Profile: APEC Education Foundation
During the first APEC Leaders' Meeting in Seattle in 1993, former U.S. President Bill Clinton put forward a proposal for a Leaders' Education Initiative. The initiative: To develop regional cooperation in higher education, study key regional economic issues, improve worker skills, facilitate cultural and intellectual exchanges, and enhance labor mobility.
APEC leaders endorsed the idea and a year later at the APEC Ministerial Meeting in Jakarta, the United States and Korea jointly proposed setting up a non-profit, private-sector funded grant-making organization. They called it the APEC Education Foundation (www.apecef.org) and it was incorporated in Washington, D.C. in 1995. Korea's Ministry of Finance and Economy, along with the AT&T Foundation, General Electric Fund, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, IBM and Levi Strauss have supported the AEF since 1997. With participation from private sector organizations, the Education Foundation has become a tripartite venture among government, business and education and training institutions.
The Education Foundation (AEF) calls for grant proposals through several channels including its web site and the APEC Secretariat web site. Typically awards are granted in three areas: initiatives that advance cooperation and know-how among educational institutions in areas such as teacher development, distance learning and educational management training; joint research and the preparation of reports that promote education within APEC; and educational exchanges and other activities that augment education.
The first grants worth US$127,000 were awarded in 1998 to five APEC Study Centers for programs involving the exchange of ideas and information and those that would promote research scholarship in APEC. (APEC study centers were established in universities and research institutions in APEC member economies in 1993. The Centers study important APEC-related issues and represent important academic communities.) After reviewing further grant proposals in 2001, AEF's Board of Governors decided to set up a consortium of institutions to help K-12 teachers make effective use of information and communication technology, or ICT, and the Internet, in the classroom.
In August 2001, the Education Foundation awarded its signature project, the APEC Cyber Education Cooperation (www.goacec.com), a grant of US$679,000. ACEC's aim is to narrow the digital divide by sharing information and knowledge on education in APEC through web portals, by fostering community-building for teachers, and building the capacities of educators. ACEC undertakes projects that narrow the digital divide; make available to teachers and administrators information and services that improve education, in particular the use of ICT; and coordinate the work of economies to enhance multilateral cooperation in the region. The Consortium leading ACEC involves the Centre for Information Technology in School and Teacher Education (CITE) at the University of Hong Kong; the Knowledge Sharing Network represented by the U.S. Department of Education and the Singapore Ministry of Education; the Korea Education Research and Information Service (KERIS); and the 2020 Communications Trust Group of New Zealand.
Essentially the consortium is trying to build a wide learning community of teachers, learners and researchers and administrators in the region. A key focus is on educational cooperation and collaboration among educational institutions and programs across the region and on the use of advanced telecommunications technologies to extend the reach of educational resources and faculty.
Enhancing digital opportunities and capacity building for disadvantaged groups is a key element. This is done by supporting science and technology innovation, upgrading English language and computer skills for effective use of the Internet, and advancing cyber-education and ICT capacity building, including for small and micro enterprises.
Chris Coward, director of the Center for Internet studies at the University of Washington, is leading ACEC's U.S. project, called "Establishing an Asia-Pacific Network of University Internet Studies Programs." The program is focused on how universities in the developing world can contribute to efforts in their communities to harness information technologies for economic development. "How universities can bring their technological capabilities together with their other capacities for public policy work or social development to assist these communities making this jump (is a key aim of this project)," explains Coward.
In January, Coward held a workshop in the Philippines where fifty guests from various universities and other organizations like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank gathered to identify the greatest needs in ICT. "Most of the people who are trying to link their universities more closely with their communities are doing so without any institutional support," he explains. "By having this meeting, the first of its kind, we identified many key players who would form a community. We are calling it University ICT4D (Information and Community Technologies for Development.)" The goal: to create a community of people and institutions that have a commitment to establishing courses, programs, and outreach that make universities integral to their communities and countries' efforts to harness ICT in development.
In one project, a handful of universities in the Philippines have started working with local telecenters - public access points where people who don't have computers at home can go to avail themselves of internet services. "A lot of these telecenters aren't doing so well," Coward says. "But we have demonstrated how universities can partner with these centers not only to provide technological assistance but in developing content that meet local needs." For example, De La Salle University in the Philippines, a partner in this project, worked with local governments to provide critical government services to citizens through the telecenters. In another example, another U.S. partner, Cornell University, worked with an agricultural university in India to develop content on local crop varieties and other issues that were needed by the farmers in that region. If a crop looked like it had a disease, the university could help provide input on how to solve the problem. Says Coward: "In many countries these universities are ivory towers and don't have linkages with their communities. This is one way to link the two."
