Int. J. Educational Development, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 467–472, 1998 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reservedPergamon Printed in Great Britain

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INTERNATIONALISATION AND DISTANCE EDUCATION: A HONGKONG CASE STUDY

MAURICE CRAFT,* RONNIE CARR† AND YVONNE FUNG†

*Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK†The Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Abstract — The accelerating globalisation of world economic relations has been paralleled by aprogressive internationalisation of higher education, including the use of distance education. Butthe modification of distance education materials and the provision of local tutorial support are onlyrarely undertaken, despite the fact that in social science and the humanities such materials areculturally saturated. This Hong Kong case study in teacher education examines the issues, describesthe opportunities and difficulties involved, and argues that cultural adaptation merits a higher pri-ority than at present. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

INTRODUCTION

The internationalisation of higher educationmay involve the mobility of tutors, students orteaching programmes, anddistance educationmaterials, whether print or electronic, travelmost readily. This gives rise to the possibility ofUK, Australian or North American programmesbeing offered anywhere in the world with greatflexibility, convenience and cost-effectiveness.But whether such materials are always culturallythe most appropriate is another matter. This wasan issue faced from its inception by the Schoolof Education (now Education and Languages) inthe Open University of Hong Kong1 whichfound itself at the heart of a much broaderdebate.

GLOBALISATION, ANDINTERNATIONALISATION IN HIGHER

EDUCATION

The widely-cited process of ‘globalisation’ issaid to represent a progressive weakening of theconstraints of space and time on economic,political and cultural arrangements, and a move-ment towards world integration in these threesignificant domains (Little, 1996). The conceptis not without its critics. Powerful evidence ofethnic and religious parochialism, for example,persists (in the former Soviet Union and Yugos-lavia, in Canada, Northern Ireland andelsewhere); and conversely, international trade,

467

migration and diplomacy have existed for cen-turies. But as Stewart (1996) puts it, we areexperiencing anaccelerating internationalis-ation of economic relations, technology and cul-ture; and even by the early 1980s, he reports,trade between the 350 largest transnational com-panies amounted to some 40% of global trade(op cit.). World trade has grown 12-fold sinceWorld War II compared with only a fivefoldincrease in output, and imports and exports nowcomprise a far larger proportion of economicactivity almost everywhere (Gray, 1998).Reduced transport costs, trade liberalisation,financial deregulation and computerisation inrecent decades are all said to have fuelledfurther expansion in exports, internationalinvestment and the movement of economicmigrants. The information technology revol-ution in world communications has provided amajor impetus towards cultural globalisation;and the collapse of Soviet communism and thegrowing influence of the International MonetaryFund and the World Bank are claimed to havehad analogous effects (Stewart, op cit.; see alsoWaters, 1995). Westernisation seems to be aninescapable accompaniment of the globalisationprocess (e.g., Ritzer, 1996), a point which isreturned to later.

In this broader context, the internationalis-ation of higher education is perhaps unsurpris-ing. Again, it must be said that higher educationhas long possessed an important internationaldimension. Western academics have always

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drawn upon an international literature in teach-ing and research; sought publication in inter-national journals; enjoyed international researchlinks and collaboration; routinely participated ininternational conferences and colloquia; hosteda few international students, and a larger num-ber of overseas visitors and attachments. Butwith globalisation (and, of course, a worldwideexpansion in higher education), all these charac-teristics have become more pronounced. Thereare now more international visits, attachmentsand exchanges, research collaborations, andcooperation or franchising agreements; and amore active international market in overseasstudent (and staff) recruitment. There is alsosome internationalising of higher education cur-ricula for a more mobile labour force — cross-cultural training, for example, as well as foreignlanguage study, and work or study abroad pro-grammes (see also Smith and Badley, 1996).The development of information technology hasprovided a major avenue for the import andexport of higher education; and technical assist-ance programmes are now commonplace,involving the training of overseas academicsand professionals, and providing advice on cur-riculum development. Indeed, joint degree pro-grammes — even whole campuses — have beenestablished overseas.

