The Internet: An Educational System for Equalizing Educational Opportunity

Abstract

The Internet is in its infancy as an educational delivery system. Because it is still in such a formative stage of development, there is great opportunity to leverage technology, software, artificial intelligence, people, and the brick-and-mortar educational system to shape the emerging Internet-based educational system. The learning system that presently exists is constrained by the structures that emanated from the bureaucratically arranged school that defined teaching and learning as time and place bound in the twentieth century. The brick-and-mortar bureaucratically arranged factory-inspired school is being displaced across the globe by a virtual school that can be adapted and customized for individualized virtual learning. As Rosling et al. (2018) points out, people across the globe are within reach of an educational system that redefines what schooling, learning, and education are for an individual. Education is the engine for growth and opportunity on an international scale. Education, then, fuels and multiplies gains in social, economic, civic, and political life across many nations and across many institutions. The UNESCO report Keystones to Foster Inclusive Knowledge Societies (2015) described the importance of Internet accessibility as a normative principle for UNESCO member states/countries:

Access to information and knowledge encompasses the vision of universal access, not only to the Internet, but also to the ability to seek and receive open scientific, indigenous, and traditional knowledge online, and also produce content in all its forms. (p. 10)