INITIAL THOUGHTS ON OPEN DISTANCE LEARNING (ODL)

OPEN AND DISTANCE E-LEARNING (ODeL) : DECOLONIZING THE LECTURE ROOM

Compiled by Joe Nel and Kallie de Beer

ORIENTATION:

Our Central University of Technolgy, Free State (CUT), only opened its doors 25 years ago as a socalled College for Advanced Technological Education which could more or less be compared with a Polytechnic in the UK or a Community College in the USA or Canada. The former South African government changed the name to Technikon of the Orange Free State (TOVS). (Please confer to my separate Blog on the history of our university.)

Without going into much detail, it was a typical and historically white (european) Higher Education Institution (HEIS). It was also a typical residential HEIS according to size, shape, finance and governance.

However, in 1990, it started a "branch" at the Satellite Campus of Correctional Services in Kroonstad, 220 kilometers from the city of Bloemfontein where the main campus resides. The management commonly refered to it as part time classes for part time learners in management and IT-courses.

In 1993 I was appointed as Director: Branches. At that time the TOVS had four branches in a geographical circumfrence of 300 kilometers. During an inspection of the former (now defunct) Sertification Council of Technikon Education in South Africa (SERTEC) renamed it in 1994 as "Satellite Campuses" for "distance education".

Subsequently I started with research on distance education and satellite campuses and eventually Open and Distance E-learning. (Please confer to my curriculum vitae Blog for references at national and international conferences re:ODeL.)

Fortunately my post was re-allocated to the Unit for Academic Development under the Dean for Academic Development, Prof Driekie Hay, who is also a very staunched researcher in Higher Education development. (Please confer to her Blog http://academicdevelopment.blogspot.com ) As such our UAD provided research capacity to publish Blogs for up to date comments which we redistribute to our academe. These research outcomes are used for abstacts and conference papers, however, the main objective is to clarify new and contemporary terminology, concepts, nomenclature and perspectives on the philosophy of Open Distance E-Learning.

Our historical development is imbedded in the transitional change of government policies as well as academic transformation that goes hand in glove with Africanisation as well as globalisation. Subsequently, the Managing Director of the EDUPARK in Polekwane, Prof Nel and myself decided to publish an opening Blog on "decolonizing the lecture room".

New thoughts and ideas of HEI’s corporative images are now to break down the old perceptions of poor quality first generation DE-practices into that of excellent quality ODeL users friendly methodologies to stay competitive in the global village of HE and the labour market.

Obviously much still has to be done to counter act the public is negative perception of “correspondence distance education” and poor student retention and pass rates. Even 30 years after the founding of Open Universities in Britain, Hong Kong and else where in the world, perceptions of non-campus based HE as second rate still persists. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 63).

However, the perceptions of ODeL are rapidly changing but still with the following red warning lights to forestall the idea that it is an ideal panacea for Higher Education:

• A naïve faith in the new technologies to solve all of the problems of educational deprivation around the world is misplaced. Access to technology, lack of skills to use the technology for teaching and learning, and the cost of buying and renewing technologies form the rest of the equation. It will continue to be the main impediments to the application of technologies for a much period than we are willing to accept. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 64).
• An absence of institutional commitment. A significant number of courses currently available on the Web and the Internet seem to be anchored not by institutional commitment but individual enthusiasm. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 64).
• Poor level of investment in staff training. The current level of investment in staff development is totally inadequate for the tasks expected from a faculty members requested to create learner conferred materials. The range of skills required to function in a multimedia environment are even more demanding. Institutions are quite enthusiastic about investing in new appliances, software programs and connections, but totally unrealistic when it comes to investing in training. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 65).
• Shifting costs away from institutions to individual learners. New approaches to ODEL via cyber pipes have also meant that the cost of learning is gradually shifting from being an institutional responsibility to that of a learner responsibility. Not many home learners have the level of disposable income to pay for these in addition to tuition and other institutional fees. If providers of education are not mindful, yet another barrier can emerge. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 65).
• A mismatch between the global market and the local curriculum. The Internet and the Web make it possible for education beyond borders to take place. But from the few examples that we know, curriculum has not kept pace with a global classroom. Curricula design, not surprisingly, is mostly responsive to local needs, and non-local learners suffer serious disadvantages. There is also the danger of creating new forms of imperialism, with one or two countries dominating large parts of the educational market with their view and interpretation of knowledge and information. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 65).
• Untested leadership to manage change. ODeL requires sound management and leadership. The early pioneers in the field, such as Walter Perry of UK Open University, Ram Reddy of the Indira Gandhi National Open University of India, were academically respected, politically connected and astute, charismatic speakers and interlocutors, clever strategists and tacticians. They did not just manage; they initiated change. (Dhanarajan, 2001: 66)
• The real danger of losing our sense of equity and equality of opportunities. At the heart of educational innovations, such as ODeL, must be the concern to reach out to those in our communities who were never able to participate in any form of learning. (Dhanarajan, 2001, 66).


