Lemmens The Virtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education Bernd Wächter (ed.) Aca papers on International Cooperation in Education The V irtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education

The digital divide
In addition to the challenge of quality assurance, we are also faced with the
challenge of the digital divide. All the benefits of virtual education are there
for the taking – if only you have access to the supply.
There are two digital divides on our continent: one that separates Europe
from the United States, and one inside Europe that separates digitally literate
groups in society from others.
The Internet is more present in everyday life in the United States than in
Europe. Whereas more than 40 percent of American homes are connected
to Internet, less than 30 percent are in the European Union. The daily use of
computers in general is also much more widespread in the US than it is in
the EU. From 1997 to 1998, US online consumer spending increased from
10 times to almost 20 times the European amount. In the course of one year
only!
The situation in schools is even more telling. In the Scandinavian countries,
which are in this respect the most advanced in Europe, there is an average
of about eight pupils per computer in schools, and almost all the schools are
connected to the Internet. But one can still find major disparities between the
various European countries. In French primary schools, for example, there
are 30 pupils per computer, and only 10 percent of those computers are
connected to the Internet. On the other hand, at the end of 1998, the United
States had an average of six pupils per computer, and 89 percent of the
schools and 51 percent of classrooms were connected to the Internet.
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There is an enormous “digital gender gap” in Europe, where 82 percent of
Internet users are men and only 18 percent are women! There is also a “digi-
tal third age gap”. Although our societies are greying, the Internet is not: 87
percent of old age pensioners do not have access to the Internet, whereas
65 percent of those under 30 do.