Demand of eLearning for professional education and learners' preparation: Bangladesh perspective

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the demand of elearning that needs to cope with and possible technology introduction through Bangladesh Open University as a lone government agency of distance education in Bangladesh for its learners who are doing Commonwealth Executive MBA (CEMBA)/Commonwealth Executive MPA (CEMPA) offered in cooperation with Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and MBA program of its own. Web based learning or eLearning is a new genre for providing services in the arena of education. Though in most developed countries such USA, Canada, UK, web based learning becomes popular to learners of their country, that is a very new to a third country like Bangladesh. Students of Bangladesh are also partaking courses through online programmes offered by those developed countries. These courses are expensive too, so it is necessary to establish our own elearning system in Bangladesh. As the demand of training and education is huge in Bangladesh, it is necessary to adapt the mobile and flexible system. Keeping the eye on view, a survey was conducted among the learners of those professional academic programmes. The informants were selected both from the capital city of Bangladesh as well as divisional cities and district town. The survey demonstrates that this technology can be appropriately used to meet the demands of the professional programmes. However, this survey also shows that the professional programmes require careful planning and sound technological infrastructures. The study will clarify how far prospective learners have the appreciation of the technology and how the learners have comparatively more preparation to participate in an eLearning programme rather than the organizations. The survey also focuses the primary and secondary education through collected data from websites of Bangladeshi government and private organization.