Virtual university

Virtual University Starting up a Business  '''1. Introduction''' Welcome to the first Unit of the Business Management course. You have made a wise decision to embark on this programme of study, and we are certain that the ideas will help you start up your own business. Any aspiring business person has to come to terms with basic concepts associated with a business. Throughout this course, we intend to discuss concepts like 'entrepreneurship', 'the an enterprise', 'the business idea', and factors that influence your intention to start up a business. For a given country, the factors could be cultural, economic, political, or environmental. As you interact with the ideas introduced, you will be conversant with the different skills related to Business Management. This is so because, for any business venture to succeed, business management skills have to be properly applied. This will be related to your understanding, as a newcomer to the business world or even if you already are a business manager, of the categories of businesses available namely, product-oriented and service-oriented businesses. VUO objectives At the end of this unit, you should be able to: • explain to someone the concept of business management • use appropriate terms that are related to business management • suggest reasons for setting up businesses • identify business ideas • compare the potential of different business ideas • differentiate between business types • describe factors that influence the starting of a business, and relate them to your situation • What factors influence the business? Now that you have looked at some of the key concepts, and discussed the reasons for getting into business, you should examine factors that influence your type of business. There are many factors, some of them positive and others negative. We shall select a few, then as you read further, we expect you to come out with some of your own.Kotler and Armstrong (2004) have come up with several factors, and we discuss some of these below. How exactly do the factors impact on business? Let’s examine each one in turn Cultural factors The culture of a country refers to customary practices and beliefs that people uphold. Jarvis (2002) has observed that culture is made up of institutions and other forces that affect society's basic values, perceptions, preferences, and behaviours. The entrepreneur should remember that people grow up in a particular society that shapes their basic beliefs. Culture affects the way consumers think and use certain products. As an example, in some cultures, it is not proper for women to deal with the public e.g. selling goods or wares. This is a crucial factor for business purposes. Firstly, should the mother of a family identify a business idea that is likely to bring income to the family, she will not be able to operate the business because of cultural constraints. Secondly, should she, nevertheless, go ahead and start a business, that might lead to conflicts in the family, and in turn that might cause the family to break up.

Economic factors The economy of a country refers to activities in which people are employed to generate revenue.Two economic factors reflect a country's attractiveness for business. Firstly, its industrial structure shapes its product and services needs, income levels and employment levels. Secondly, in a subsistence economy the vast majority of people engage in simple agriculture. They consume most of their output and barter the rest for simple goods and services. In such a situation, there are few market opportunities for a business. For example the economy of Botswana is based on diamonds and beef industry. The economy of Mauritius depends on tourism and agricultural production, specifically sugar production. How would the economy of your country affect your business? Let us imagine that you had set up a retail shop at a settlement where employees depend on diamond mining for their wages and salaries. Suppose the mine closes down because diamonds have been depleted or there is a slump in the industry. How does that impact on your business? To begin with, workers will be retrenched and can no longer have money to spend. Secondly, they might migrate to new places where they are offered jobs. This means you end up without customers, hence no income from the business. You will be left with goods that no one wants because your market has been affected. Eventually, you have to close shop.

Political factors So, what do you think are political factors? Nations differ in their political and legal approaches. Such factors should be taken into account when deciding whether to set up a business. Government bureaucracy is an example. This refers to the way a particular government facilitates or constrains business. If, as an example, only citizens are allowed to operate certain types of business, that means non-citizens will find it difficult to start up businesses even though they have the capital to do so. Political instability is another factor. A country is said to be politically unstable if there is violence or when there is no rule of law. Unstable political situations discourage business. As an investor, you may not feel safe to set up a business where there is no assurance of security.

Environmental Factors The environment of a business can be both physical and political. In business terms, the physical environment refers to the place where your business is situated.Location will determine the success or failure of the business. If you were to locate the enterprise, say a hotel, in a place where there are bad roads, it is most likely that customers will not be able to reach you. So, in that case,the environmental factor would be a major constraint for setting up the enterprise. virtual Definition

Via the technical term {virtual memory}, probably from the term "virtual image" in optics) 1. Common alternative to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects (like addressable {virtual memory} larger than physical memory) created by a computer system to help the system control access to shared resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Opposite of {real} or physical. [{Jargon File}] (1994-11-30

