Looking to the East

Is Asia ready for e-learning? Some U.S. vendors are banking on it.

By David Raths

The enthusiasm of Asia-Pacific students like Joy Wong has not gone unnoticed by online learning vendors and Western universities. "There's so much opportunity. It's a huge market that hasn't been tapped," says Steve Thommes, director of new business development for OnlineLearning.net in Los Angeles.

The gold rush mentality that pervades the Internet has definitely taken hold in Asia, a region where many believe the Web's potential has barely been touched. By 2002, Asia is expected to have 61 million Net users, or 22 percent of the world's total, according to eAsia Report, a study done by the New York City research firm eMarketer. China, with 1.26 billion people and only 890,000 users in 1998, will see its Internet community grow to 6.7 million by the end of 2000.

Matching Internet growth is a hunger for distance learning. The number of university students from Asian countries will reach 45 million in 2010 and 87 million in 2025, according to research firm IDP Education Australia. Hong Kong-based online education start-up NextEd Ltd. estimates that the market for online training and distance education in Asia is already worth $6 billion and is growing at a rate of 25 percent a year.

Yet corporate training and distance learning vendors realize there are serious impediments to entering certain Asian markets. Regulations, bureaucracy, poor infrastructure and widespread poverty are just a few of the hurdles.

China is the most obvious example. Almost every vendor expresses interest in the huge Chinese market, yet several powerful government ministries are jockeying for position to set the country's Internet policies, says Lane Leskala, research director of Gartner e-Business Intelligence Services in Hong Kong.

"China has done a very good job of promoting telecommunications infrastructure, but when it comes to content, they are at an impasse. This has slowed investment considerably," Leskala says, although he adds that vendors with connections to the ministries, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, "seem to be in an OK position." Mark Kiddell, director of global partnerships for KnowledgeWindow.com, says of China: "It's like dealing with 50 countries in one. If you don't have the right contacts, doing business deals can be very frustrating."

It's not just access to higher education courses that's drawing interest in Asia. The economic turmoil of the 1990s has made many companies realize that to stay competitive in a global market, their workers must have relevant knowledge and current skills.

Sitting in his office in Melbourne, Australia, Andrew Silvers plugs away at his notebook computer linked to the Internet with only a 28.8 kbps modem. Yet he is demonstrating Hewlett-Packard's latest virtual classroom product simultaneously to people in Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Silvers, HP's e-learning development manager for Asia-Pacific, says the product is designed to work at 28.8 precisely because "most people in Asia are working with relatively low-speed lines."

Despite the lack of bandwidth in many parts of Asia, Silvers reaches for adjectives to describe the enthusiasm about online learning in the corporate sector there. "The demand we are seeing in the marketplace is astonishing," he says. "The technology is new to most people. However, as soon as they see it and experience it, they are extremely excited."

A booming ebusiness
Many Western e-learning corporations are rushing to stake a claim in Asia. In the past year there has been a flurry of activity, with partnerships forming between East and West, and new offices opening in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. Here's a look at some recent initiatives:

"We noticed a large portion of our students were coming from the Asian region, in part because the UCLA name is well-known," says OnlineLearning.net's Thommes. So far the portal, which they're calling 1to80.com, is just another marketing vehicle. Eventually, it will offer services to targeted geographic regions, and may offer courses in languages other than English.

n KnowledgeWindow.com, a Princeton, N.J., Web-based training provider, is making a big push into Thailand. The company recently signed an agreement with Thai Internet service provider Loxley Information Services for distribution of its VLearn online training application. KnowledgeWindow.com focuses on Web-based English language training for government agencies and businesses in Asia, including the Taiwanese language education provider Merica Chain. Merica is using VLearn to teach English over the Internet to students in Taiwan, China and other countries in the Far East.

The company is focusing on Thailand because of the market's potential. "Very few people are educated there, as opposed to Singapore, where a majority of the population is educated and already speaks English," says Kiddell.

n Hong Kong-based NextEd, which acts as a university hosting company, recently signed an agreement with the Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University to deliver Web-based courses to bright students in Australia and Asia. The company grew out of the frustration CEO Terry Hilberg and his wife felt when they discovered they couldn't take distance learning courses in Beijing because of technical and regulatory restrictions. "We thought there would be room for somebody to offer accredited courses from the U.S., U.K. and Australia with local partners in each Asian country," Hilberg explains.

Formed in 1998, NextEd began by serving the Australian Internet education market. The company provided the technology to help the University of South Queensland convert its distance education programs to an Internet platform. Other NextEd Australian partners include Latrobe University and the Australian Catholic University.

Scaling the Great Wall
Despite the growth of the Internet and the hunger for Western education, online education runs up against some stiff cultural barriers, including:

Bureaucracy. In many countries, regulatory and bureaucratic hassles abound. In Indonesia, for instance, foreign-based distance learning is banned outright, NextEd's Hilberg says. In Japan and other countries, colleges need accreditation from a government agency such as the Ministry of Education before they can set up a program, says Steve McCarty, a professor at Kagawa Junior College in Japan and president of the World Association for Online Education.

At this point, no Japanese university is offering online classes for credit, but there is a proposal to accredit some courses that are televised at a distance.