Internationalisation

The philosophy of OL was to a great extend formed by global forces in HE such as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), and various other international organisations and funding agencies such as the World Bank.

For the purposes of this framework on the philosophy of OL, our focus will have to be on Africanization within the above mentioned international bodies.

In 1999 the UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) was established to further for example teachers’ education in its 53 African member states. It also strives for international co-operation for the development of education through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Union (AU). (IICBA, 2004).

Very important is the IICBA’s ability to utilise ODeL to train and develop a critical mass of teachers in the most cost effective manner. Another characteristic is its partnership with African intergovernmental organisations and nongovernmental institutions to identify and execute comprehensive strategies for Africa’s educational development. (ICCBA, 2004).

ICCBA links African Ministries of education to enhance Information and Communication Technology. One of its key objectives of the ICCBA’s ODeL project is to adapt the courses within African countries.

In 2000, world leaders set eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) that aim to transform the conditions of human kind in the 21st century. From this global perspective the holistic philosophy of OL was given a huge boost within the Commonwealth of Learning who promotes this idea since its establishment in 1988 in Canada. (COL, 2004)

“The Commonwealth of Learning is an agency established by the Commonwealth in Canada in 1988 to widen access to learning through the effective use of open distance learning (ODL) and new communications technologies. It rapidly developed into one of the Commonwealth’s most successful initiatives, pioneering developments in international distance learning.” (Educational Formal, 2004: 13).

“COL is the only international intergovernmental agency that focuses exclusively on using technology to expand the scope and scale of human learning. It operates on the premise that knowledge is the key to individual freedom and to cultural, social and economic development. It helps Governments to develop policies that make innovation sustainable and to build systems or applications that expand learning and works in partnership with other international and bilateral organisations working on the MDGs.”

“COL is a small agency. It achieves high impact through its focus on technology; placing special emphasis on open and distance learning (ODL) because of its proven effectiveness.”

“COL starts from the premise that the use of human reason, and the knowledge that flows from it, is the key to enabling all people to enjoy healthy and decent lives. As a world leader in the new field of knowledge management, COL has a special mission to help people access and use knowledge that can help them.”

“The achievement of the Millennium Development Goals does not depend on knowledge and learning alone. Political decisions, for example to make trading arrangements more equitable for developing countries, also have a vital role. However, ready access to usable knowledge can enable people in developing countries, from farmers to academics, to take rapid advantage of favourable changes”.

“Development depends on the creation, dissemination and application of knowledge by everyone. COL believes that technology can greatly facilitate these processes. The techniques of open and distance learning give farmers the know-how to improve their livelihoods and rural women the knowledge to arise a healthy family. Schoolnets create communities of practise among teachers and give children access to the best materials. E-learning and the knowledge media are gradually enriching the curriculum for all universities”.

COL is an effective partner in combining knowledge and technology to advance development.

• Across the globe:
More than 135 million children do not have access to primary education. Of those who do, many are taught by poor trained teachers in ill-equipped schools with no learning materials, laboratories or libraries, and will not complete primary school education. Over one billion adults, most of them illiterate, have never received or benefited from education when they were young. Many others require new skills to function in a new and ever-changing global environment. Access to HE is no more than percent of the relevant age group in many developing countries. (COL, 2005).

• Education:
It offers the best strategy to break the cycle of poverty, misery and violence. But conventional means alone or unable to meet this challenges. ODeL, coupled with the application of appropriate information and communications technologies, can play a central role in delivering education at all levels to all peoples, providing them with the chance for a brighter future.

“The Commonwealth of Learning”(COL)
Employs open learning and distance education to increase access to education and training. COL collaborates with governments and educational institutions and works with national and international development agencies, national regional distance education associations and open universities and schools around Commonwealth. Through its model-building programmes, COL has:
• Enhanced access to leaning in more than 40 countries;
• Influenced the development of open schools and universities;
• Conducted training seminars and studies;
• Established an extensive network of education and technology specialists; and
• Facilitated systemic changes in the delivery of education and influences government policy.” (COL, 2005).

COL’s partners within the UNESCO’s ITCBA’s member Ministers of Education Network work closely together to achieve the UNESCO’s World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal in 2000. Especially to improve the literacy rates of women in Africa. (Connection, 2004: 8).

A further advantage of COL for African member states is of course the advanced network which consists out of India. COL could be regarded as a global catalyst for collaborative action in a synergistic manner. (Round Table, 2000: 462).

Capacity building by creating programmes to incorporate a variety of customized (read Africanized) technological models, for collaboration is the core business of COL. (Macdonald, 2000: 463).