Introduction As universities seek to realign themselves in response to the new societal needs, paradigms and communications and information technology (ICTs) infrastructures, branding is causing semantic confusion. The label 'university' has a long pedigree, its core business being the creation, processing and disseminating knowledge in the search for truth, and remains sacrosanct. Universities do not change because there was no incentive to change. Therefore they enjoyed a degree of stability in the last 400 years entrenching their built-in capacity to resist change. But technology forces that bring dot.com corporates to their knees changing all aspects of human endeavour will do the same to the university. Why become virtual? Winston Churchill observed that 'future empires will be empires of the mind' implying the centrality of knowledge. Universities are assuming virtual dimensions to respond to a set of real world global issues in the dawn of the 21st century. The pressures of rising enrolments and increasing fiscal constraints, and the inability of currently designed university systems to address the increasing bifurcation of society into the information rich and information poor are significant impetus for universities to go virtual. Furthermore, the United Nations launched the Global Virtual University of the United Nations University (GVU) in 2003, an online school that will focus on sustainable development and the needs of the developing world. Comprising of a network of universities, including some from Ghana, Uganda and South Africa it will be headed by the UN Environmental Programme with Norway's Adger University as the core partner, and will offer common diplomas and joint degrees Similarly, The Commonwealth of Learning that embraces 54 mainly developing countries is currently working on developing The Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth). Universities in Crisis The prevailing neoliberal, mainly Eurocentric discourse on the future of universities and higher education has since the 1960s lamented the parlous state of education More than two decades on, the crises in education in all societies persists, and is deepening as governments grapple for solutions. Readings (1996) suggests that the contemporary university is a "ruined" institution, shifting from its core functions of knowledge discourse to the new "marketspeak" of managerialism, strategic planning, performance indicators and so on that have little to do with higher order thinking and knowledge creation. Another theorist whose work has influenced the re-thinking of the role of universities is Jean-Francois Lyotard). He argues that the changing nature of knowledge in capitalist societies has lead to commodification, which has changed the nature of universities' future role in higher education (Why are our education systems that have been so successful for thousands of years now out of synch with societies' needs? Does the problem lie in the way education is administered, the methods of The Virtual University The infrastructure of the virtual university which is on the Internet is the technology that makes possible telelearning, telebanking, teleworking, teleshoping and telemedicine without leaving one's home. Distance from any place is no longer a limiting factor. It does not matter where the university is physically located and learners in any country can as easily access courses from the global virtual university as they can from their neighbourhood university. In fact as Internet access increases, for people who are housebound, in hospitals or at work or are travelling, it offers an invaluable alternative access to educational opportunities.

Conclusion The digital revolution and economic globalisation are herald a new era towards the global knowledge society where information, skills and competence become the driving forces of social and economic development. The problems associated with this transformation cannot any longer be solved by traditional means. At no time is there a suggestion in this article that virtual universities will replace conventional universities. Rather they will be complementary and seek to work with them and through them. Both will exist in tandem because education is about contextualisng, connectivity and networking in a global environmental ecology, giving the learner choice in where, when and how they access learning. In researching the virtual university, there appears to be no intractable cognitive problem to learning and teaching with the Internet. However, students will go through great lengths to socialise with each other in physical reality. Universities are not just instructional automatons. They are a state of mind and this means social and cultural interaction. Why become virtual? Winston Churchill observed that 'future empires will be empires of the mind' implying the centrality of knowledge. Universities are assuming virtual dimensions to respond to a set of real world global issues in the dawn of the 21st century. The pressures of rising enrolments and increasing fiscal constraints, and the inability of currently designed university systems to address the increasing bifurcation of society into the information rich and information poor are significant impetus for universities to go virtual.

Creating Knowledge The creation of knowledge is the raison d'etre of universities as institutions engaged in research. In these postmodern times and liberal economies, applied research with tangible measurable outputs funded by industry and hence tagged are favoured by cash-strapped modern universities, over basic research as a process of enquiry and search for new knowledge with less tangible outcomes. How do universities foster research environments to add to the corpus of world knowledge?

A HyperClass (HC) The HyperClass is based on HyperReality (HR) a technological platform developed by Nobiyoshi Terashima). HyperReality intermeshes physical reality and virtual reality allowing people who are physically present in different places to meet as telepresences to work together on a common task. Terashima’s idea is a spatio-temporal field of communication that makes connection not only between the real and virtual, but also between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence. The Virtual University The infrastructure of the virtual university which is on the Internet is the technology that makes possible telelearning, telebanking, teleworking, teleshoping and telemedicine without leaving one's home. Distance from any place is no longer a limiting factor. It does not matter where the university is physically located and learners in any country can as easily access courses from the global virtual university as they can from their neighbourhood university. In fact as Internet access increases, for people who are housebound, in hospitals or at work or are travelling, it offers an invaluable alternative access to educational opportunities.

Contents • 1 History • 2 Coursework • 3 Teaching modes • 4 Quality • 5 See also • 6 References • 7 Examples of virtual universities

History The defining characteristic of all forms and generations of distance education is the separation of student and teacher in time and space. Distance education can be seen as the precursor to online learning. Before the advent of virtual universities, many higher education institutions offered some distance education through print-based correspondence courses. These courses were often referred to as a “course in a box These have been developed so that students can obtain almost immediate feedback from professors and online tutors through e-mails or online discussions. Quality Students taking “virtual" courses are doing “real” work to get their degrees, and educators preparing and teaching those courses spend “real” time in doing so. That is, students meet a comparable level of academic learning outcomes and are evaluated through programs constructed according to standard university-level criteria.[ Though it should not be assumed, virtual universities may be accredited in the same way as traditional universities and operate according to a similar set of academic standards. However, questions remain about accreditation and the quality of assessment. Accreditation is required to assure students that the online institute has certified online instructors who have the expertise and educational qualifications to design and carry out the curriculum. Assessment standards need to be particularly closely monitored in virtual universities. For example, respondents in studies of opinions about online degrees will rate an online degree from Stanford the same as an on-campus degree, because the name of the granting institution is recognized See also • Autonomous university • Distance education • Online degree • Virtual learning environment • Virtual school • National University • The Open University, Open Universities Australia • Open University of Catalonia • University of Phoenix • University of the People

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Virtual University