The Internet is greatly changing the global landscape of industry competition.
First, because of email and instant messaging, people do not write as many letters and or send as many cards as they used to. This means that the "snail mail" postal industry, which is often supported by the government, has lost a large part of its stamp-selling business.
Second, because of technology such as Google Voice Talk, Yahoo Voice Chat and Skype, traditional telephone companies are losing customers and revenue. Why use expensive phone lines when you can Skype your cousin in London for free? Third, because digitisation of photos and designs is so easy to do, traditional commercially-run photo-processing labs are on the verge of extinction.
To these changes, experts add two more industries: print-media and education. When readers can read news online for free in any order they want, the cost of gathering a piece of news is likely to be less than the revenue generated from selling advertisement space. The New York Times and Time magazine are reporting huge financial losses, The Reader's Digest has gone bankrupt, while free media such as influential blogs and wiki tend to generate more hits and clicks.
Finally, in education there is a growing global harmonisation of standards. What this means is that a module of knowledge can be produced once, to be distributed widely. The distribution could be freely available on the Internet, as are the courses in MIT and Stanford. Or, it could come for a fee, as in online SAT tutoring by Kaplan. In both cases, someone else controls the production and the quality of the knowledge products, while the distribution is global.
One local example of this is Informatics College in Kamal Pokhari, which is now run under new management after 12 years of operations. The college offers knowledge products which have been developed, refined and tested in Singapore. Thanks to the Internet, the back-up support for these knowledge products is online driven. These have been distributed for a fee among 140 Informatics colleges across 23 countries.
If someone with A-levels or equivalent credentials successfully 'consumes' these knowledge products one is awarded a Bachelor's degree in either IT or business and management. Both degrees enjoy recognition by 40 universities in Nepal and abroad. Besides, the global validity of the degrees makes it easier, as success stories have shown, to find jobs in and abroad.
Experts claim that universities represent a closed system, while online learning is only possible in an open system. By combining quality, affordability, employability with validated educational degrees, schools like Informatics represent a way of thinking about higher education.
