The 2nd Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning started yesterday in Durban, South Africa. The conference web-site is here: THE COMMONWEALTH OF LEARNING. I have taken the liberty of quoting at length from Education Minister Kader Asmal's opening speech, which is available at the Department of Education web-site here: Opening Learning: Transforming Education for Development. Asmal is perhaps the world's only national Minister of Education who is both a legitimate academic (former Dean of Arts at Trinity College, Dublin) and who obtained his foundational tertiary education by distance learning. I think his comments go some way towards addressing the common perception that he fails to understand distance learning and/or the role of education in a developing country. Here, then, is Kader Asmal on distance learning: … I was a graduate of Unisa, South Africa’s dedicated distance institution and one of the ten or so mega universities of the world. I spent long lonely hours at my texts, studying through what was then a purely correspondence institution. Incidentally many of South Africa’s liberation leaders also achieved access to higher education through Unisa. It was the only choice available to them as they languished in prison on Robben Island – a very real barrier to learning had been overcome. Unfortunately, though, not all distance educators are inspired by a vision of increasing access to quality educational opportunities. Too many, it seems, are inspired solely by personal or organizational profit. Making profit is by no means a problem if a quality service is provided, but in South Africa – as I’m sure is the case around the world – there are providers who exploit marginalized people by offering highly accessible but poor quality programmes to very large numbers of students. In some cases, so little is given to students by way of good learning materials, proper formative assessment tasks, or individual interaction with tutors that only a tiny minority pass. In others, programmes require only the regurgitation of information of a highly theoretical nature, so while students may pass, the qualification they receive is of dubious value. In an attempt to tackle the problem of quality provision, my department drew up a set of quality guidelines for distance education. We believe that striving for quality is critical – there can be no equity without quality. … One of the key quality criteria focuses on learner support. It reads as follows: Learners are supported to a considerable extent by the provision of a range of opportunities for real two-way communication through the use of various forms of technology for tutoring at a distance, contact tutoring, assignment tutoring, mentoring where appropriate, counselling (both remote and face-to-face), and the stimulation of peer support structures. The need of learners for physical facilities and study resources and participation in decision-making is also taken into account. I highlight this example because my own experience of correspondence study those many years ago was one of deep loneliness. I refer to it as "the loneliness of the long distance learner". It was not that I did not understand the text or grasp the concepts at a general level, though many students desperately needed support in these aspects. It was rather that I had no opportunity for interaction, both with peers and with those who might have more knowledge than I. I had no opportunity to test my ideas, to extend my conceptualization, or to make the knowledge my own so that I could apply it meaningfully. I believe it is essential to provide proper opportunities for proper interaction. Indeed, for me, one of the greatest challenges of distance education is to find creative ways to establish accessible learning structures, which enable this interaction. Providing meaningful, high quality learner support would be one of my key requirements for the merger of South Africa’s dedicated distance education providers. It would also be a major requirement of any provider, public, private or international, that offers distance education in South Africa. Perhaps it should be a requirement of all types of provision, as I am certainly aware that the sort of interaction I speak of cannot be taken for granted at the traditionally face-to-face higher education institutions where large impersonal lectures are prevalent, becoming more where little provision is made for tutorials, and the knock on the lecturer’s door, or the email message, remains unanswered. I am aware that meeting criteria of good quality means that distance education will not be cheap. While one might be able amortize the costs of curriculum and course development over large numbers of students involved in a particular programme, the learner support costs will in most cases increase in a nearly linear manner as student numbers increase. This clearly has major funding implications, which need to be carefully examined given the broader resource constraints that impact on education. As members of the audience are no doubt aware, a second key requirement of good distance education is to make serious, systematic investments in producing high quality courses and course materials. Regretfully, a common theme in much distance education practice has been to neglect this critical investment or to make it only when a course is initially developed. In the context of Africa’s developmental challenges, this problem is particularly acute because the continent as a whole simply lacks a sustainable tradition of indigenous knowledge production. If we are to achieve the goals of NEPAD, we will only be able to do so by regaining faith in our ability to produce knowledge, rather than just consuming the knowledge products of the developed world. Again, I believe that this concern is one affecting the entire developing world and not just African countries. I strongly believe that distance education has a major role to play here. Well-designed distance education courses and programmes can become critical vehicles for producing and disseminating knowledge that is relevant to the lives and aspirations of the people for whom they are intended. I believe that distance educators have a responsibility to take this challenge on as central to their cause, so that distance education does not simply become a factory-like production line, but rather a vibrant and active part of the knowledge production of the developing world. This of course does not mean that developing world distance educators should simply go it alone. There is a wealth of information and experience from all around the world on which we should draw in developing and implementing high quality distance education programmes. However, we must guard at all costs against simply becoming consumers of education developed elsewhere. We must be active participants in the ongoing intellectual endeavours that shape the global educational landscape. To this extent, I believe that we should be very wary of the tendencies exhibited by some so-called virtual universities, which seek to lock developing country markets into a mode of educational consumption by delivering courses entirely over the Internet from the developed world. This commodifies the learning process, which is unacceptable. Knowledge generation and intellectual development are the product of social interaction and engagement, and distance educators in the developing world should seek to protect this space rather than looking to buy into an ultimately disempowering – and educationally suspect – mode of information transmission from developed to developing world. (NEPAD = "New Partnership for Africa’s Development")
