Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world has had both a personal and a professional impact on me. Personally the Web 2.0 higher education platform has allowed me to undertake tertiary studies in a situation where, as a full time carer of a child with a severe chronic illness, I would have otherwise been excluded from such activities because of time and commitment constraints. Moreover, the international collaboration that I was required to undertake in such courses has lead not only to social networking across a broad range of countries but also to the development of friendships through establishing links with those people when they have visited Australia. In turn this has lead to a new world of both international professional contacts as well as a greater personal understanding of health systems reform across the developing and developed world. It has been interesting to note that within developing countries, access to and use of the Web 2.0 for higher education purposes has been seen as playing a vital role in the advancement of the training of health professionals to international standards. The prescribed reading; Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World briefly addresses such an issue (point 84) from a UK perspective and notes: “It is not unreasonable to foresee the emergence of a small number if international purveyors of online HE which will come to dominate the mass market globally.”
Within the Australian context, universities such as the University of NSW have seized the opportunities that such online education provides and accommodated openly to such a market. As a consequence online international student numbers have rapidly increased to the point where it is anticipated that more than half student attendance for Master’s courses in health will be online enrolments from international students.

From an immediate professional perspective my present students have experimented with a number of online tools as a medium in which to conduct their group learning requirements. We have gone from group email and using wikis to finally settling on Google docs as a forum for collaborative requirements. My biggest challenge as a tutor has been to inculcate within the students an imperative for critical analysis. Their willingness to adopt the recommendations of Wikipedia unchallenged has slowly been replaced with an understanding of the need to extend such baseline knowledge with confirmation or refutation from further online peer reviewed sources. It would appear that my experience with students is common as again the UK reading Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World (point 39) confirms that such ready adoption of data without critical analysis in UK student learning has been seen as a challenge to the meaningful use of such educational resources.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World: available at:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/higher-education-in-a-web-2-0-world-report-published/