BUSINESS
No room for Irish language in e-learning
21-10-2004
by
Riverdeep's chief executive says that the Irish government needs to plan its e-learning strategy and warned that Irish Gaelic may be left out in the cold.
Barry O'Callaghan made his comments while addressing the TIF Telecommunications for Education conference in University College Dublin's O'Reilly Hall. The conference was focused on the implications of broadband for Ireland's 4,100 schools.
Riverdeep, which was set up in Dublin in 1995 to develop e-learning for schools, is the biggest seller of e-learning software in the United States. However, the company sells very little in the Irish market, where the government has yet to formulate an e-learning policy. When outlining the potential difficulty in rolling out e-learning in the Irish market O'Callaghan said that any requirement to localise e-learning courseware into Irish-Gaelic could be prohibitively expensive.
"Ireland will need to make some hard decisions in regard to Irish language e-learning," he said, pointing out that his responsibility, as the chief executive of a private company, was to make money for the shareholders.
O'Callaghan said that most of his experience of e-learning in schools came from Riverdeep's experience in the enormous US market. He said that the demand for e-learning software in the US was driven by huge expenditure on academic IT infrastructure, as well as the record numbers of students attending American schools. He also noted that the fact that one-third of the US's teachers are expected to retire within the next five years means that the remaining teachers will need additional resources in order to teach effectively.
The US has taken a variety of approaches to e-learning in terms of curricula and budgets and O'Callaghan was reluctant to prescribe an e-learning structure for Irish schools. He did say that effective planning was needed to ensure that e-learning was effectively implemented in Irish schools.
"Nobody knows ten to 15 year plan, but the better the plan the better the products," he said. "We need expert groups, who will debate the issues and agree upon a solution."
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