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Massive Open Online Courses have been a recent phenomenon in providing large-scale interactive participation and open access to courses online. Depending upon internet availability and familiarity with digital learning practices, this alternative could provide education for many people. This paper explores whether technology such as massive online open courses can democratize education by providing opportunities and access for those who desire formal learning. This paper reviews literature on massive online open courses as well as the benefits and challenges of these courses in adult education. Using computer-based content analysis, this paper also examines recent research (2010-2019) on massive online open courses and the implications of using them to provide widespread access to higher education in Asia. The findings show that offerings in many Asian countries help promote social and economic mobility for their people by providing continuing educational, professional, and personal development through courses online. Yet barriers involving digital literacy, technical capabilities, and language as well as culture, prevent the underserved from pursuing this digital education. This paper provides future research suggestions for collaboration of educational organizations to use massive online open courses in engaging life-long skills for people in Asia.

Suggests that the rise of democracy was the most important development of the 20th century, examining the question of democracy as a universal value by focusing on: India's experience with democracy; democracy and economic development; the functions of democracy; universality of values; and cultural differences in values. Concludes with a discussion of where the debate belongs. (SM)

In the comparative research we present here as the introduction to a set of case studies, we first assess the quality of democratic procedures, content and outcomes in eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region on the basis of quantitative and qualitative data. Second, we investigate whether, to what extent, and how democratic qualities relate to one another. These investigations are carried out by applying an analytical framework that we developed elsewhere. In contrast to our previous empirical findings demonstrating that all the qualities go hand in hand, that participation and competition are the main determinants of democratic qualities, and that the democratic qualities form a funnel of causality, the present study suggests a different set of conclusions. In the Asia-Pacific region, the democratic qualities are weakly related to one another, do not form a funnel of causality, and participation and competition are not the main drivers of democratic quality. The data presented in the empirical section of the paper claim the existence of an Asia-Pacific exceptionalism. By carefully examining the cases included in our sample, we provide a detailed explanation for why, at least as far as democratic qualities are concerned, the Asia-Pacific region may be exceptional and unique. We reach the conclusion that responsiveness could be achieved by a transition from a rule by law – often coupled with the prominence of patronage, patrimonialist practices and privileges for the elite – to a proper rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the debate on the multidimensional phenomenon of Asian regional integration. Considering one case study -- a regional grouping known as 'ASEAN+3' -- this paper offsets it against relevant achievements on the European continent. Admitting that direct application of the EU's model to the ASEAN+3 frameworks is fruitless, this study uses a different approach, treating the EU's legal composition as a leading tool to assess if the European 'know how' in regional integration could be applied to facilitate the inter-relations within the ASEAN+3. Three barriers to regional integration are explored: differing democratic practices, dominating intergovernmental interactions, and the globally (vs. regionally) orientated China. Yet, this paper argues that the aforementioned challenges have a potential not only to subvert, but, paradoxically, reinforce the Asian integration process, particularly within the ASEAN+3 grouping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks: why do Canadians oppose trade deals with Asian countries but support them with Europe? While many Canadians view Asia's economically dynamic countries as important to Canada's future prosperity, they are hesitant to formalize ties with the same type of trade agreements they are willing to offer traditional trading partners. Using polls conducted by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, this paper identifies the demographic and attitudinal basis for the “trade support gap.” It finds that the gap is driven by factors that go beyond economic interest. Canadians prefer to strengthen economic ties with democratic countries that have strong human rights records. Furthermore, those who are worried that foreign control of the economy threatens national security and those who prefer ties with traditional allies are likely to support trade with the EU but not with Asian and other non-Asian emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper attempts via case studies to illustrate the nature and importance of political structures and transitions in the course of rapid growth and development. The cases are drawn principally from Asia, where the pattern has often been a dominant single-party structure evolving into a full multi-party democratic structure. This results from the interaction of the politics and changes that result from the growth process itself, such as the emergence of politically active middle and entrepreneurial classes. The role of political leadership in managing, sequencing, and pacing these transitions is discussed. We do not yet have a general model for which these cases would be instances. The hope is that an in-depth understanding