programs.

National School-Informatization Action Program

This recommended program aims at three strategic goals. First, it aims to provide PCs to all state schools throughout the country in five years, which means 2005.  This goal is laudable and there is no other option in light of the high ambition of e-Thailand.   NICTS (2002) proposes that the government should at least provide a PC for 80 primary school pupils and for 40 secondary school students.  Second, it aims at ensuring continued allocation of the budget of 1,000 million baht.  NITCS estimates that such the amount of money will allow state schools to buy 30,000 PCs a year and can cover the relevant costs for other required equipment and software for e-education.  Third, it proposes to connect all educational institutions through the Thaisarn/Internet (Thai Social/Scientific Academic and Research Network) for communication and sharing of data or resources nationally and globally.  The low recommended ratios of computer per students seem preposterous to me, but the third idea is great.  In reality, different institutions have their own networks that allow limited access; thus, encouraging a new culture of sharing resources among educational institutions is a wise plan in making a full use of resources.

National Interactive Multimedia Institute

This institute will facilitate the development of educational courseware and application software and the sharing of the products.  First, this institute will become a national center to oversee the development of interactive multimedia technologies and dissemination, the design and development, the outsourcing and the distribution of courseware and interactive CAI/CAL packages, or the licensing and adaptation of useful commercial package. Second, it will provide an annual budget of at least 400 million baht as a start to support the development of technologies and courseware packages both within and through outsourcing, using all the resources in different regions of the country to meet the diverse needs. (For recommendations about these two tasks, please see recommendation 9).  Third, it essentially will make a portal of resources, courseware, and training packages available for all kinds of learning, i.e. formal, non-formal, life-long, continuing, and for all types of need.  It is still not clear how this will be managed; i.e. as a portal or a learning community, and how institutions and corporate sectors can participate in this national knowledge base. Fourth, it will encourage the use of IT-equipped educational institutions to serve the communities’ educational and vocational needs. This is a wonderful idea.  Educational institutions are fed by the tax money, and they should definitely serve the communities around them. 

Recommendations

Having examined the policy related to e-Education, I wish to recommend the following courses of action to the people involved in e-Thailand, or specifically in revising and/or writing further action plans for the e-Education policy as follows.

e-Education in Context: Bridging the efforts

1.                  Strategic plans for e-Education should be revised to include more details and concrete plans after a consultation of all the stakeholders and advice from experts from Thailand and overseas. The strategic plans should be made clear on what to do, who to do it, when to do it, what to expect, what support from whom, and so on.  The voices from all sources must be sought, including teachers, students, administrators, relevant government representatives, corporate representatives, community leaders, and churches or temples or mosque leaders. The e-education policy is covers education and learning of all forms; without the engagement of all parties, we risk missing the details and the mutual understanding that are crucial to the implementation phase. 

2.                  Not only should e-Education policy be spelled out in details, it should also be put in perspectives along with the plans for the other four pillars (e-government, e-commerce, e-industry, and e-society).  All the five pillars should be treated as interconnected missions. In addition, by nature, these missions are run under authorities of different ministries, various offices, or several groups of people from different institutions. Therefore, committees and sub-committees must be set up to translate the plans into more concrete actions and to work closely in collaborative, efficient ways at all levels. Each committee must, again, include as many stakeholders as possible.

3.                  Government support should be given from the top level to the bottom.  Dr. Myunghu Hong, a well-known e-educator from Korea (personal contact) mentioned teacher frustration and resistance in Korea as the Reform Fatigue Syndrome because of the issuing of chains of policies that do not come with enough support, which end up being an obstacle for success at the classroom level. Teachers are often not given enough pedagogical support or framework they need to perform on the electronic stages (Bonk & Dennen, 2003). The future policy or strategic plans must include the mechanism that guarantees government support, not only in terms of budget, but also in terms of giving on-going training, supplying experts, and negotiating with local institutions about workload, recognition of the extra work, incentives and so on.

Access

Figure 3. Internet users in Thailand

Source: http://www.nectec.or.th/internet/

            Although the number of internet users in Thailand has soared sky high since 1991, in 2003 only 10 percent of the population accessed the Internet (see Figure 3. above). Therefore, I would like to offer more thoughts about access.

4.                  The government must make sure that access to IT tools is adequate and equal. The success of Korea in terms of having ubiquitous technologies available for education, according to Dr. Myunghu Hong  (personal contact), did not come out of a plan to supply only one PC to 80 or 40 students.  The corporate sectors donated huge numbers of PCs and software to assist their government in ensuring that every single teacher has a laptop and every classroom is equipped with ample computer systems and internet access. The Thai government must not be too thrifty on this. The Thaisarn/Internet, which is a national-wide network Social/Scientific Academic and Research Network set up in 1992 to promote the use of the Internet in Thailand, must continue to expand its access for all schools at no or a very low cost.