In March, the Thai government approved its first-ever foreign degree awarded by distance education. The move came after Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand expressed interest in hiring Taweechai Suksithpornchai as a lecturer. Taweechai had earned a master's degree in telecommunications engineering from National Technological University (NTU) in Fort Collins, Colo., a school that offers satellite-delivered courses. Thailand's government must recognize a degree for a graduate to pursue a career in the public sector, so the Thai Office of Civil Service Commission approved Taweechai's NTU master's in order for the university to hire him.

Infrastructure. Some countries have paved the way for electronic commerce by encouraging Internet use. For the past decade, Singapore's National Computer Board has pushed information technology extensively to enhance the island nation's economic competitiveness and quality of life. By investing in a high-speed telecommunications network and funding ecommerce pilot projects, the government has drawn a concomitant private sector investment. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard are using Singapore as a base for their regional ecommerce centers.

In June 1996, the Singapore government launched a nationwide broadband infrastructure called Singapore ONE. After a year-long pilot, the network went commercial in June 1998. More than 400,000 users are expected to be online by the end of 2001.

Most major cities in Asia have modern digital switches, and Internet access works pretty well within their boundaries. But once you get outside those metropolitan areas, infrastructure issues loom large. And in some countries, there are still very few Internet users. Indonesia, with only 790,000 Internet users, has the lowest Internet penetration rate in Asia, according to A.C. Nielsen's Global Netwatch. Thailand has the second lowest rate with 830,000 users. Both figures represent less than 1 percent of those countries' populations.

Malaysia is another country that has a lot of catching up to do. A report issued by that country's government last year noted that only 17 of every 100 people had a telephone and only 3.2 of 100 had a PC. The report went on to say that the dearth of computers in businesses and homes, lack of familiarity with the Internet at universities, and slow growth of companies in the new media industries make it difficult to promote Malaysia as a country conducive to ecommerce — much less e-learning.

Localization. The language of content and the culture it reflects remain big issues for e-learning vendors. According to a 1999 report by International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market research firm, Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region continue to show a clear preference for viewing the Web in their native languages.

The few U.S. companies that provide traditional computer-based training in Asia find localizing content very difficult and expensive, Knowledgepool's Kato says. Knowledgepool has a Japanese staff that localizes content. The company has yet to translate material into Korean or Thai.

One Knowledge-Window.com partner, ECC, which operates the largest computer training center in Thailand, uses a company called ThaiTrans to translate material from English to Thai. "I thought it would be easy — that they could just dump it into a computer that does a translation, but it's not," Kiddell says. "That only gets it about 60 percent of the way. Then you need a Thai editor to go over it very closely."

Whether content must be translated and culturally adjusted depends on the subject being taught, NextEd's Hilberg says. For instance, soft-skills training has to be localized. "We showed some Asian customers U.S.-created soft-skills training, and they were just rolling on the floor laughing," he says.

Vince Rowe, a Knowledgepool vice president, has noticed that Asian presentations are much more formal. When Japanese Knowledgepool execs first saw the U.S. training material a few years ago, they called it "edutainment" because it was so informal, he recalls.

But in China, students want post-secondary courses to be taught in English. "They want their training to be Western," Hilberg explains. "They want to know they're getting exactly the same course as people in Australia or in the United States. They may want a cheat button to get help in a local language, but they're motivated to take the course because they want to work for a multinational corporation or perhaps emigrate."

Gartner's Leskala agrees, noting that parents in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore push their children to learn English. That's not the case in Japan and Korea, where most knowledge-based training will have to be translated into the local language.

Making deals. Another challenge is working with restrictive business regulations or finding partners in Asian countries. "The most frustrating thing is determining what value the local partner brings," says KnowledgeWindow.com's Kiddell. In Thailand, where KnowledgeWindow.com has been concentrating its efforts, the law says 51 percent of a company has to be owned by the Thai partner. "But we are bringing all the capital and all the expertise," he says.

This also affects infrastructure. In Thailand, foreigners just recently were allowed partial ownership of Internet service providers. Thirty-four percent of Thailand's first Internet service provider is still owned by the government, which has never put a cent into it. The government's share of ownership can never be diluted, either. "That puts a huge bottleneck on capital for development of the Internet, and so service is terrible," says Kiddell.

Learning style. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome is learning style, says NextEd's Hilberg. "In Asia, people like to sit in classrooms with a professor at the front of the class handing out pearls of wisdom to a silent student body. The model of the energized, interactive classroom really hasn't penetrated there."

The idea of an entirely online classroom hasn't caught on in many Asian countries, either. "In Japan, even something over the Net needs a face-to-face, group-oriented component, in the context of the Japanese language and social system," McCarty says.

Yet HP's Silvers says the virtual classroom does have its advantages. "In many cultures across Asia, students are uncomfortable answering questions because of the fear of getting the answer wrong," he says. "People can write on the virtual whiteboard in an anonymous way. It can be a much more collaborative environment than a real classroom."

Joy Wong of Palau agrees. She found it easier to contribute to online classes, even though she never met her classmates. "Behind a computer, I was uninhibited," she says, "more open and able to share things I may not have shared in a more traditional classroom setting."

David Raths is a Kailua, Hawaii-based free-lance writer.
Email him at  draths@hawaii.rr.com.