Essay Draft - 1

Introduction

In this 21th century, the continuing growth in information technology (IT) which has successfully encouraged global interactions and wider internet access all around the world has introduced many modern means for education which allows people to get global information, “challenging assimilation and assessment skills” with ease, making “learning becomes a truly lifelong activity—an activity in which the pace of technological change forces constant evaluation of the learning process itself” (WikiEducator,2009). The internet access is especially important to high school students nowadays to obtain various useful online educational resources to help themselves in their studies, besides honing their soft skills such as critical thinking skill and problem solving skill. The usage of internet nurtures all-round students who are well-equipped with knowledge and valuable skills, making them to have comparative advantages to compete with others to get into better universities. However, in Malaysia, due to the digital divide among high school students from rural and urban areas, for example, Kuala Lumpur which has the highest penetration rate(119.4) and Sabah which has the lowest penetration rate(47.3), high school students from rural areas have less exposure to more information, causing them to be comparatively less competitive to get higher education. Based on the figures presented by the United Nations Development Program[UNDP], only five percent or 107,115 Sabah, a rural area in Malaysia, secondary students pursued tertiary education (2007). Apart from other factors such as family backgrounds, incomes and others, the poor internet access in this area is the dominant factor that results in such low enrollment to universities among high school students in Sabah. Therefore, as high school students from rural areas are comparatively less competitive than students from urban areas to have better tertiary education as a result of disparity in the accessibility in online educational information, the Ministry of Education of Malaysia should speed up the actions in narrowing the digital divide among high school students by allocating  more budget in increasing broadband penetration in rural areas so that fair competition among high school students to get into more prestigious universities occurs.

Problems
As people nowadays are aware that knowledge is significant to change and improve their life and living conditions while education is the most effective to become a knowledgeable individual, more and more parents in rural areas are sending their children to schools instead of asking them to work to earn for a living. This positive phenomena has increased the percentage of youngsters to enroll to high schools in Malaysia. However, the poor broadband penetrations confines to students to get more resourceful educational information outside their textbooks, which resulting in the limited exposure and knowledge received by them in school. The lack of facilities such as computer rooms and low income in families in rural areas make this problem to become worse.

The disparity in the accessibility of educational information causes high school students from rural areas to have comparatively lower performances in studies. Thus, they have disadvantages in competing with high school students from urban population to get into more prestigious universities.

Solutions:
To narrow the gap of internet usage between high school students from urban and rural areas, the Ministry of Education should allocate more budget in increasing broadband penetration in rural areas by providing adequate facilities such as computer rooms in schools to improve internet connectivity.