Locally Relevant Curriculum In Poor Countries: A Collec-tive Adaptive Approach

JORN ALTMANNLYNN ILON

Seoul National Uni-versity

Jorn Altmann is an Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Seoul National University. He has worked as a Senior Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs and on international research projects about pricing of network services. Dr. Altmann's current research centers on the economics of Internet services and Internet infra-structures, integrating economic models into distributed systems. He also served on several European, US American (National Science Foundation), and national panels for evaluating research proposals and research projects on next generation networks and emerging technologies.

Lynn Ilon is a Full Professor in the College of Education at Seoul Na-tional University. With degrees in Economics, Education and An-thropology, she specializes in the knowledge economics of learning. She has spent 30 years working in poor countries, lecturing and consulting for the World Bank, Harvard University, the United Na-tions, Educational Testing Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development among others. Dr. Ilon has lived in five regions of the world and worked in over 20 countries. She has headed and worked on projects in poor countries worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Challenge

• Bring high quality higher education to poor countries

• Quality content means making education rel-evant to the society and lives of the people

• Use knowledge economics to reduce costs of higher education

• Use collective adaptive system to build cur-riculum

• Use local strengths to build local content and increase development prospects

“even the well-read Africanist or sociologist is struck by how little has changed in the field of edu-cational development in Africa since the turn of the twentieth century. Countries throughout Africa are still struggling to find a balance between curricula that are culturally relevant and that prepare stu-dents to participate in larger, global settings. And all over (or under) this problematic issue is the colonial legacy.”Bob White, (1996) “Talk about School: Education and the Colonial Project in French and British Africa, (1860-1960)”. Comparative Education, 32(1):9-25.

African higher education has

never been relevant to

the local situ-ation and was

never de-signed to be

relevant

“About 86% of the lecturers surveyed indicated that they rarely found materi-als relevant to their information needs. Only 3% of the lecturers said they found the materials needed for their work in the library, whilst 3% indicated they never found anything in the library.” Muyoueta Simui and Christine Kanyengo, (2001), “Financing Of University Libraries In Zambia,” Lusaka, Association Of African Universities.

Resources for building curriculum locally and for quality curriculum delivery are a funda-mental constraint to

expanding local higher education ac-

cess in Africa

Student analysis becomes new

content

Commu-nity Data

Local doc-uments &

data

Local Expert

Lectures

Local GKI Environment

Disorganized, high quality

global content on the web

Collective/Adap-tive System for

Building Curricu-lum

The proposed collective

adaptive sys-tem will or-ganize both

local and global con-

tent into high quality cur-riculum for delivery in poor coun-

tries

P

Syllabus 1 Syllabus 2 Syllabus 3

Various types of con-tent; videos, web pages, articles, blogs, etc.

Module

•People can add modules at any time and connect to existing content on the web or content submitted by local sources.

•Modules can be revised as new content appears. •Syllabi are easy to update and include new, fresh material.

Collective/Adaptive Possibilities

• Diverse module authorship means that multilateral agencies (World Bank, Donors, NGOs, professors, graduate students, coun-tries, social movements, BBC, CNN and existing content providers) compete to get their views and content into modules

• Diverse views compete to make modules appealing to be included into syllabi worldwide

• Module authors are thus rewarded to keep content fresh, dynamic, appealing

• Increasing local content from around the world bring local voices into global curriculum

• Potential for adding local views into global classrooms

Research Questions• How can an accreditation system for local higher education systems

be incorporated? [must validate syllabi as deriving from valid sources; current design links modules and syllabi to credentials but this is not a complete system for online accreditation of system]

• How can system provide ability for users to link to other modules and syllabi where they see conceptual, ideological or content connec-tions? [current system allows for non-author to make comments which includes a hyper-link, but this is very awkward system].

• Should modules in which there is disagreement on content allow for non-authors to change, suggest modifications or simply build com-peting modules?

• Who is allowed to submit modules?

• How can credentials be validated? [One suggestion is to have local institutions validate au-thors for a small fee.]

• Likely, a second-level of creativity is the creation of syllabi. Can a second collective-adaptive system of syllabi creation be designed at a later stage? Who is owner of syllabi? Can the syllabi be stored in the system?