Tony Durham reports from Singapore on the global scramble to develop and control forms of distance learning.

No knowledge, no future: from shanty town to corporate headquarters this is understood. Hungry for economic growth, fearful of ecological disaster, the world has a huge unsatisfied demand for education. Suddenly, teaching the billions begins to look possible. A stunning repertoire of technologies is at hand: the Internet, satellites, videoconferencing, digital libraries. A few years ago India had just one open university. Now it has at least seven, each with more than 50,000 students enrolled. Indonesia's open university has 400,000 students. Turkey's has more than 500,000.

The new education is cheap: twopence a session, they estimate at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, which was founded in 1985 and teaches through a combination of satellite broadcasting, low-paid local academic support, and student-tutor interaction by fax, phone and letter. A complete master of business administration course costs Pounds 80. But the West is not standing aside. Typical of those who see an opportunity for Western media and business skills, not to mention western academic knowledge, is the film director Sir David Puttnam. His planned World Learning Network will commence operations in India - the vast country whose English-speaking heritage, entrepreneurial ethos, and extremes of knowledge and ignorance have made it the crucible of the emerging global education marketplace. Whenever such powerful market forces are at work, there are worries about what will be destroyed as the new is constructed. At risk are the traditional university and its academic values. Inequalities of wealth and knowledge, on the other hand, seem assured of survival well into the next millennium.

These worries formed the core agenda for last month's conference in Singapore where around 200 delegates, with vice chancellors outnumbering techno-visionaries, gathered to think about universities in the 21st century and the prospect of education in a borderless world. Some were shocked by the onrush of marketspeak, others amazed at the unbusinesslike attitudes to teaching and learning displayed by their peers. An academic from Ghana was bored by the endless rehearsal of the arguments about partnership or paternalism, pedagogy or politics. His journey was made worthwhile by the case study sessions where speakers from half a dozen countries described their own experiences in harnessing electronic media to education goals. The organisers were the British Council and its counterpart IDP Education Australia, known for its energetic promotion of Australian ÖйúAƬ in the Asia-Pacific region. "We cannot compete with the British," the self-deprecating Australians insist. Actually they can and they do. Britain may have a broader and deeper academic resource to market, but the Australians know their future is with Asia and they cultivate the connection single-mindedly.

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It was, however, the British who invented the open university, using electronic media to bring ÖйúAƬ to people who had not attended a full-time campus-based course. Sir John Daniel's speech (THES, August 9) was a vindication of the idea of open universities, rather than a sales pitch for the OU of which he is vice chancellor. Though the OU is expanding abroad, his most telling point was that indigenous open universities in countries such as India can offer courses at far lower cost than any European or North American institution. Looking back from the third millennium, perhaps historians will acclaim the OU as the Bologna of the new learning economy, the prototype of a new kind of institution.

Most people at the conference were from universities and, though accepting that their institutions face a period of rapid change, they scarcely considered the possibility that universities will perish. To hawk that idea at such a gathering would be like wandering round a lambs' convention with a tray of kebabs. The only determined kebab-vendor in sight was Dale Spender. Though on the payroll of the University of Queensland, she has an income from radio, television and books - her latest is Nattering on the Net. Universities, she argues, are a product of print culture. Their traditions and their instincts are all wrong for the emerging network culture of cyberspace. Some institutions may adapt and survive, but it is not an easy time to be an academic.

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"A community which has been predominantly word-oriented will have to become visually sophisticated," Dr Spender warned. Power will shift as education and the media converge. A few favoured academics will work with large teams of media-skilled paraprofessionals. "On some campuses," she said, "it is the library that has taken the lead." In the production of multimedia education, the library is employing the faculty. Franchising could reduce most universities outside the United Kingdom and North America to shopfronts. With little local content, the world would face a Hollywood-style invasion of alien values. Fellow Australian Mal Logan made similar points, in a less apocalyptic style: the threat of western cultural dominance; the risk that only a few producers may dominate - since open learning offers "huge economies of scale" similar to those that have allowed a few players to dominate publishing and television.

Alternative futures abound. Campuses would be reduced to clusters of physical resources rented out to dispersed but electronically connected teaching teams, in the scenario envisaged by Paul Duguid of the University of California at Berkeley and Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown (Multimedia, May 10). The three-way fission of universities would be completed by the establishment of separate degree-granting bodies with no teaching duties. In Singapore, Paul Duguid argued persuasively against the hydraulic, jug-to-mug model that tends to dominate discussions of distance learning. The poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote of knowledge he "stole" from a visiting musician. "Students find what is useful to them, rather than what you think is useful to them," Duguid explained. He argued that the role of ÖйúAƬ is not merely to transfer knowledge and skills but to induct the student into the community of physicists, historians or environmental scientists. This requires physical meeting and mingling. For a further reason Duguid claimed that distance and location will always matter. Though mathematics stresses the universality of knowledge, "I think the important thing that the humanities are giving us is that there is an extraordinary local essence to knowledge," he said.

Duguid does not buy the crude theory of info-haves and info-have-nots. Being online, he argued, does not bring admission to the social elite: the Western Governors' Initiative, the much-publicised online university of the American West, "is in some sense providing a very cheap education online, whereas the sophisticates will still be able to go to Berkeley, Harvard and Yale."

Getting online may not deliver Americans' dreams, but in Asia and Africa it is seen as a giant step onto the socioeconomic ladder that remains unattainable for the majority. "The arrival of satellite and computer technology has divided people into media rich at the top and media poor at the bottom," said Binod Agrawal, director of the Taleem Research Foundation in Ahmedabad.

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Speaker after speaker stressed how distant is the dream of equal access to ÖйúAƬ. "In South Asia 380 million people are still illiterate. Participation in ÖйúAƬ is about 5 per cent," said Gadaraj Dhanarajan, pioneer of Malaysian distance education and now head of the Canadian-based organisation Commonwealth of Learning. Rakesh Khurana of the Indira Gandhi National Open University pointed out that Indian students may not have space or a desk for home study. While in South Africa, according to Brenda Gourley, vice chancellor of the University of Natal, 60 per cent of the population are without electricity, precluding any access to information technology. As in a recent article (THES, August 30) she pointed to problems much bigger than education, which block the way to educational equality. Governments, she said, must provide access to electricity and roads. Universities should establish learning centres around the world, "the pedagogical equivalent of electrification and road-building." But as universities are swept along by market pressures and technological changes beyond their control, they may find that the old borders are replaced by new ones. In the words of Walter Uegama of the University of British Columbia: "The borders are set by technology. The borders are set by class distinctions. The borders are set by availability of resources."

A borderless world? Not this century. And maybe not in the next.