Barriers To Scandinavian Online Education

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List 7. Nine barriers to Scandinavian online education collaboration

1. There is a lack of funding to support Scandinavian online education projects. The project partners experienced that it seemed to be much easier to obtain funding for European projects and for national projects than it was to get funding for a Scandinavian project. 2. Governmental slowness and bureaucratic indecisiveness may make it difficult for formal programs to compete in a global, online education market in which timing and development time may be crucial. One of the project partners experienced that it took two years to obtain a formal accreditation for an online master’s program from the Ministry of Education. 3. Even though Scandinavians have a mutual understanding of the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish languages; they strongly prefer to use their own language. This could make it difficult to offer online education across the borders. Ironically, it may be less controversial to offer collaborative Scandinavian courses in English, since English textbooks are much used in Scandinavian higher education. 4. There are cultural and pedagogical differences between the countries that make it harder to collaborate. Just to mention a few, Denmark has a tradition of using face-to-face weekend seminars and a preference for oral communication and collaborative learning. Norway has a long history of supporting correspondence courses and distance education. Sweden does not allow colleges and universities to charge tuition fees from individual students. 5. There is ongoing harmonization of degrees, credits, and grades in Europe. But there is still a significant lack of educational harmonization even between the Scandinavian countries, which makes collaboration difficult. 6. A strong incentive for collaboration is the prospect of additional income. Norwegians and Danes seem to be much more open-minded than Swedes with regard to student fees for online education. Swedes expect that additional income should come from public funding. The incompatible financing structures make it hard to find financing models that support collaboration. 7. New educational programs need marketing, and there are few advertising and marketing channels that cover the Scandinavian market. One may argue that Scandinavia is three separate markets with regard to advertising. 8. Scandinavian collaboration could benefit from exemplary, formal agreements and collaboration models that clearly demonstrate win-win situations. Such exemplary models and agreements are scarce. 9. There is very little focus on online education as an export industry in the Scandinavian countries. Very few institutions have ambitions to offer courses abroad, not even across the Scandinavian borders.

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