of the case dynamics will be a useful input to the development and testing of more general theories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A first glance at almost any policy document generated by a bilateral or multilateral donor agency reveals a familiar rhetoric of participation, partnership, community, good governance, growth and strong democracy as key ingredients for a successful development program. While some critics of this rhetoric argue that this is merely a recasting of old aid agendas, others confirm that recent rethinking of aid policies and agendas are sincere efforts to address poverty reduction and ensure aid effectiveness. Education has been proposed as an indispensable element to achieving the aforementioned goals of development policy rhetoric, not least in the Eight UN Millennium Development Goals. This paper examines the role of the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) in the current global development environment, with particular focus on education policy in the Asia Pacific region. How does AusAID's education policy align with international goals for poverty reduction and sustainable development? How does AusAID coordinate its education policy priorities with other development agencies and recipient governments? To enable an exploration of these questions, this paper provides a comparative analysis of AusAID's approach to its educational development programs in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What lessons can political science classes borrow from the humanities? This paper presents the results of a multi-year study on teaching about Asia as part of a general education program. Given the challenges of meeting common learning outcomes while also teaching discipline-specific lessons, political science courses often underperformed in assessments when compared to benchmark expectations. While our initial conclusion--that a greater focus on multimodal assignments would promote deeper learning and reflection--proved unfounded, explicitly emphasizing students' reflection on their own process of democratic engagement, in comparison to that of their counterparts in Asia, did seem to address the shortcomings of the previous approaches by giving students context and guidance in their understanding of how democracy works at home and abroad. Data from reflective essays, collected over two years, provide evidence for this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising concern about gender inequality among the economies in South, South-East, and Eastern Asia motivates us to study the context of gender development in terms of bridging gender disparity. To show the impact, the data has been extracted from various authentic sources- Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), World Bank Development Indicators database, Sustainable Development Index, The Observatory of Economic Complexity and Human Development Reports of the 24 South, South-East, and East Asian economies from period 2000–2020. This research was carried out empirically using various techniques such as the Ordinary Least Squared Method (OLS), Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM), and Generalised Quantile Regression. The findings of the research show a significant impact of FDI and Economic Complexity in the reduction of gender inequality. Along with this, access to justice and electoral democracy will be providing more representation to women by reducing the gender gaps. Several policy implications have been proposed following the results of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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All around the world, the phenomenon of Internet regulation is on the rise as more and more countries implement such policies, from Asian authoritarian regimes to Western democracies. At the same time, the great majority of Internet users are not aware that they access a filtered version of World Wide Web due to the "non-transparent" policy of many governments, something that results to a very dangerous precedent for the future of the Internet. In this paper, the authors promote and encourage the participation of Internet users in the designing procedure of Internet Regulation Systems (IRSs), as a way to develop effective and ethically correct systems. This can be done via well-formatted surveys conducted in national level in order to measure public opinion and point out user's needs. To justify their approach, the authors discuss the results of the available related surveys conducted around the globe. Last, in order to attract researchers in the field, they launched a portal for the International project WebObserver.net (http://webobserver.net/) via which they provide all the needed tools for researchers to conduct such surveys with ease and with the minimum time needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, five Asian economies received net private capital inflows amounting to $93 billion. One year later, they experienced an estimated outflow of $12.1 billion, a turnaround in a single year of $105 billion, amounting to more than 10 percent of the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of these economies. By 1998, three of these economies had become mired in a severe economic crisis, the magnitude of which would have seemed inconceivable just months before even to the most knowledgeable and insightful observers of the region. One lesson of the crisis is that international capital markets do a poor job of discriminating between good and bad risks. It is hard to believe that there was much collective rationality in investor behavior before and during the crisis: Financial markets got it badly wrong either in 1996, when they poured money into the region, or in 1997, when they pulled back en masse. The implication is that relying excessively on liquid, short-term capital is a dangerous strategy. Second, the crisis has demonstrated that trade orientation per se has little to do with the propensity to be hit with severe liquidity problems.

