Distance Education and the Role of the State: A Sweden/USA Perspective

Abstract

This study aims to comparatively explore the role of the state (federal policy) in distanceeducation initiatives in the higher education communities of Sweden and the United States. In a globalized context, education institutes now have the capabilities to provide education and educational resources more efficiently and to a wide-ranging and diverse audience. Within the education sector and distance education, the role of the state and federal policy becomes increasingly important, in terms of how distance-education platforms are developed and implemented in institutions of higher education. The first section of this article provides an overview of the United States and Sweden's current higher education and distance-education landscapes, focusing on the role of the state and federal policy with respect to the funding and overall aims of distance education. The development of distance education in Sweden is highly related to political goals and policies, the top down/domestic/'inside' approach. The governing body dictates the funding and policy for distance education, and implementation is left to the university body. In the United States, the landscape differs in that no one federal institution provides direct funding or unified guidelines for developing distance education, but universities are left to their own devices and capabilities for implementation. In Sweden, high ambitions and goals are set at the national level, but the educational organizations are changing only slowly. The pressures on the education organizations are high because of steadily decreasing funding and fewer and fewer staff in relation to students. In the United States, education functions primarily as a state and local responsibility. In conclusion, the article aims to exploit the differences between the two countries' role of the state (federal policy) in distance-education policy, and present a middle ground which would be most balanced for distance education, entailing some federal supervision with the allowance for a certain level of autonomy in regards to development, implementation, funding and longevity. Part 1. Overview of Education Systems Education in SwedenDuring the last few decades expectations concerning the systems for adult education have been extremely high from the policymakers. Through flexibility they will meet needs of people with short educational histories and compensate them for what they missed during their early years. By co-operating with the work sector they will adapt the human capital to close the gap between needs and supply in the labour market. Being a companion throughout life, the education systems will be present during an individual's life cycle; providing sources of fast-increasing knowledge, furnishing the individual with new tools and explaining the changing conditions in society, creating the possibility of lifelong learning.

DeepOtolith v1.0: An Open-Source AI Platform for Automating Fish Age Reading from Otolith or Scale Images

“…Additional species, however, can be incorporated as related works will be published in the future. This image analysis platform is a Python application (https://www.python.org, accessed in 2001) that uses Python Flask (https: //flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/, accessed in 2010) and ReactJS [18] to operate as a webserver at the front-end. The source code for DeepOtolith, as well as sample otolith/scale images for experimentation, are available at: https://github.com/dimpolitik/Deep-Otolith (accessed on 1 March 2022).…”