CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Education is a critical component of long-term growth (Chimombo, 2005). The importance of education is growing, particularly in emerging nations, as demand mounts to catch up with the developed world in areas such as global competitiveness (Hawkins 2002). As one might expect, educational environments in underdeveloped nations differ from those in rich countries, with low educational quality and limited opportunities to attend school in rural regions due to long distances and high opportunity costs. According to Chimombo (2005), country-specific circumstances affecting compulsory and free education must be adjusted in order to ensure broad access to education. The right to compulsory and free education for all is already enshrined in Article 26 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN Human Rights 1948).
The constant introduction of new technologies has increased the demand on academic personnel to respond to these significant changes in a very short, and often impossible, time period. One of the primary obstacles of teaching using technology, according to Bates and Poole (2003), is that you can’t possible keep up with the technology. The paradox of technology-enhanced education is that technology evolves at a rapid pace while humans evolve at a slower pace. Electronic resources are information extracts that are developed using modern information communication technology devices, refined and redesigned, and more often stored in cyber space in the most concrete and compact form, and can be accessed simultaneously by a large number of people from a variety of locations.