Perhaps paradoxically, these powerful globalprocesses include significantnational and insti-tutional elements. Nationally, many countries,particularly in the West, regard internationaleducation as an aspect of foreign policy, andhope to benefit from helping to educate futurepolitical and business leaders from overseas (DeWit, 1995). Some, such as Australia and theUK, see it as a means of exporting educationalservices (Backet al., 1996); and former Sovietbloc countries hope the internationalisation oftheir higher education institutions will help themmake the transition to more market-orientedeconomies (Mallea, 1996). From theinsti-tutional standpoint, international links can con-vey prestige, particularly in research, and parti-cularly for new universities seeking reputationand ‘maturity’. Some institutions see inter-national education as a practical means of part-icipating in large research projects which wouldotherwise be unaffordable (Mallea, 1996); andrecruiting overseas students has become a majorsource of revenue in hard-pressed universitybudgets in some countries, with the establish-

ment of international offices, directors of over-seas recruitment, and often aggressive market-ing.

So internationalisation is not new to Westernuniversities. They have always beenuniversalis-tic, partly because the generation and dissemi-nation of knowledge requires it, but also forpolitical and economic reasons.Politically,Western models of higher education have beenexported through colonialism, and through theCold War influence of America and the formerSoviet Union upon their respective satellites;economically, Western university systems havebeen wealthier and more able to dominate worldscholarship. Indeed, it can be argued that highereducation has been a significant avenue ofcul-tural imperialism, disseminating, whether delib-erately or incidentally, largely Western ideas,perspectives and technology, Western experi-ence and behaviour. Ali Mazrui (1975) hasargued that the university is the single ‘mostsophisticated instrument of cultural depen-dency’, generating an appetite for Western lifes-tyles and undermining African culture(Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1997; Altbach, 1987).What was once largely a by-product of militaryconquest, economic dependency, missionaryactivity and primary schooling is now achievedby the mass media, the global reach of infor-mation technology, and byhigher education—the prime source of occupational credentiallingand particularly professional education, rein-forcing the influence of Western languages andthe pre-eminence of Western publishing(Altbach, 1984, 1988). Perhaps only inter-national travel and tourism will have a greaterlong-term influence.

CULTURAL ADAPTATION IN DISTANCELEARNING IN HONG KONG

Referring to the popular view that ‘…theentire world is being swamped by Western —more specifically, American — culture’, Robert-son (1995) demurs, and argues that culturalmessages are differentially received and inter-preted, cultural products are often tailored to adifferentiated global market, and that there isalso a reverse flow of ideas and practices. Simi-larly, Gray (1998) has recently argued that whileglobalisation has linked nearly all the world’seconomies, they are not necessarily converginglet alone integrating. Many national differences

469INTERNATIONALISATION AND DISTANCE EDUCATION: A HONG KONG CASE STUDY

remain. However, while there is a little suchevidence in higher education, the emphasis islargely in the other direction, and particularly indistance learning. As indicated earlier, distancelearning materials written for use in the UK,Australia or North America are now extensivelyexported and used overseas with little if anyadaptation, and often without the use of localtutors. In its early development, most of the pro-grammes in the Open University of Hong Kongutilised imported British course materials whichwere initially deployed with little modification,but were later adapted or supplemented to agreater extent. The establishment of a newSchool of Education, mandated to initiate an in-service BEd(Hons) programme for practisingnon-graduate primary school teachers, raised theissue more sharply, for an initial survey of Brit-ish and Australian materials confirmed that theywere culturally saturated. These, often superblyproduced overseas programmes were full ofassumptions about the educational structure andits organisation and administration, about cur-riculum content and standards of achievement,and about styles of teaching and learning —assumptions that were rooted in a foreign socialstructure and social, political and family valueswhich, while not totally dissimilar, were differ-ent. The language used demanded a sophisti-cated grasp of both formal and colloquialEnglish, with frequent local references, and vis-ual materials naturally portrayed Western chil-dren and schools. Above all, their academicfoundations were based entirely on Western(generally American) theoretical and empiricalwork in psychology, sociology and curriculumstudies.

