The LoColms Distance Educational System, An Innovative Approach To Promote Web Based Distance Education Over The Local PSTN To Improve Education In The LDCs

In general, the traditional form of education has failed to deliver, and it is much worse in the low-income countries where the standard of education has been on a decline due to the weak economic performances. There exist many forms of distance education today, but the web-based distance education approach has offered a quantum leap in solving education problems in a number of places, especially among the industrialized countries, but still a non-starter in most of the developing world. This is largely due to two reasons: 1) the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which provide the infrastructure for the technology supported education are still mystified concepts to a number of these countries; 2) it requires dedicated network infrastructures to support the distance education, thus an extra financial constraint, which might be a deterrent factor on the part of the governments of the LDCs. Due to these constraints, it would take these countries decades before benefiting from the opportunity. In the recent past, numerous researches have been underway, both on the International arena and local LDCs' initiatives, to introduce and popularize distance education in the LDCs' educational system, but so far no technology supported distance education, including the "Virtual University" (VU), can promise a sustainable solution because they often lack relevancy to the LDCs' situation, as they never address the root cause of the problem, which is the weakening of the educational institutions. These numerous attempts to promote technology based education in the poorer third world countries are mainly centered and controlled from abroad and solely relying on the foreign donors for their sustenance. We seek to solve the problem by employing an approach which avoids the financial and technological disadvantages: 1) the web-base distance education supported as a part of the regular curriculum in the local universities, and the local telephone system (PSTN) as the supporting infrastructure, and this approach is demonstrated by our Application, LOCOLMS. The ubiquitous PSTN that provides a communication infrastructure to support web technology tools necessary for the Distance Education system, solves the problem of the latest ICT sophistication, since the PSTN is a familiar technology and a well established infrastructure of which every country has. We employ the Point-to-Point Protocols (PPP) to avoid communication network duplication; the Proxy Caches (ProCa) to eliminate high costs involvedin the telephone system; the Video Streaming to solve download latency in the local area networks; and the Web-Ontology tools and cache content replacement techniques to optimize the web resources. The thesis addresses the economical concerns both in terms of costs and the learning curve considerations, which have been the major hindrances to the deployment of the technology supported learning in the educational situation of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).