e-Education in Thailand: Equity, Quality and Sensitivity for Learners and Teachers

This article looks at e-Education in Thailand with a focus on its equity, quality and sensitivity for learners and teachers. The first part includes a brief history of Thailand's ICT Development and ICT in Thai education. The second part of this article reviews the current status of information infrastructure and the way Thailand attempts to overcome the digital divide, featuring samples of the current national initiatives for the academic sector (both K-12 and university levels) as well as community sector. Third, the issues on the quality of e-education and key success factors are described. Fourth, the article examines how well Thai teachers, educational personnel and learners accept e-Learning. Lastly, the article concludes by considering the challenges posed to Thai education by the needs for new learning approaches that respond to changes in knowledge and skills needed for " Smart Thailand. " a relationship was found between a level of innovation development competence and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per Capita. From the same report, Thailand was listed in the factor-driven group, meaning that the country still relied mostly on natural resources and agricultural products. However, given that Thailand is still in the early stage of economic development, it has done quite well in a number of areas that have enhanced its efficiency and innovative capacity. Thailand is beginning to show its benefits of substantial improvements in a number of key areas such as the development of high speed backbone network which can respond well to the Thais' incessant need of information. However, as compared with six Asian countries which are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Singapore and Malaysia, the country still needs to catch up with others especially in terms of digital divide and quality infrastructure (Ministry of ICT, 2009). In Thailand, ICT implementation in various sectors has formally been initiated since 1992 when the Thai government set up the National IT Committee, or NITC, which is a high-level policy body chaired by the Prime Minister. Later in 1995, the Thai government has announced the Year 1995 as the Year of ICT for the Thai nation. The national ICT policies together with their master plans have been our key frameworks and guidelines to govern Thailand ICT development (Figure 1). The first is the National IT Policy called IT 2000, announced by the NICT and endorsed by the cabinet. The goal was for the country to utilize ICT to achieve economic prosperity …