5.                  For life-long learning to be possible, availability of computer labs must exist at the village or community level.  In the U.S., for example at the Monroe county, Indiana, the county’s library has its computer lab with consultants to provide free IT training classes, and now computers with internet access via the high-speed network and wireless connection are everywhere inside the building.  Establishment of community library should be considered seriously.  The idea of pushing educational institutions well equipped with IT technologies to become the after-hours learning center is laudable and must be pursued. Incentives must also be offered to teachers and staff for contribution in community services.

6.                  Because IT technologies are still too expensive for people at the grassroots level, the Thai government and corporate sectors must do their best to provide the have-nots with the infrastructure and equipment they need as soon as possible.  Their familiarity with technologies indeed is a prerequisite to every pillar in the national policy.  The government must be generous and invest enough on this. The community must be encouraged to move the wheels further, for example, via establishment of IT-knowledge base at local levels in which groups of able members generate, store, publish and exchange knowledge and information.  For instance, the village leader can be assisted by a group of local students to make the village website to pass news, store local intelligence and knowledge, to vote online on certain issues, to have forums for discussions, to receive complaints and petitions, etc.  Life-long, continuing education and skills-upgrading training will then be right at the door if IT is truly part of their lives. IT skills training, pedagogical issues, and needs for research

7.                  The government must make sure it provides trainers who know both IT know-how and pedagogy to teachers at all levels. They can come from nearby universities or college or within the school clusters.  In addition, continued support must be thought through and provided.  For instance, the trainers may be assigned to work with teachers at an assigned level by training them, planning lessons with them, observing and giving feedback to them. 

8.                  Pedagogy for e-Education is a new need and practices for different disciplines may require different details, teacher trainers in institutions that train pre-service or in-service teachers alike must take the role of a crusader in exploring and bringing ideas and some guidance related to IT use in pedagogically sound ways to the teachers so that they can experiment further and synthesize new ideas and find their own ways of teaching electronically.

9.                  The NITCS must make sure that its efforts to centralize power in generating courseware and resources and make them available to both academic and non-academic agents are made with agreement, cooperation, recognition and support from local institutions. It must thus seek to explain to and negotiate with the different agencies involved, be they academic or non-academic, in terms of why it initiates this project, what each institution would gain from the participation, what it requires, the status and recognition of staff involved, and how the materials could be usable by different agencies. 

10.              To derive better informed strategic plans particularly for e-Education, in which inconclusive findings and unknown factors are in play, and more so in Thailand, research agendas must be identified and funding be allocated to researchers.  Issues such as faculty and student readiness, IT access and using behavior, best practices in leading institutions both within and outside Thailand, and so on must be investigated. White papers or reports in related fields or disciplines should be consulted to catch up with the status of problems and to identity issues to be further researched in the Thai contexts.

Conclusion

The e-Thailand policy is based on a good rationale of developing all the interconnected aspects of development. Its spirits in tackling the digital divide and in using IT to help produce educated populace are highly agreeable, and the efforts to lay the necessary infrastructure and pave the ways through e-government that in turn facilitates the development of other pillars, especially e-commerce, e-industry, and e-society are necessary.  However, emphasis and priority on e-Education seem weaker than it deserves.  The recommendations offered in this paper are far from being comprehensive, but are of high importance in dealing with the critical gaps that exist between the master plans and the actions at different levels.  e-Education is crucial and complex.  Learning and teaching in this new environment will be challenging for both the teachers and the students and other learners, especially in developing countries, where teachers are not technically ready and are pedagogically confused, students are confused with unprecedented roles and some have not accessed the Internet, and where the whole society has not realized the real taste of a real e-society. In all and ultimate words, people involved in writing policies and strategic plans must take e-Education most seriously.

References

Bonk C. J. & Dennen, V. (2003). Frameworks for research, design, benchmarks, training and pedagogy in web-based distance education. In Moore, M. G. & Anderson W. G. (eds), Handbook of Distance Education. (pp. 331-348). New Jersey: LEA, Publishers.

Garrison, D. R. (2003). Self-directed learning and distance education. In Moore, M. G. & Anderson W. G. (eds), Handbook of Distance Education. (pp. 161-168). New Jersey: LEA, Publishers.

Gibson, C. C. (2003). Learners and leaning: The need for theory. In Moore, M. G. & Anderson W. G. (eds), Handbook of Distance Education. (pp. 147-160). New Jersey: LEA, Publishers.

Granger, D. (2003). Constructing knowledge at a distance: The learner in context. In Moore, M. G. & Anderson W. G. (eds), Handbook of Distance Education. (pp. 169-180). New Jersey: LEA, Publishers.

National Information Technology Committee Secretariat (2002). Towards social equity & prosperity: Thailand IT policy into the 21^st century. Retrieved October 31, 2004, from http://www.nitc.go.th/it-2000/it2000s.pdf.

Pratheepajitti, N. (2002). Executive Report of the IT Utilization in Public Sector Part II. Retrieved November 9, 2004, from http://www.nitc.go.th/project/upu_eng.html.

Rao, M. (2002). Asia-Pacific gears up for e-Government opportunities. Retrieved December 1, 2004, from http://www.valuenotes.com/madan/mmr_bangkok_30dec01.asp?ArtCd=30611.