Universities, the Information Technology Challenge, and Open and Distance Learning in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The educational needs of eastern and central Europe can be met by distance education methods. The need to reform and to expand open and distance education possibilities led in 1990 to the founding in Budapest of EDEN, the European Distance Education Network. After 1990, the proponents of open and distance education were able to expand the scope of their activities as the result of expanding possibilities provided by the rapidly developing information and communication technologies. The pedagogical possibilities offered by these technologies are described with an emphasis on their democratizing tendencies, their ultimate inexpensiveness in terms of the total costs of different types of higher education, and their commercial possibilities. The setting up of the Distance Education Centre of the Technical University of Budapest is presented as a case study. Governments and institutions must find the best ways to use the information and communication technologies to integrate traditional higher education with open and distance learning techniques so as to offer the best possibilities at regional, national, and institutional levels.