The Hong Kong Government had indicatedoutline requirements for the early developmentof courses, mostly in the medium of Chinese,and ‘relevant to local conditions’, and proposeddistance learning with a substantial face-to-facecomponent, for a flexible, large-scale part-timein-service programme (Education Commission,1992). With these requirements in mind and inthe broader ideological context outlined above,it was decided at the outset not to import oradapt overseas materials, but to try to generatethem ab initio in Hong Kong, focusing uponlocal needs, traditions and relevant research,while also drawing upon international practiceand broader theoretical considerations: indi-genisation but without parochialism. The basic

structure of this in-service BEd (Hons) degreeprogramme was in fact directly derived fromWestern practice, for Hong Kong, now a SpecialAdministrative Region of the People’s Republicof China, is a modern (if not postmodern) indus-trial society, using Western models of govern-ment, bureaucracy and professional education(including teacher education), and internationalcredibility for the award was obviously alsoimportant (Wong, 1991; Bernhard, 1995). Butinitial planning began with meetings of teachersin local primary schools, school inspectors andcollege of education students, in order to can-vass their respective views of local needs ininitial training; and an advisory peer group rep-resenting local teachers, teacher educators andthe advisory inspectorate was established, andmet regularly to evaluate the emerging pro-gramme. Educational psychologists at the Uni-versity of Hong Kong were commissioned toprepare the first course, in the English medium,drawing wherever possible upon local researchin child development, learning and teaching, andthis was evaluated by a leading local specialistas well as by international experts overseas. Atfirst, on practical grounds, subsequent courseswere scheduled to be written in English, withChinese versions being introduced two or threeyears later; but this two-stage process was soonabandoned, moving directly to the Chinesemedium, when experience on the first courseshowed that many Hong Kong primary schoolteachers faced serious difficulties in studying inEnglish. The regular face-to-face tutorials, dayschools, workshops and evening ‘surgeries’were staffed by selected local tutors and con-ducted in Cantonese, and discussed coursematerials in the context of students’ local pro-fessional experience. The courses themselves,focusing upon current classroom needs, wereconstructed and written by small teams of locallecturers and senior teachers, and were reviewedby School of Education staff and local special-ists.

Before long, work also began on an in-serviceBEd(Hons) programme forsecondaryschoolteachers, the classroom subject courses in thiscase being drawn from other Schools in the Uni-versity. For the Education courses, many of thesame basic principles as in the primary edu-cation programme were applied, including, forthe most part, local development of materials.However, in this degree, for both academic and

470 MAURICE CRAFTet al.

practical reasons, the language medium was‘mixed’ — some courses in Chinese, some inEnglish. Also, in the strand for teachers ofEnglish, it was decided to import two languagestudies courses because of their high quality.The problems of adaptation now became appar-ent. Overseas producers, understandably con-cerned about maintaining the integrity of acourse, placed limitations on the nature andextent of modification. Secondly, these courseswere naturally permeated with idiomatic, meta-phorical and colloquial expressions; and Euro-pean geographical, historical, literary and othercultural references — the language of puns,songs, jokes and advertisements. Also, the audioelements of the courses included accents anddialects incomprehensible to non-native speak-ers of English.

The subsequent introduction of an MEddegree raised similar issues. But in this case, ongrounds of cost and quality, and to speed up theoffering of postgraduate studies in Education, amore substantial number of courses were‘bought in’ from abroad. This was felt to be jus-tifiable because of the more theoretical emphasisof courses at this level, and because the Englishlanguage competence of potential students wasjudged to be better. But cultural adaptation wasstill necessary.

