TECHNOLOGY AND OPEN UNIVERSITY IN EGYPT

Technology and Open universities in Egypt
By: Andrew Dempsey
Andrew Dempsey is an educational technology Specialist in Cairo, Egypt. With an academic background in Linguistics and Second Language learning, experienced in technology,and language learning in the Middle East for a long time. He is fluent Arabic
Andrew, in his article focuses on Technology tools as the first element in teaching methods success and the high performance among students. He mentions how technology in teaching has promoted the developing countries to catch up with the advanced ones. I see He is right as We see now many countries which were behind the education and progress began to take steps towards achievement in the industrial, economical, agricultural and educational fields. These countries do not wait to receive donations or funds from others but through their talents inserted technology that can put them on the right way to be advanced.
The writer address first the educators giving an example of the Egyptian Education Minister, Hussain Kamal ,who, in Feb 2001 said “We can not wait to solve the furniture problems without involving Educational technology system in our schools”. He is right as school challenges and problems are a lot like installing new taps, remodeling the building or changing the furniture. Education can not wait without technology because if we said that we have to solve the existing problems and then we think in technology we will wait for ever without technology, I mean wait behind at the end of the queue.
Then the writer focus on another point, " Technology effects" hw added saying
" Technology has demonstrated an obvious positive effect on students’ achievements especially on line studies and open universities". Positive effects are foind for all subject matters like science, math, history, physic education and arts, in preschool through higher education, and for special needs students, in public and private schools.
To agree with the conclusion the author made about the usefulness of technology in open universities in Egypt,I have to I go back again to my country Egypt as a developing country with overpopulation problems, we see that the only solution for the crowdedness in the classrooms and the university halls is technology as with the coming of technology a lot of open universities have been established to help students complete their studies either college, BA degree or higher studies on line.
To evaluate the authots opinion I accessed another website; mentioned below and concluded That,
One of the famous open universities in Egypt is the Arab Open University (AOU) which serves the students all over the world and provides studies in any subject student prefers. The AOU mission is to serve local and regional communities with opportunities of higher education, to provide professional development and life-long learning opportunities and serve the Arab and human societies.
The recent statistics for the on line study in Egypt has reached 2,315,002 in 2002/2003. Statistics are increasing because on line studies and open universities are not expensive especially all students have to work hard or travel abroad looking for better jobs to solve their economical problems and at the mean time he joins on line studies to get the degree he/ she likes.

References:-
Ellis, N. (1997). Vocabulary acquisition:Word structure, collocation, word-class, and meaning. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), Vocabulary:Description, acquisition, & pedagogy(pp. 122–139). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dempsey, A. (2007).Technology and Open universities in Egypt, Kairos Information Technology,http://www.egyptianarabic.com/index.php