Online no substitute for teachers

THE government is mistaken if it thinks broadband technology is any substitute for skilled language teachers, academics warn.

THE government is mistaken if it thinks broadband technology is any substitute for skilled language teachers, academics have warned.

"We don't want to oversell the idea (of online learning) that you don't need teachers, you just use the NBN," said Adrian Vickers, professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Sydney.

The Asian Century white paper sells the NBN as a way to link language teachers to schoolrooms across the country, guarantee access to four priority Asian languages, as well as lift student numbers in Asian studies and languages at university.

"Instead of having someone in every school with every language facility, you can get kids to study a language even though their teacher is in another part of Australia," Julia Gillard said.

Academics who spoke to The Australian agreed that online learning could be a tremendous asset but it was no replacement for quality teaching.

"In the end, teaching is a social practice and you've got to have some relationship with somebody," said Jane Orton, an expert in Chinese teacher training at the University of Melbourne.

She said that a video conference set-up with a teacher and a remote class necessarily limited the interaction that was possible in the remote school.

On his blog Professor Vickers said the problem with the white paper was that its language recommendations were largely unfunded.

"The (white paper's) solution to lack of funding is that everyone can study online, especially through the new NBN," he said. "This seems a remarkable confusion between a medium and its content.

"Anyone who has done any online teaching will tell you it's expensive to set up, difficult to maintain, and students always prefer face-to-face experiences."

Meanwhile, the University of Tasmania reportedly has become the latest institution to cut Asian studies course options as it struggles with tight federal funding for postgraduate coursework.

Jim Barber, vice-chancellor at the University of New England and a champion of online learning, said broadband technology offered many possibilities, especially for regional areas where it might be difficult to attract expertise.

"We need to exploit the power of broadband for education and change the way we think about education," he said.

He gave the example of a school in his university town of Armidale, NSW, which had a broadband link to a sister school in Korea, allowing pupils a level of cultural interaction that a teacher in Armidale could not match.

Indonesian lecturer Phil Mahnken, from the University of the Sunshine Coast, said online language teaching "needs excellent training of teachers for that medium and at the moment the education of languages teachers in general is neglected and, in my view, pathetically inadequate".

The University of Western Australia's Krishna Sen said countless reports over the years had shown that the problem with languages was one of demand -- students were put off by their perceived difficulty.

The NBN, offered as a solution to a lack of teachers, was a supply-side measure, "so, the NBN is not an answer at all to the demand side," she said.