For both the BEd(Hons) for secondary teach-ers and the MEd, the aims of adaptation werethe same: to facilitate accessibility, makeforeign material more meaningful and relevant,and embed the critical analysis of current pro-fessional concerns in Hong Kong. A variety ofstrategies have been adopted to meet suchneeds. For instance, tutors are strongly encour-aged to relate theory to local practice in theirface-to-face sessions; and written assignmentsoften require students to apply the concepts andtheories considered in the courses to the HongKong context. However, while useful, suchways of addressing local relevance were notconsidered sufficient in themselves; tutorials areoptional, and further support for students to helpthem translate theoretical analyses to the localclassroom context seemed necessary. This hasinvolved the development of supplementarymaterial (print, and occasionally audio) for eachcourse — combined, in some cases, with mak-ing parts of the original materialoptionalwhereit was particularly difficult or remote from HongKong students’ experience.

The supplementary material in each case wasdeveloped through several drafts by a CourseTeam, generally consisting of an external devel-oper from another university in Hong Kong, twointernal academic staff from the School of Edu-cation, and a course designer from the Univer-sity’s Educational Technology and PublishingUnit. The scale and nature of the additionalmaterial produced has varied to some extentwith the subject matter concerned. For example,for the course on educational research, its pri-mary focus on methodological principles obvi-ated the need for extensive adaptation. In thiscase, the contextualisation was limited to a com-missioned paper on the development of edu-cational research in Hong Kong, plus a few art-icles to illustrate the local use of variousresearch approaches included in the course.Other subject areas, such as language studies,child development, curriculum and assessment,and educational management, have clearlyrequired the inclusion of a more extensive rangeof commissioned and existing papers. In theMEd course on leadership and management ineducation, for example, a dozen articles wereadded — half of them specially written — tohighlight the local dimension of issues such asthe role of the school principal, school effective-ness, and continuing professional development.The additional papers for the MEd course incurriculum studies will duly be published as abook, Curriculum and Assessment in HongKong.

In the BEd(Hons) in secondary education, thecourse on the English language required a sub-stantial amount of extra material to addressissues which are currently of central importancein Hong Kong, issues such as language policyand planning, and the medium of instruction inschools. Other topics such as the Hong Kongaccent, and code-switching between Cantoneseand English were handled through a combi-nation of written and audio material.

Material has also been developed to stimulatestudent reflection on how the supplementarycontextual readings relate to the originalmaterials, and to their own work situation.Locating appropriate readings has involvedextensive local and international literaturesearches, and adaptation has been greatly facili-tated by the increasing number of local textswhich have become available in the last fewyears.2 Finally, glossaries covering UK edu-

471INTERNATIONALISATION AND DISTANCE EDUCATION: A HONG KONG CASE STUDY

cational terminology have been produced ineach case to assist students’ understanding.

Even at the Master’s level, the issue of langu-age of instruction remains a significant consider-ation. The offering of this programme in Englisheffectively excludes some teachers who wouldwish to undertake postgraduate study in Edu-cation. So, one course in Chinese — on Chineselanguage education — is to be added to the pro-gramme; and this will inevitably raise questionsabout the possible presentation of furthercourses in Chinese and/or the translation ofsome of the existing ones, complex though thiswould be.

Such efforts at adaptation were in no wayaimed at the production of narrowly-focused‘Hong Kong courses’, but rather at blendingappropriate local material with exposure tointernational literature and contemporary over-seas debates on educational policy, theory anddevelopment.

CONCLUSIONS

The cultural adaptation issue is widely appli-cable. Even distance education material writtenin England, which concentrates on the BritishParliament’s 1988 Education Reform Act, itsideological antecedents and its policy outcomes,is of less interest in Scotland which, though partof the United Kingdom, has a different edu-cational system. Similarly, in many large federalstates such as the USA or Australia. But theseat least share a language, and broadly, a culturalheritage. West–East and North–South problemsof transferability are much greater and, as indi-cated at the outset, appear to be an inevitableaccompaniment of internationalisation in highereducation with the associated aspects of culturalimperialism and cultural homogenisation. Theissue arises pre-eminently in Hong Kong whichis possibly the world’s most active market inhigher education. Its 6.3 million people cur-rently have seven universities (and several otherlarge tertiary institutions). But four of thesewere established only in the last three years andmany young people have traditionally travelledabroad (or have undertaken overseas pro-grammes delivered in Hong Kong) for theirhigher education. In 1994, a comprehensive sur-vey of overseas institutions advertising in HongKong was reported (Lee and Lam, 1994). Over300 institutions from 13 countries were ident-

