Zia, "China's critical educational access demand and United States higher education distance learning curriculum: An answer?" 2000

Caleb Kai-Mong Zia, Ed.D.

Abstract (Summary)
China's educational system, with its traditional classroom lecture, is strongly influenced by its 5,000 years of civilization and culture. Grown out of the Confucian teaching, this tradition is still highly regarded as the major guideline of educational development.

At present, China has a population of over 1.2 billion people. There are approximately 270 million students in elementary and high schools and the demand for post-secondary education is extremely high. With limited physical resources, such demand for access to higher education has now risen to crisis proportions. One option that potentially could ease the crisis is to offer curriculum that includes Bachelor and Master degrees from accredited United States higher education institutions, through an appropriate distance learning delivery modality, to the students in China.

This study quantifies the usefulness of offering United States curriculum through distance learning in China. It also determines the effectiveness of a distance learning delivery system to document a possible increase in, or at the very least, equal educational success compared to a traditional instructional delivery media.

A one-shot case study was used to determine the English language proficiency of all the participating students for the all-English curriculum. This was then followed by a pretest-posttest control group design experiment on 60 randomly selected students for two terms. Using a telecourse developed in the Unites States on Cultural Anthropology, entitled "Faces of Culture", the 60 randomly selected students were divided into two groups of 30 students each. For the first term, instructional materials were given to the first group through the distance learning modality with the second group receiving the course work in the traditional manner. This was then repeated in the second term with the first group becoming the control group and the second group acting as the experimental group. Results were then collected, tabulated, and analyzed using statistical instruments, such as frequency distributions, gains analysis, and t -tests.

Advisor: Hagedorn, Linda S.