By Amed Demirhan

TRANSFORMING education to electronic environment is an imperative.

The electronic revolution creates a great opportunity for developing countries to become advanced countries. As a practitioner of this transformation, I know firsthand, the utilities it generates.

To be more concrete, I have created a diagram on how transformation should happen and have presented same in Africa, Middle East, Europe, and America many times in the last seven years.

I call it  E-electronic (E) and M-mobile (M) thinking in decision-making process for transformation. It means in any decision-making in this regards, we have to explore opportunities of E & M first. The change must start from curriculum because whole university is organised around curriculum.

We hire faculty, admit students, develop library, create laboratories, hiring administrative staff, and organising logistic support according to these needs. Therefore, it is only logical to start transformation from there.

Benefits: First, these changes will provide enormous opportunity to access millions of open access, learning resources from textbooks, library, laboratory resources, academic journals, videos, and more.

Open access: Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. For example, Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, as of December 21, 2019, has 14,099 Journals – 11,146 searchable at Article level, from 130 countries 4,509,568 Articles.

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These numbers are much higher than any developing country’s physical journal collection and more than most developed countries’ physical collections as well. Another example about the amount of available resources in World Wide Web gives us enough ideas on freely available resources.

A study published in May 2014 shows an “estimate of at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents are accessible on the web; of these, an estimated 27 million (24 per cent) are freely available… Again, this amount of scholarly resources is much bigger than most countries’ largest university collection.

Since this study was conducted five years ago, we could easily estimate now it has doubled.

Hiring staff: The same goes for hiring faculty and administrative staff. With the electronic environment with real time interactive communication, developing countries could hire skilled and knowledge staff from around the world with much less cost than bringing them physically to their country.

In general, when institutions hire an expat, they must pay more than what they are making in their home countries. In addition, they pay for housing, transportation, annual round-trip ticket to visit their home countries, buying insurance, and more.

By hiring needed skilled work force and knowledge workers in their own countries and benefiting from them through direct real time interactive media, institutions could save an estimated 40-60 per cent of the staff cost. Since salaries vary from country to country around the world, institutions could strategically choose the most cost-effective staff. We are not limited to one country or one region, but we are recruiting globally.

How students will benefit from this transformation

Students will be the beneficiaries of the electronic system because they will have access to millions of free resources for their education. In addition, they will benefit from more knowledgeable up-to-date faculty and effective professional services. Furthermore, their learning resources will be available 24/7. They will save time and money as well because now they don’t need to go to a certain place for access to knowledge resources and they could take academic advice from their professors from anywhere in real time.

In short, administration will save money while increasing resources and the quality of education. The faculty and students will benefit from greatly improved cost-effective resources and effectiveness of this system.

Most developing countries have required the Internet technology; the matter is to re-organise their institutions and resources accordingly. The public and private institutions shouldn’t wait for government to lead the change; they should lead the change.

Demirhan, a librarian, wrote via:  [email protected]

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