Graham Hayman
Universities are heading for a crunch with the mainstay of the government’s policy on education, the National Qualifications Framework (NQF).
Eventually, all tertiary institutions will have to meet the requirements of the South African Qualifications Authority, which created and administers the NQF. If they do not, they risk losing their government subsidies and accreditation of their programmes.
While many administrators have begun to come to grips with the NQF, the biggest need is to “retrain” academics. Those involved say lecturers will need to shift their attitudes, as well as their academic practices.
The NQF is not nearly as rigid as many suspect, but it does require wide participation. Some wonder whether the brain drain will leave enough skilled people to make it work.
Outcomes-based education is an educational philosophy widely used elsewhere but applied differently in, for example, the United States, Wales, Scotland and New Zealand.
The NQF requires outcomes-based education to make it work, and has a few add-ons particular to South Africa. For instance, neighbouring universities and technikons are encouraged to collaborate and rationalise.
Many academics think the NQFgoes too far – they’re afraid they will lose their academic
freedom. There are disagreements about “quality” and “efficiency”. Some think it doesn’t go far enough. Others who want to Africanise the curriculum think the NQF will actually handicap their efforts.
Under apartheid education, black and white systems used the same educational method (although content and resources differed). Putting it crudely, the method was “chalk and talk” and “the Big Exam”.
Outcomes-based education is as different from this as cheese from chalk. Instead of writing and talking about knowledge, students must prove they can use it in practice. An outcome is evidence that a student can practically apply knowledge. This cannot be assessed by an exam alone. Because assessment methods must change, teaching methods must change too.
The NQF demands huge retraining of all lecturers to help them teach and assess differently. And the weight of retraining is going to fall on the poorly resourced academic development centres at universities across the country.
Some academics think outcomes-based education means new labels for old processes, and others have used aspects of outcomes-based education for years, without realising it. Professionally oriented departments – medicine, for example – have always had to produce graduates who could demonstrate practical competence.
Academics are suspicious of the NQF for many reasons. They dismiss outcomes-based education because it’s often applied to technical education, and doesn’t appear to suit general degrees such as a BA or a BSc.
South African academics are promoted mainly on their research and publications, so they are tempted to reduce teaching time. Outcomes-based education does not take more time to teach than existing methods. But in the transition period, academics will need to spend time learning about it, and then rethinking their teaching and assessment to make it work.
University administrators also have problems with the NQF. Not only are there more immediate pressures – funding cuts and a drastic drop in enrolments in 1999 – but each university jealously protects its specialist degrees and research areas.
They exploited ambiguities in the Act which introduced the NQF to avoid standardising their courses nationally. Universities didn’t want students to construct a modular degree with “off-the-shelf” courses from several campuses. This would negate their “brand identity”, their competitive marketing edge for recruiting matriculants or raising research funds.
Also, students who campus-hopped would not achieve the higher-level integrated thinking skills, the intellectual nourishment that resulted from a carefully balanced diet of planned course combinations.
The NQF is intended to reduce race and class barriers, but there’s criticism of this aspect too. Andr Kraak, an education policy researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, points out the NQF could unintentionally replace the old racial divisions with class barriers if it is applied in a narrowly technicist or behaviourist way. But because the NQF is difficult to work with, the technicist way might seem easier.
What happened to the rousing war cries of the people’s education movement of the 1980s? This rhetoric was understandable, because it was created by people in the streets, classrooms and union meeting halls who were themselves not highly educated.
In the 1990s campaign for reform, the better- educated youth and exiles from foreign universities took over policy-making. Also, the economic demands of globalisation dawned. Outcomes-based education and the NQF seemed able to solve internal and external problems at one stroke.
By law, the NQF is a very open system, demanding participation by many stakeholders. It does not regulate by direct government prescription.
A Tanzanian professor has evocatively described it as “the state setting the menu, but staying out of the kitchen”. But to cook up this new menu is going to make huge demands on universities over the next few years.
Graham Hayman is a former lecturer in media studies at Rhodes University. He has researched open learning in South Africa and Canada