Global Trade in Educational Services: Implications for Open and Distance Learning (ODL)

Abstract

It was incongruous, until recently, to refer to international student mobility as international trade in educational services. Indeed, considered crucial and innocuous for socio-cultural development, such traditional forms of trade in educational services as international student/teacher mobility across borders may remain benign. Similarly, signing of memoranda of understanding or letters of agreement with overseas institutions for research and for purposes of resource sharing – expertise and hardware – is not uncommon. Trade in educational services assumes a new dimension with the inclusion in GATS of foreign investments in the educational sector and borderless education through e-learning provisions. As much as there are commercial motives, there are the ubiquitous cultural and political rationales behind policies to globalise education.Against this backdrop, the paper analyses the implications of GATS for ODL by examining various aspects such as the relative value of removing knowledge from the realm of public domain and considering it as a commodity, the impending Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime that is potential to make information dearer to the already disadvantaged societies, the fostering of collaboration or competition among institutions, however skewed it may be, the reframing of existing national quality control/assurance mechanisms and the evolving of international quality audit systems as they pertain to higher education in general and ODL (including e-learning) in particular.