|
The
SARS Outbreak in Hong Kong: Use of the Internet in Times of Crisis
ONLINE EDUCATION
On Friday the 28th of March,
the Education and Manpower Bureau announced that all kindergarten, primary and
secondary school classes would be suspended until April 21. Shortly afterwards,
Hong Kong's tertiary institutions followed suit with their own suspensions. As
in other segments of society, information technology was a crucial component of
crisis management. The Education and Manpower Bureau offered materials that schools
could upload for their students on its "Education
City" site. Education City soon recorded a doubling in average daily
visits, attracting as many as 3.8 million hits a day.11
At The University of Hong Kong, teaching staff was advised to post lecture materials
on the school's WebCT e-learning
platform, but many courses had not been designed to be interactive, so the sophisticated
platform effectively operated as a file-transfer facility.
Several Hong Kong schools
had already experimented with conducting classes online and had developed facilities
for posting homework and receiving completed assignments. But most school sites
were of an ancillary nature and not designed to cater to an extended suspension of
all classroom activity; many were quickly overwhelmed by a sudden surge in traffic.
The English Schools Foundation's Kennedy School was among the first to post its
learning materials on the web, but its site soon crashed after many people tried
to access materials at once.12 Technical issues
on the home-user's end were also a consideration as a minority did not have access
to the Internet from home, or were limited by inadequate computer capabilities.
The Hong Kong education
authorities accepted an offer from Edinburgh's Heriott Watt University to make
its "Interactive University" online teaching platform available to 30,000
students free of charge until August 2003.13 But
a highly advanced home-grown alternative was emerging after nine months of development
at Hong Kong Baptist University's Education Studies Department and School Administration
and Management System Training and Research Unit.
Known as Vitle
- the Virtual Integrated Teaching and Learning Environment, the e-learning platform
had been due for pilot testing, but the outbreak of SARS impelled its developers
to accelerate implementation and solicit corporate sponsors for assistance with
infrastructure. Servers were provided by Cellwise Technologies, a database and
operating system support was provided by Microsoft, interactive applications such
as Coldfusion and Flash were supplied by Macromedia
and broadband connections were provided by the Powernet
Internet Group.14
The VITLE platform was launched
in a mere two days and offered free during the duration of school closures. It
had the capability to link teachers from 60 elementary and secondary schools to
65000 students, with each school able to operate one virtual classroom and set
up 200 individual student accounts.15 In contrast
to existing e-learning platforms, VITLE placed greater emphasis on real time interactive
teaching capabilities, using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server MX, to stream
live two-way video between teachers and students. The video was further supplemented
with a split-area text chatroom (one area for students to pose questions, another
for teachers to respond), and a flash animation area that was convertible into
a digital "whiteboard" area.
- Linda Yeung,
"Vitle lessons from the Sars virus," South China Morning Post, April
12, 2003.
- Ibid
- Joe Leahy,
"E-learning company has answer for schools closed by Sars crisis", Financial
Times, May 2, 2003.
- Eric Wilson,
"E-learning Initiative Gets Its Acid Test," The Age, May 6, 2003.
- Linda Yeung,
"Vitle lessons from the Sars virus," South China Morning Post, April
12, 2003.
|
