Around the World in Eight Hundred Days

Abstract

Since January 2006, while on a two-year sabbatical leave, Dr. Jon Baggaley, Professor of Educational Technology, CDE, has circled the globe five times, developing and supervising distance education research and development projects across Asia. Working on behalf of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), he has visited 19 Asia-Pacific countries from home bases in Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Mongolia. While lecturing at most of the Asian 'mega-universities', he has since published four volumes of DE research findings, including a guest edition of the 'Distance Education' journal (Summer 2007). Results of current Asian evaluations of mobile learning, learning object development, and uses of open-source software for learning management and e-assessment will be presented. Inaccessibility of conventional western methods of DE delivery for millions of Asian students, and the innovative solutions created by Asian educators to solve the problem will also be highlighted.