LINC Conference to address global challenges & opportunities in education

With more than 100 papers submitted from 40 different countries, and with authors traveling from five continents and as far away as the Fiji Islands, the fifth conference of MIT’s Learning International Network Consortium (LINC) (May 23-26) will address challenges and opportunities in education from a wide variety of perspectives.

Conference papers will cover diverse topics such as e-learning in Afghanistan, information and communication technologies for lifelong learning in Africa, and blended learning at the University of the South Pacific. Plenary and parallel talks will focus on ways universities can provide distance education and e-learning resources to high-school students, thereby strengthening the universities’ potential pool of applicants, and also to alumni, promoting the lifelong learning essential in today’s fluid job market.

LINC is an international community of individuals and organizations, including many in the developing world, who share best practices in order to develop and strengthen distance-learning projects in their home countries. LINC began in 2002 in response to a growing and unmet demand for distance learning. At the time, MIT’s now internationally popular OpenCourseWarehad just launched its smaller, pilot version, and MIT and other major universities were not yet equipped to provide distance learning resources on a large scale.

Professor Richard Larson, LINC founder and director, explains that LINC was created out of the idea that education is an asset shared by the entire global community. Collaboration and innovation are required to ensure education is available to all, particularly in some developing countries where 50% of the population is under age 20.

“The reality in many developing countries is that the population burst is so large that it is not possible to accommodate the large quantities of students with only the standard student-to-teacher ratio,” says LINC founder and director Professor Richard Larson. “We need to leverage the available technologies and resources to reach more students more effectively.”

LINC unites educators from around the world who are interested in using distance and e-learning technologies to help their respective countries increase access to quality university education for a larger percentage of the population. For more information, visit http://linc.mit.edu/.