From Digital Divide to Digital Dividend: What Will It Take?

Sir John Daniel and Paul West explore the difficulties inherent in bringing postsecondary education to developing countries. While current research points to online education as the best financial alternative for these impoverished countries, cross-border educational solutions are largely unavailable, making local solutions a necessity. Daniel and West advocate the use of open source educational resources (OERs), now more accessible than ever, in creating online postsecondary programs. They provide considerations to guide the use of OERs in developing nations, address infrastructure and policy issues that must be addressed to support widespread implementation of online learning, and provide suggestions for making good Internet bandwidth affordable to institutions and ensuring that students have access to it. They provide a useful plan for bridging the digital divide and making digital dividends accessible for economically disadvantaged populations worldwide. Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Daniel, J., and P. West. 2006. From Digital Divide to Digital Dividend: What will it take?. Innovate 2 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=252 (accessed July 10, 2006). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

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