“Distance” was the operative word at a high profile education conference in early February in Cape Town – and not simply in terms of its geographical connotations. The All-Africa Ministers’ Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education served to underscore the chasm between policy and delivery on distance education.
But participants – including ministers of education from 36 African countries among a 270-strong pastiche of delegates from Africa and the diaspora – began working out ways towards bridging the divide.
It was clear there were the urgent educational issues at stake. As a delegate from Nigeria, Olui Ka Nkrame, quipped shortly before the conference convened: ‘Education in Africa is a bit like Cinderella – all dressed up and ready to party but with a pumpkin, instead of a carriage.”
The conference, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), occurred against a difficult and fractious educational backdrop. Adult literacy levels throughout Africa in general and South Africa in particular remain appallingly low. On the home front learners and educators at all tiers – primary, secordary and tertiary – are increasingly vociferous in their demands for a more equitable redistribution of resources and a quickening of the pace of transformation.
Underpinning the conference, therefore, was the acknowledgement that current education models and the extent of delivery do not meet the demands being placed on African countries. Alternatives, therefore, must be explored.
In his opening address, Education Minister Kader Asmal pointed out that the ‘increasing globalisation of the world economy makes it imperative for Africa to raise its education and skills levels in order to be both competitive and relevant. It is through greater access to learning that we in Africa can respond to escalating poverty levels.”
The title of the conference was Transforming Education for a New Africa: Realising the Potential of Open Learning and Distance Education.
The terms tend to be used interchangeably, but there is a distinction between open and distance learning. While open learning refers to a philosophy of educational practice, distance education refers to the methodology. Other terms used in the field of distance education include ‘correspondence education”, ‘distance learning”, ‘distributed learning”, ‘external studies”, ‘flexible learning”, ‘blended learning” and ‘self-instruction”. With the increased use of information and communications technologies, more terms have been added to capture a diversified field.
Distance education is not a recent development in South Africa. Unisa became a fully-fledged correspondence college as long ago as 1946. Similarly attempts have been made to ensure the quality of distance education (or correspondence education as it was then called) since the passing of the 1965 Correspondence Colleges Act that regulated private provision of distance education.
Where distance education has been most successful is at universities. But in order to remain sustainable, there is a pressing need for separate quality criteria for distance education, effective strategies to be implemented and ongoing stakeholder participation. This was the recurring refrain in one of the conference’s more provocative papers delivered by the South African Institute for Distance Education.
Entitled Beyond the Wish List: Assuring the Quality of Distance Education in South Africa, the paper underscored the urgency of self-evaluation and internal quality improvement, in order to prevent poor practice. A key strategy for taking quality assurance beyond a wish list is the development and application of minimum targets for distance education. If rigorously applied, these minimum targets can both educate providers in acceptable practice and create pressure to reform poor practice.
To illustrate both the success and blunder-factor of distance education in Africa, delegates drew on various case studies throughout the region. These included:
– Tanzania Radio study-group campaigns on health education in the 1970s
– Zambia Farm radio forums from the 1960s to date, and cooperative education campaigns by radio in the 1980s
– Pakistan Adult basic education programmes at a distance from the Allama Iqbqal Open University in the 1980s and onward
– Ghana Farm radio forums from the 1960s to date and the use of radio programmes as part of the functional literacy campaigns of the 1990s
– Namibia ‘Cattle Is Our Livelihood” experimental farmer
education project using radio and study groups run by the University of Namibia in 2001
– Sudan Post-literacy basic education through self-help reading material generation via the Solo Press is still running.
In all these cases the use of open and distance-learning techniques illustrated their potential to create effective learning among illiterate and neo-literate adults and to reach out to much larger numbers than are normally reached by conventional teaching methods.
Some of the most pertinent questions addressed were:
– What is the realistic role of technology in any strategy?
– How does one ensure that the implementation becomes part of the national education system and that institutions are renewed and developed?
– How does one construct partnerships to encourage resource-sharing, achieving economies of scale and leveraging existing capacities within the country and region?
– Can any implementation strategy include private-public partnerships to encourage innovation, research, education and training?
– What type of leadership and management training is necessary?
The conclusions reached by the end of the conference were
sobering. Developing a distance-education system within South Africa – and indeed the rest of the continent – will be a daunting task. It is not a panacea for all ills besetting Africa’s educational systems. But it is ultimately viable, not simply as a ‘marginal” delivery mode but as a learner-driven system integral to all educational provision.
Collaboration and resource-sharing are essential strategies in dealing with paltry resources, expertise and infrastructure.
Without these approaches to education, the African university as we know it today will languish, with the divide between conventional and distance teaching becoming all the more difficult to bridge.