Comparative Assessment of Online Discourse Models for Tertiary Education in Pakistan

Abstract

The impact of 4th Industrial Revolution, where innovative technologies are on the demand and fundamentally transforming the traditional ways of doing businesses. In this digital World, the use of advance ICT technologies have been ever increasing, such as the smartphones, digital device and smart applications. With increased access to these devices, our young generation and leaners are more digitally connected than ever before. Today, the young children are “Digital Native” who tend to outsource many cognitive tasking to these modern technologies. Inthis study, two types of communication for distance learning are discussed -Broadcast Media Technologies (one-to-many) and Communicative Media Technologies (many-to-many). The work focuses on Synchronous Versus Asynchronous methods of communication. Further, thestudy examines the usefulness of Digiskills’ (an initiative by the government of Pakistan for Information Technology courses) procedure of communication and its possibilities of addressing the same in tertiary education in Pakistan. For the ease of access, affordability andfamiliarity with tools and software, this research has conducted a survey with the help of Google forms in order to assess an availability of internet connectivity, availability of devicesfrequency of using digital tools and access to email for distance learning amongst Students. Study also addresses the OMO (Online merged Offline) model which has been commonly utilized after COVID-19. Finally, the researcher proposes a Hybrid Solution for distance education for tertiary Education in Pakistan and propose the terminology “Hyochronous” which is the Hybrid form of synchronous and asynchronous mode of distance education.