This month my story comes from beyond EMEA. My excuse is that I heard it while at an outreach conference in Guatemala City run by the GUIDE Association based in UniMarconi in Rome!
The story is all about online learning reaching places that others cannot get to—providing learning to young farmers in the poverty stricken and drug-lord ravaged central western region of Colombia. More about that in a moment.
The outreach in itself calls for comment. How did GUIDE come to be in Guatemala City? Simply because GUIDE’s conference co-sponsors, Universidad Panamericana, believed that the huge momentum for eLearning developing in Central and South America would benefit from global exposure and review. This is another part of the world where the benefits of education and training are rapidly becoming more accessible through the Internet and technology.
Colombia is well known for its 50-year history of drug-related violence, corruption, and anarchy that has made it an impoverished and incredibly dangerous country. It was unable to provide even basic services to most areas and to a large proportion of its people.
Fourteen million people live in the 94 percent of Colombia that is rural. The department of Caldas in the central west is part of the Colombian Coffee Triangle, producing some of the world’s best—including for Starbucks! Now there is an energetic process of re-construction underway that is bringing boom times to the Triangle.
With the boom comes a danger. The beautiful countryside, so ideal for coffee production, is composed of steep sided and remote valleys (Figure 1). It is remote and inaccessible—certainly for young people looking for the technical and business skills to compete sustainably in the growing market.
Figure 1: The coffee-growing region of Colombia is beautiful but challenging
In cities such as Manizales, which is the capital of the department of Caldas, and the better known (notorious) Medellín, there is good penetration of tertiary education, but a differential was in danger of developing in the countryside areas. Young people were leaving the very farms that were bringing prosperity in order to gain an education in the cities.
In 2009, Universidad de Caldas created Universidad en el Campo (University in the Countryside) in an alliance with the Committee of Coffee Growers to implement academic programs at technical and technological levels to address the needs of young farmers across the region. A program of online courses focusing on basic professional skills and the technical skills required for success in the agriculture industry was launched and has now reached nearly 800 participating young farmers.
Carlos Alberto Parra, one of the leaders of the project presented the case study. He told us the outcomes are focused on business competitiveness, productivity, and sustainability, “The aim is to create entrepreneurship based on a set of sound business skills but contextualized within the local environment.” By providing a self-study program attached to the University assessment and mentoring programs, the young participants were able to learn right in the context of their jobs—working on their own farms. As well as an emphasis on the immediate coffee crop, the program embraces a width of curriculum that provides skills in, for example, animal husbandry.
I asked Carlos what problems he encountered. “The biggest issue was professional resistance from more traditionally minded colleagues in the University! But the results speak for themselves! We achieved a greater quality of outcome than that achieved through traditional methods—and that was with a participant group that did not have a particularly high level of education before they enrolled.”
The Universidad en el Campo results compare favorably with campus-based tertiary centers in the area, and as the program progresses, student attainment is steadily improving. Carlos laughs as he tells us that a major outcome of the project has been a massive challenge to the existing paradigms of the university. Proudly he says, “It has proven to be a successful model that is replicated in Mexico, Bolivia, and Nicaragua and is now sponsored by the European Union.”
So what do we learn? Online learning has brought opportunities for rural development that ensures students unable to reach a campus are not disadvantaged. Education, even in the difficult places, is not just a privilege of the urban population—and will be willingly embraced by people anxious to learn and to succeed, whatever their background.
What I also learned is that online resources are more restricted when English is not the language of learning. Hopefully technology will ease that problem and provide even greater access for populations in the hard-to-reach places.
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