True collaboration involves more than joint funding says Macdonald (2000: 463). It extends also to joint planning, management, and implementation, such as that affordable by Canada’s piloting as innovation to the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Program.

COL participates in forums that bring together agencies-governmental, intergovernmental, or non-governmental-that have similar or complementary objectives, for example, in the Global Knowledge Partnership; the ongoing work with UNESCO, UNICEF and other development agencies in a range of areas including initiatives supporting the EFA agenda, secondary school reform and health education; the building of African capacity in distance education through their membership on the executive committee of the ADEA (Association for the Development of Education in Africa) supporting humanitarian agencies in their educational and training activities (UNICEF, UNHCR, OXFAM); and participating on the WETV Foundation Board. (Macdonald, 2000: 463).

The Federation of Commonwealth Open and Distance Learning Associations (FOCODLA). Cooperates with Commonwealth professional associations to assist them to apply open and distance learning in continuing professional education. Also to organise effective ways to follow up on the expectations of the Education For All (EFA) conference in Dakar. (Macdonald, 2000: 463).

The development of a formal relationship with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s (SAARC) distance education facilities is a high priority. As part of its role as a catalyst for collaboration, COL will explore ways to partner with the Indian educational television, Gyan Darshan, and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), to include educational programming useful to Commonwealth countries covered by the satellite’s footprint: East Africa through the Pacific and South Asia. In addition, the potential for the creation of an Eastern African facility for distance education development as well as the feasibility of establishing a facility for research and training in distance education in the Pacific will be significant initiatives. In cooperation with the Commonwealth Secretariat, and possibly the ADEA Working Groups on Teacher Training and Distance Education, COL organizes a sub-Saharan Africa policy dialogue on teacher training through ODL. Learning methodologies to improve training. (Macdonald, 2000: 464).

Africanisation

The National Association of Open and Distance Learning of South Africa (NADEOSA) also collaborated with COL to organize their annual inter-national conference in Durban June 2003. It forms a consortium with the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) and other African associations such as the Regional Training and Research Institute for Open and Distance Learning (RETRIDAL) in Nigeria as well as DEASA.

An African Ministers’ Conference on ODL were also held in early 2004 in partnership with the South African Department of Education and UNESCO, which made recommendations that will enable African countries to make maximum use of ODL and incorporate it into their education frameworks. COL is working with the Department and UNESCO in taking forward these recommendations. (COL: 2005).

In February 2005, COL collaborated with the World Bank, UNESCO and the AAU to organize a joint conference in Cape Town. Substantial workshops forged closer ties among university vice chancellors while an African Quality Assurance Network (AQUANET) was also established. (AAU: 2005).

The Association of African Universities (AAU)

The AAU is a not-for-profit continental organisation with a membership of 175 HEI’s drawn from 44 African countries and all sub-regions of the continent. Since its founding in 1967, the AAU has been serving as the collective voice and principal regional forum for consultation, exchange of information and co-operation among the institutions of higher education in Africa. Key areas featuring in its Core Programme have been:
• Strengthening of institutional capacity,
• Promotion of networking and institutional collaboration, and support for research on higher education issues,
• Policy advocacy, promotion of quality assurance and academic mobility, and
• Enhancing access to scholarly information. (AAU, 2005).

The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU)

The ACU is a registered charity with a membership of 500 universities across the Commonwealth. It was founded in 1913 and since then has served as the principal forum for discussion, the exchange of information and co-operation among the institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth. Its programmes, inter alia, promote academic mobility, institutional collaboration, research networks, research on higher education issues, (in particular borderless higher education and benchmarking institutional management processes.

Another important sub-division of the AAU, namely PAREN (The Promoting of Research and Education Networking-Internet), is already on track and collaborates with the Canadian Independent Development Agency (CIDA) as well with the AVU, a project of the World Bank. (AAU: 2005).

Most important for South African Universities is the establishment of SARUA (Southern African Regional Universities Association) which operates according to the SADC protocol within the greater NEPAD structures. (SADC-Protocol: Article 7:14). In ODeL terms the African Council for Distance Education (ACDE) promotes OL methodologies such as Flexible and Blended learning. (AAU: 2005).

The South African Minister of National Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, committed her Department’s desire for technical partnerships with other African universities to establish a new African university infrastructure. (AAU, 2005).

In addition, the IICBA, of UNESCO, underpins the COL and AU initiatives within the NEPAD Secretariat on educational issues. Substantial development work has also been done on science and technology for industrialisation. (IICBA; 2005).