What are the political, economic, and cultural implications of an increasingly robust and globally penetrating Asia-based media industry? How have Asian states tried to manage the diffuse representations of Asia emerging from informal yet globalized media channels? This collection of articles by Asian media scholars and professional journalists explores the changing relationships between Asian states and Asia-based media institutions and industries as the nature and role of media in Asian society undergoes profound change. With the increasing visibility and power of Indian film, Korean television, and Japanese animation industries, and of Asian broadcasting networks such as Star TV and Al Jazeera, there has been no shortage of scholarly attention devoted to the rise of Asian media. This collection, however, focuses less on the meteoric rise and power of Asian media itself and more on how that rise has been negotiated by Asian states, with a particular focus on China and Indonesia. As digital media technologies become ubiquitous, both formal and informal media platforms push beyond state boundaries, challenging state efforts to control the content of and access to information and entertainment. This challenge is addressed in commentaries by three journalists with extensive Asian experience, and three academics exploring the spatial and historical contexts of an increasingly mediated Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India in 1947 faced the challenge of transforming a poor, socially and spatially fragmented country with low literacy and violent memories of Partition to a democratic state and a cohesive nation. Though the country sorely lacked the “pre-conditions of democracy,” it still made a successful transition to electoral democracy, and went on to consolidate it. Compared to other South Asian nations, India's democracy appears even more puzzling–common origin from British colonial rule has led to dissimilar outcomes among India's neighbors. I argue in this article that India's democracy is neither a sham nor idiosyncratic. India's transition to democracy is the outcome of general variables such as path dependency, adroit institutional arrangements, strategic policy reform, and political capital. India's democracy conflates Western liberal democratic forms and non-Western cultures, leading to enfranchisement, entitlement and empowerment of the citizens, and the creation of a sense of efficacy, social justice, legitimacy and trust among them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on how globalization affects Asian economies and government expenditure. Two theories are presented on whether globalization has led to reduced political influence and eroded economies, known as the efficiency hypothesis and the compensation hypothesis. The link between globalization and democratization is explored, with a focus on how neoliberal economic and social policies influence public sector spending. Several charts are presented showing Asian economic growth, domestic spending, and trade openness.

The article offers information on the Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia project. It is part of a larger East-West Center project on state building and governance in the continent that investigates political legitimacy of governments, the relationship of the military to the state, the development of political and civil societies and their roles in democratic development, the role of military force in state formation, and the dynamics and management of internal conflicts arising from nation- and state-building processes. Related information are further elaborated.

This article examines whether Confucian Asian values are incompatible with liberal democracy. Analyses of the East Asia Barometer Survey conducted in South Korea reveal that attachment to those values makes it more difficult to reject authoritarian rule than to embrace democracy. These findings suggest that Asian values detract from cultural democratization primarily by keeping the mass public oriented toward the virtues of authoritarian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1997 Asian economic crisis discredited the international discussion about 'Asian values' in Pacific Asia, replacing it with a globalised 'good governance' discourse. The financial breakdown undermined claims by Asian autocrats that government should be based on authoritarian 'Asian values', not 'Western democracy'. Yet, seven years later, authoritarian regimes in the region are flourishing while the new democracies flounder. Why have dictatorships, not democracies, prospered politically since the Asian financial crisis? Pacific Asia began as an 'imagined community' of developmental dictatorships, making authoritarian development the 'original position' against which democratic governance is judged. While the demise of 'Asian values' contributed to the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, it did less harm to authoritarian regimes in more economically developed Malaysia and Singapore. The US-led anti-terror coalition provided several authoritarian rulers in Pacific Asia with welcome support from the West, while allowing them to weaken internal opposition. The new democracies, by contrast, faced international pressures to combat terrorism, often arousing local protest. Finally, middle class-based reformist movements have risked destabilising the region's new democracies in the name of good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the international legal framework and the Asia-Pacific perspective on the issue of public participation in environmental law making. Reiteration of the principle of public participation; Limits to efforts to democratize environmental decision-making in the Asia-Pacific region; Role of non-governmental organizations in the shaping and implementation of participatory democracy.

Argues that the conventional explanations offered in the modernization, the dependency and class literature such as culture, liberal colonialism, wealth, new middle class, are unable to account for the divergent paths of democratic development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Model highlighting the importance of conjuncture factors.