International collaboration in e-education and Regional Digital Divide in developing countries

With the adaptation of Internet by countries around the world considerable efforts had been made to transfer the knowhow via online from so-called developed countries to developing and emerging countries. Such e-education is especially true for specified types of education material, such as the ones on technical and medical fields. In highly advanced fields, e-education provides a cost effective and sustainable mode of knowledge transfer, than physically sending the experts to another country. Usually, the cooperation for such distance training programs happen with the mutual agreement between educational institutions. Though the intention to transfer the advanced knowledge is good, often the technical bottlenecks cause many practical difficulties when implementing such training programs. Based on some technical tests conducted by the author, with locations in Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, the digital divide among the regions within a country could become one of the key bottlenecks, especially when a partner is located in an non-urban area in an emerging country. This paper looks at the “Regional Digital Divide” and its impact on international collaboration in e-education.