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Some of the Challenges faced by our Educational system after the Rapid Evolution of ICT are as follows:
The appearance and the rapid evolution of ICT have created at least two major challenges for education: to achieve the appropriate integration of ICT into overall education systems and institutions, and to ensure that the new technologies become agents of expanded access and equity and increase educational opportunities for all, not just for the wealthy or the technologically privileged.
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Indeed, early policy research in the United States, one of the first widespread adopters of new ICT, found strong evidence that uneven access to the technologies was worsening existing equity gaps in education. Explicit attention needs to be given to equity considerations so that the new technologies, which “shatter geographical barriers (may do so without) erecting new ones and worsening the digital divide”.
There is another potential threat for education in knowledge societies. It is now established that the knowledge economy needs an educational arrangement to promote extensive use of ICTs, educational programmes that can be traded across the border as commodity and life-long learning for the workforce. Several noted experts on distance education however, have viewed ICTs as a vehicle for commercialisation education globally.
To David F. Noble against the backdrop of phenomenal expansion of ICTs educational campuses are now being identified as a significant site of capital accumulation by converting intellectual activity into intellectual capital. To him this process has penetrated with the process of commoditisation of the research function and of the educational function of the university, transformation courses into courseware, learning instruction itself into commercially viable products that can be owned, bought and sold in the market.
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Against, the backdrop of the exponential emergence of knowledge economy he highlights that the corporate and political leaders of the major industrialised countries in order to retain their economic supremacy now turn towards the “knowledge-based” industries.
To him, as impacts of commoditisation of university function, teachers as labour are made subject to all the pressures of undergoing rapid technological transformation from above. They have also reduced their autonomy, independence, and control over their work. Now universities are transformed into market for the commodities being produced, whereby faculty who conducted research in the role as educators and scholars, has became instead producers of commodities for their employer. Much to suffice the commercial end there has emerged close partnership between universities and industries to convert the instructional process into marketable products, such as a CD ROMs, Websites, or courseware which they themselves may or may not “deliver”.
Latchem, C. and Hanna, D.E. find that in general the ‘higher education is experiencing a shift from supply driven to a demand driven pressures due to impact of globalisation and information and communication technology (ICT), competition from new providers, and the need to be self sustaining. Universities are increasingly seeking solutions to these challenges in the open and the flexible and ICT based online or virtual learning, and the ODL system also getting transformed from quality driven and marginal to commercially-oriented and mainstream.