The Perception of Distance Educators and Learners about
Web-Based Instruction (WBI) in Selected Asian Open Universities

With an exponential growth in information and communication technology, Web-based Instruction (WBI) has become an increasingly popular method for course delivery and maintenance. Similar to the situations in many Western countries, the Asian government leaders and education scholars are attempting to rise to this challenge and take advantage of the expanding opportunities. The leading open universities in Asia have started/planned  to start investing heavily in Web-based instruction. Hundreds of Web-based courses have been introduced and many others are in the pipeline. Despite the popularity of Web-based courses, little research has been done on evaluating perceptions of on-line educators and learners from a comparative perspective. The purpose of this project is to conduct a comparative study of WBI in selected Asian open universities from the angle of WBI educators and learners. The method of questionnaire survey will be employed. A two-stage procedure will be followed in the collection of data. The first stage will be a survey of institutional profiles on WBI. All open universities in Asia having more than one year experience in administering web-based courses will form the population of the sample. One representative from each of these open universities will be selected to assist with data collection in this survey. The  questionnaire items will cover various components in WBI, the features of on-line programmes and the corresponding learning environments. The learning environments will include pedagogy (teaching and learning), technology (hardware and software, bandwidth issues, speed of communication lines, software applications and cost considerations), organization (such as course planning and preparation), institutional policy (e.g. course credit, course evaluation and instruction support), ethics (programme and course administration, learner/facilitator interaction) and so on. The results will form the basis for the research in the second stage. Two questionnaires will be designed to investigate perceptions of distance educators and learners about WBI in selected open universities in Asia. It is hoped that the research will provide a better understanding of the current state and the problems of WBI in Asia. The results could be valuable for the OUHK and other open universities in the Asian region to develop more effective, efficient and user-friendly Web-based courses through experience sharing and lesson drawing.