Another project idea that came out of the conference in the Philippines is to develop games for cellular phones that can teach skills such as microfinance or financial accounting or convey information and awareness about diseases such as HIV/AIDs. "Our games will teach elementary concepts of supply and demand or what happens when exchange rates change. The idea is you take something enjoyable like a game and you imbed within it a message or a skill you want people to have," Coward notes. The group hopes to have a prototype ready by the end of the summer and will probably launch its first game on HIV/AIDS awareness in the Philippines later this year.
Yet another program the group is working on is developing research and training courses in the area of emergency preparedness that partner universities will deliver to disaster-prone communities such as those that were struck by the recent Asian Tsunami. "The value of the APEC grant is that it is going to create this community and a venue under which these types of projects can be created," Coward explains. "None of this would have happened without the APEC Education Foundation because there was no such community. At the moment there are people around the world who are individually trying to do good things in their universities. These people are now extremely relieved because this community now can provide a support network. So if someone develops training modules in disaster education, for example, they will be shared with all the participants."
Both the AEF and the ACEC have increased their activities significantly in recent years. AEF has provided scholarships to students at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, as well as in support of professors who want to set up curriculum or undertake research on APEC. ACEC has grown with the participation of China (Higher Education Partner Schools); Malaysia (Seminar on Best Practices and Innovations); Chinese Taipei (APEC Cyber School and Networked Collaborative Learnings) and Thailand (APEC Sister School Networking). In addition, ACEC established a study secretariat in the U.S. to further improve its programs.
In 2002, the Board announced its second call for grant proposals to enhance the capacity of small and micro enterprises to use ICT more effectively. In November 2003, the foundation approved US$719,000 to six projects on ICT capacity building for small and micro enterprises. The six projects also provided a total of in-kind matching contributions equivalent to US$1.14 million. Nineteen APEC member economies participated in developing the projects under the management of six member economies: Australia, Canada, Korea, Mexico, Thailand and the United States. The projects have been conducting training programs, website building and workshops. "The AEF recognized that effective use of ICT offers a set of tools to small and micro businesses that are critical to their success in the new economy," says Dr. Jaebong Ro, executive director of the APEC Education Foundation.
Specifically the projects included ICT capacity building for women's micro and small enterprises at Korea's Sookmyung Women's University; a human capacity building project for small and micro environmental businesses at the APEC Virtual Center for Environmental Technology Exchange in Australia; a micro-business and micro-banking information website at Mexico's University of Colima; creating and delivering relevant programming intended to enhance the use of ICTs by new and existing small and micro businesses within APEC; an internet and communication technology for community enterprise development project via Thailand's APEC Study Center at Thammasat University and setting up an Asia-Pacific network of university internet studies program at the Center for Internet Studies, University of Washington.
The AEF also publishes a magazine called ACEN Webzine, which shares ICT information and know-how to facilitate activities for online collaboration among teachers and educators. The ACEN webzine was renamed the ALCoBzine and it is published in seven languages (www.alcob.com). The AEF also publishes the Asia-Pacific Cybereducation Journal, an academic journal, to share knowledge and experiences among APEC economies and enhance the use of information and communication technologies in education.
In 2001, the Internet Volunteer program was launched. It has grown rapidly since then and has dispatched more than a hundred volunteers to China, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and Thailand. Indeed it has dispatched volunteers to China three times between 2002 and 2004. In addition to Internet Volunteer activities, teachers and learners formed teams to implement cooperative projects. "We dispatched one or two experts to each country so that we could do needs assessments," explains Dr. Young-Hwan Kim, chair of the APEC Cyber Education Cooperation Consortium, or ACEC. "We met education administrators and teachers and we listened to their needs to find out what best investments would be with our time and money."
The project has run for the last five years in Indonesia where hundreds of school teachers from around the country have received training on everything from how to make a home page and how to do a PowerPoint presentation to how to use IT for everyday teaching and how to enhance teaching skills in IT. "Some teachers need to have more practice and get more confidence to use IT in teaching otherwise they are reluctant to use the technology for everyday teaching," explains Kim. And in China, five professors and education experts were sent to Xiamen in southern China to teach more than 200 high school principals the value of ICT.
"In less than five years we have dispatched many teachers from Korea to different economies and they have had the chance to see the reality and the problems in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, China and Thailand," Kim explains. "If we can have a teachers' network we would have more volunteers to help each other. It opens a new way of cooperation."