ified (some two-thirds offering programmes atdegree level), with the majority delivering themin Hong Kong. By mid-1998, the GovernmentEducation Department, under new legislationdesigned to ensure quality control, had approvedover 200 programmes for delivery in HongKong by overseas institutions, and a further 117collaborative ventures with local institutions.But the criteria for approval focus only onwhether the non-local institutions are ‘recogni-sed’, and are offering programmes of a compa-rable standard to those offered in the homecountry. The legislation has no provision gov-erning the cultural appropriateness of anaward’s academic programme. Few such pro-grammes in teacher education, for example,make reference to Hong Kong’s development ofa Target-Oriented Curriculum, the School Man-agement Initiative, or mother-tongue languagepolicy. If they are British, they tend to focus indetail on the National Curriculum (England andWales) or local management of schools, and,without any locally provided tutorial support,there will be limited opportunity for compara-tive analysis and discussion.

Those engaged in international educationsometimes argue that students enrolling in anoverseas distance education programme are con-sciously opting to study education as it is prac-tised in, say, the UK, Australia or Canada, andthat is what they are offered. That furthermore,any undergraduate or postgraduate course —‘relevant’ or not — makes intellectual demandswhich are intrinsically enriching regardless ofcontent; and that all academic exploration hasto begin somewhere, so the discussion of prin-ciples of educational policy could commencewith any international policy issue. Even apurelyabstractanalysis which started with prin-ciples such as social continuity, equity or econ-omic productivity would involve broad exempli-fication. But these appear to be mererationalisations. Perhaps a more serious ques-tion is what is ‘relevance’? As a former colony,Hong Kong’s educational system is closelymodelled on UK practices, so unadapted Britishdistance education materials might be con-sidered highly relevant; indeed, UK educationalsystems have themselves followed North Amer-ican models for some decades. Cultural dif-fusion is an ongoing social process.

However, it is surely unexceptionable in the1990s to argue that an overseas distance

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education programme in the Hong Kong SpecialAdministrative Region should at least make ref-erence to Confucian beliefs and educational tra-ditions, and to Chinese child-rearing practices,societal elements which underpin the operationof what has appeared superficially to be a thor-oughly Westernised educational system. TheSchool of Education at the Open University ofHong Kong sought to go further by writingcourses locally, many of them in Chinese; andby adapting others to the local context throughincorporating appropriate additional material,and using assignments and tutorials focusing onthe application of concepts and theories to thelocal professional environment. This has been achallenging, intricate and time-consuming pro-cess, and no claims are made that the complexproblems inherent in such a task have been fullyresolved. However, at least the need has beenrecognised and, as internationalisation proceeds,it will surely grow. To offer courses developedfor a particular target group to students in a verydifferent cultural context without efforts tolocalise their content and presentation, has seri-ous implications for the value and effectivenessof their learning. It may also inhibit the develop-ment of indigenous theory and practice, some-thing which should perhaps be encouraged inthe face of accelerating cultural globalisation.

NOTES

1. Prior to mid-1997, the Open Learning Institute ofHong Kong. Although many of the developments dis-cussed in this paper originated then, for simplicity thepresent university title is used throughout. The thenSchool of Education established by Maurice Craft isnow the School of Education and Languages, whereRonnie Carr is Dean and Yvonne Fung Associate Pro-fessor.

2. For example, Biggs (1996), Cheng (1996), Lau (1996),Morris (1995), Postiglione and Lee (1997), and Wat-kins and Biggs (1996).

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