All in all Africanization of ODeL is still only in the making. Suffice to say that it is a very neglected issue at many South African universities who do not really recognise the urgent needs of the African continent at large. Unfortunately politics on the continents bedevilled much of the valuable information on ODeL. For example the predominant negative news reports that over shadows the sincere objectives of the Virtual Institute for Higher Education in Africa, (VIHEAF) which is geographically situated in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is an UNESCO cluster office which offers free registration on the Internet http: // www.viheaf.net. VIHEAF inter alia strives to:

• Build/strengthen the capacity of teachers and other personnel in educational in stitutions in sub-Saharan Africa in critical areas of national and regional needs as identifies through the machineries of AU, MINEDAF and NEPAD;
• Provide Internet-based training on HIV/AIDS Education for teachers at the primary, secondary and higher education levels in Africa;
• Provide Internet-based training on the development of materials for open and distance learning;
• Enhance the knowledge and skills of academic staff in institutions of higher learning on such issues as (a) teaching of large classes; (b) effective utilisation of (meagre) resources; (c) modern methods performance; (d) basic guidance counselling techniques; (e) basic skills of curriculum development: and (f) techniques for writing winning grant proposals.
• Share experiences among staff in institutions of higher learning and within the context of the World Conference on Higher Education (WCHE) and the African Network for Innovations in Higher Education (ANIHE) on best practices in higher education teaching. (VIHEAF: 2005).

Thinking Beyond Scenarios

Our vision is to Africanize a differentiated but single co-ordinated African higher, further and vocational education system of the southern African of Regional Universities Association (SARUA) within the Association for African Universities (AAU) in tandem with NEPAD.

On the micro level, an OPEN UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE will sooner or later be established to encapsulate the following institutions:
• The University Free State (UFS);
• The Central University of Technology Free State (CUT);
• The UNISA – Regional Distance Facilities;
• Further Education and Training Institutions (FETI’s); and
• Vocational colleges (Agricultural and Nursing).

Eventually, the Free State Higher and Further Education Consortium (FSHEC) of which the CUT is also a member will co-operate within SARUA and its ODeL substrates such as:
• ACDE
• DEASA
• NADEOSA
• World Bank
• AVU
• AAU
• COL
• UNESCO

Timeframes of UNESCO for example to train teachers in Africa is as follows:
 Begin interventions:
 2006: 16 countries
 2008: add 7 countries
 2010: add 15 countries
 2012: add 8 countries

 Consultation with Member State to determine which countries enter the Teacher Education Initiative next
 Assistance up to four years (AAU: 2005)
 ODeL methodologies are prominent through out (Own italics)

Step by step the way is pared fonto an holistic approach to Higher Education.

The Higher Education South Africa (HESA)

CUT Council agreed, in principle, that the CUT should subscribe to and become an institutional member of this Section 21 Company, which represents the interests of South African public HEI’s. The Principal/Vice-Chancellor of the CUT was appointed and authorised to make all the arrangements and sign all such documents as may be necessary to secure the CUT’s status as a subscribing member of Higher Education South Africa, on terms which he might deem appropriate. The Principal/Vice-Chancellor of the CUT was appointed as a director of HESA and was appointed and authorised to make all arrangements and sign all such documents as may be necessary to give effect to this resolution. (CUT Council: 2005)

Technology based ODeL which is currently hampered by the multilingual African societies will be overcomed via appropriate technical solutions without totalitarian language management engineering of politicians. Carl Sayan (1996: 432) writes in his book “The Demon-haunted world: Science is a candle in the Dark”:

New ideas, invention, and creativity in general, always spearhead a king of freedom breaking out of hobbling con-straints. Freedom as a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and be technologically competitive. At the same time, science – or rather its delicate mix of openness and scepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and dedate – is a pre-requisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society.

Skeptical thinking does not imply that ODEL will be exactly planned according to the philosophy of OL as argued for the only and single solution for HEI’s in Africa, but to serve as a premise or starting point for an holistic differentiated meaning. That implies that the whole concept is bigger than its parts which could be investigated with a logical set of logical reasoning tools:

• Facts that ODeL is on the agenda for HEI’s;

• Substantive evidences of academic debates are available;

• Experts of ODeL with reknowned authority propagate the democratic ideas of freedom and openness;

• OL is open for multiple working hypothesis for a number of methodologies that are successfully implemented and developed, e.g. Flexible learning, Blended Learning and all its sub-divisions;

• ODEL as such is an alternative hypotheses on its own. A number of new ideas on OL can be elaborated on, however, not initial impressions which were already coined;

• Alternatives for ODeL are yet to be developed. Subsequently it is not a final panacea for HEI’s. One reason for example, will be to reject the idea that e-learning could ever replace the lecturer in the African learning culture;

In conlusion:

• Scientific ODeL research is quantifiable. Refer to curriculum vitae: http://Kareldebeer.blogspot.com. Cf the great number of HEI’s in these references who are already implementing one or other form of ODeL;

• There is a chain of logical arguments how ODeL currently develops in Africa ;

• NEPAD has a budget to fund ODeL (AAU=Press Release); and

• In comparing the data on the philosophy of OL, the simple choice is to accept the ODeL as a Fait de accompli at African HEI’s.