As the world population expands beyond seven billion and moves rapidly to cross the nine billion mark over the next quarter of a century, there are increasing numbers of young persons seeking admissions in colleges and universities.
Since the number of seats in universities is limited, most are frustrated, particularly in countries such as Pakistan where higher education has not been a national priority. For every ten students who pass out of high school in Pakistan, only one can find admission, while the remainder are left lost and frustrated. This is a huge national waste. As the pressures grow to establish new universities and new campuses, the danger of achieving this at the expense of quality is very serious.
The most important factors in determining the quality of a university is the quality of its faculty, as well the ratio of the PhD level faculty to students. This should be one PhD level faculty for every 20 students enrolled. In top universities of the world (such as the University of Cambridge which has produced over 70 Nobel prize winners) there is a ratio of one PhD level faculty member for every six students enrolled. In most Pakistani universities this ratio is still an appalling 1:80, and in many it is much worse, in spite of the best efforts of the HEC to develop PhD level faculty.
Technology has, however, opened up new exciting opportunities through distance learning. In 2001-2002, we had rapidly improved IT infrastructure in Pakistan. Internet access was rapidly expanded from 29 cities to over a thousand cities, towns and villages during 2000-2002. Fibre was expanded from a few dozen cities to 1000 cities and towns. The cost of bandwidth for a 2 MB line was sharply reduced from a ridiculous $87,000 per month to only $2000 per month and later to $900 per month, making us among the cheapest in the region. A satellite was placed in space (Paksat 1) and a couple of transponders were set aside for distance learning courses. The Virtual University was established in Lahore; it now provides high quality education to some 150,000 students in Pakistan and many other countries.
The rapid improvements in IT infrastructure had a tremendously positive impact on a number of sectors including banking, commerce and education. The mobile telephony explosion was triggered by our decision to sharply drop telephone call prices and remove charges for receiving calls. The mobile telephone explosion that followed these interventions raised the number of mobile phones in Pakistan from only 0.3 million in 2001 now to over 130 million. This opened up millions of opportunities for plumbers, electricians and other technically trained persons to work from their homes and is now providing opportunities for education through access to lectures on iPads and other mobile devices.
The higher education sector has significantly benefited from these advances. In 2004, we started to look at various ways to provide high quality education to our university students. A digital library was established that provided free access to 25,000 international journals and 65,000 textbooks and monographs from 220 international publishers to our university students. Such a facility is not even available on a free nation-wide basis in USA, Europe or Japan.
Excellent nation-wide video-conferencing facilities were established and today all of Pakistan’s public sector universities and many private sector universities have excellent state-of-the-art video conferencing facilities with lectures being delivered by top professors in USA, Europe and Japan, and questions being asked by students from Pakistan in live interactive sessions. Some 3,000 lectures have been delivered in the last three years under this visionary HEC initiative that has contributed greatly to bringing quality education to students of our universities. The national focal point of this exciting programme is the Latif Ebrahim Jamal Science Information Centre located at the University of Karachi.
Pakistan has also begun to benefit from a large number of excellent online courses that have become available internationally for distance education at school, college and university levels. MIT was the first to open up its courses to the world through the MIT Open Courseware initiative. This was quickly made use of by the Higher Education Commission in 2005 when a mirror website of MIT Open Courseware was established in Pakistan to facilitate quick down loading.
These 2100 courses are free of charge and have attracted a huge number of users, with over 20 million website visits annually from 215 countries. An astonishing100 million users worldwide have accessed and made use of these materials. Such Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are now also being offered by a number of other institutions.
Another exciting initiative is known as ‘Udacity’ that contains excellent material on artificial intelligence and other related fields. Some two million students registered for these classes. Two other courses that were also initiated by Stanford attracted more than 100,000 students to each course. This led the scientists to start the company ‘Udacity’ for providing online courses to college students. However the fastest growing distance learning initiative is ‘Coursera’ co-founded two by two computer science professors at Stanford. Enrolment has already crossed three million and hundreds of thousands of new students are enrolling to take one or more of the more than 200 courses offered.
Quick on the heels of these initiatives has been another online learning programme of Harvard University with MIT, named ‘edX’. Each of these two universities has provided $30 million towards this massive open online course. EdX offers university level courses world-wide and over a million students have registered. The Khan Academy offers thousands of school level courses many of which are dubbed into Arabic, Urdu and French. A consortium of some 40 British and other universities called ‘FutureLearn’ was launched last year and now has hundreds of thousands of students registered.
We realised that this was a wonderful opportunity for Pakistan to leapfrog and catch up. After obtaining permission from these organisations we have created an integrated version of these Massive Open Online Courses. These were launched by the president of Pakistan some months ago, making Pakistan a world leader to offer these courses on a completely integrated platform (www.lej4learning.com.pk) These are available completely free of charge and no registration is needed. Now any student across the world can have all these courses for free, arranged in a very easy-to-use manner, since the arrangement is according to the levels of the courses (school, college, university) and according to the disciplines and sub-disciplines. There is a meta search engine built-in, which allows a quick search of the content.
World class courses are at our fingertips. It is now up to schools, colleges and universities in Pakistan to integrate them within their teaching programmes, hold tests and grant credits to students on the basis of these courses. This can have a significant impact on the quality of education in Pakistan and across the world.