In recent years the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) has had the opportunity to engage with a very interesting example of learner support infrastructure for a distance education programme in one of the rural areas of South Africa.
This is in the BPrimaryEd programme offered by the University of Fort Hare’s Distance Education Project (UFH DEP). What is distinctive about the learning centres in this programme is that they are not buildings that have physical addresses; nor can they be can be pinpointed on a map or referred to as destinations when giving someone directions. Instead, they are made up of people, the abakhwezeli (those who keep the pot boiling), who constitute teams of highly mobile tutors and bearers of learning resources able to get to and provide support for students in far-flung areas of the Eastern Cape.
These experiences have led Saide to try to understand better its bottom-line conceptions of the constituents of a successful learning centre in support of a good distance education programme. The UFH DEP experience makes it clear that it is the people, and not the place, that lie at the heart of a learning centre.
Because the programme demonstrates this so well, Saide has come to regard it as a particularly important initiative in opening up distance learning in South African teacher education. The Saide concept paper, What is a Learning-Centred Learning Centre?, explores the implications of such a conception of learning centres for distance education. It argues that in order for a distance education programme to become truly open, it needs to have within it learning centres in which skilled mentors support its learners in an ongoing way.
The various functions that a learning centre must fulfil can be organised in a number of ways. These functions include providing information on and access to distance education courses, registration, recruitment and counselling of learners, delivery to students of programmes, ongoing learning support, enabling learners to benefit from information technology and media in learning, and ensuring the formal recognition and certification of qualifications.
What the UFH DEP demonstrates is that these functions need not be housed in a particular place to be delivered successfully. Actually, it is an organised group of people geared up to ensure the delivery of these functions that matters. Even access to venues and information technology can be facilitated by tapping into local facilities as needs arise, instead of establishing them in a permanent place styled a ‘learning centre”.
There are many distance education programmes that do not support their learners adequately, and thus fail to realise open learning. Distance learning is not simply a means of conducting learning and ongoing assessment through the post, as the worst practices of many of our distance education institutions assumed in the past (and as some, unfortunately, still do).
Rather, distance education needs to be conceived as a sophisticated collection of methods for the provision of structured learning in situations where learners are unable primarily to attend fixed classes at a centralised venue and in the physical presence of a teacher. The question is what kinds of methods and support are necessary to ensure that learners are able to engage optimally with the curriculum and learn from it, given their particular location, constraints and life circumstances. And the way that we organise these methods and support is the substantive issue in conceiving of what a learning centre should be. Rather than thinking about it primarily as a place, Saide suggests it is more useful to think of it as a group of people who carry out learner support functions.
One of the arguments in the Saide concept paper is that contemporary understandings of learning necessitate such a view of a learning centre. The concept of learner-centredness entails a shift from concentrating on what it is that must be taught to how it is that learners best learn in a course. The learner’s needs, interests and struggles become paramount, not those of the teacher.
In distance education, the central problem becomes one of how best to create a situation in which learners are able to engage and be supported in a particular, unfamiliar activity without having to be in the constant presence of practitioners of that activity. Part of the answer is that a good distance learning course requires carefully structured course materials that identify both the networks of knowledge and skill the learner has already acquired and those that the to-be-acquired knowledge domain contains, and then builds a learning pathway between them.
However, the support offered by the text in itself is not sufficient. No matter how well structured, it cannot provide all of the ad hoc feedback that is a necessary part of learning to engage in an unfamiliar practice. When a learner is engaged directly in learning a new practice — in, as it were, an ideal face-to-face relationship — the support that she receives takes the form of the constant, informal mediation of the unfamiliar activity to her by a more experienced practitioner.
But in distance education, this range of mediatory practices must be provided in the absence of sustained face-to-face contact between a learner and the experienced practitioners of a task. The texts, learning guides and structured activities of a distance programme, with judiciously spaced and used contact sessions, must provide a practice-in-itself within which the learner can be inducted into and supported in new, unfamiliar knowledge and skills. In distance learning, it is in combinations of training, materials and structured experience that the contexts of practice normally associated with a classroom are set up and sustained.
This is where the notion of a learning centre becomes important. A context needs to be provided for the much more structured, much less spontaneous support that learning at a distance requires. When we think about learning imperatives in this way, it is clear that a learning centre cannot be conceived of as primarily, nor simply, a place where the learner gets hold of a course and its materials.
Rather, it is a community of practice, consisting of people engaged in the practice, the pathways along which novices become experienced practitioners and the pedagogies used (the forms of induction into the practice). In conceiving what is entailed in the provision of successful distance education, it is the mobilisation of people (as the bearers and mediators of practices) that is the key element in the establishment of a learning centre.
So, in a well-conceived distance education programme, the character of the learning centre should not be driven by the requirements and constraints of a physical facility, but by those of the learners and the people who constitute that learning centre.
We often assume that distance learning programmes are by definition characterised by open learning. What seems clear though, is that it is only when adequate, people-based learner support is provided that open learning can be realised. There are far too many distance learning programmes that are closed, and that fail to provide the kind of structured learning experiences that will maximise access, learning and development. The new Saide concept paper on learning centres aims to encourage further debate on these issues.
The full version of this article appears in OLTDE: Open Learning through Distance Education, a Saide publication. The first three readers to call Saide will receive free copies of What Is a Learning-Centred Learning Centre? Tel: Jenny Louw, (011) 403 2813