DISTANCE AND OPEN EDUCATION
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS DISTANCE EDUCATION?
The language is confusing. ‘Distance education’ is sometimes taken to mean the use of television and at others the use of the internet. The words imply that students are always remote and never meet each other or their teachers. ‘Open learning’ suggests that anyone can enroll and start and finish when they like. ‘New information technologies’ sounds good but vague.
These guidelines are about the use of a range of technologies in education, using a set of definitions that have general currency. Distance education has been defined as an educational process in which a significant proportion of the teaching is conducted by someone removed in space and/or time from the learner. Open learning, in turn, is an organised educational activity, based on the use of teaching materials, in which constraints on study are minimised in terms either of access, or of time and place, pace, method of study, or any combination of these. The term ‘open and distance learning’ is used as an umbrella term to cover educational approaches of this kind that reach teachers in their schools, provide learning resources for them, or enable them to qualify without attending college in person, or open up new opportunities for keeping up to date no matter where or when they want to study.
Open and distance learning often makes use of several different media. Students may learn through print, broadcasts, the internet and through occasional meetings with tutors and with other students.
Three illustrations take us beyond definitions.
The University of the South Pacific serves scattered audiences over the huge area it serves. It teaches education, and other disciplines, by combining correspondence lessons with broadcasts and with regular sessions at regional centres within its region. The university was one of the earliest users of communication satellites and is able to run two-way seminars with its students by means of satellite links. The university’s early adoption of distance education has made good quality teacher education available that would have been beyond the resources of the individual small states of the Pacific.
In order to expand the supply of teachers as it came out of a period of civil war, Uganda has set up a number of programmes deigned to equip untrained and unqualified teachers with professional skills. It has done this by combining teaching mainly through print with regular face-to-face sessions for student teachers and short periods of intensive study within conventional teachers’ colleges.
The British Open University was set up in 1969 to widen access to education in Britain and has served as a model to many others. At the request of government it introduced a programme for a certificate in education for graduates who wanted to enter teaching but had no professional qualification. Teaching materials were distributed partly by mail and partly through the internet. Trainee teachers were based in schools where a mentor guided their teaching practice.
Students used computer conferencing as an integral part of the course to interact with tutors and with each other.
Open and distance learning may use print, broadcasts, cassette recordings, computer-based materials, computer interaction, videoconferencing, and face-to-face learning. We look at the choice of technologies in chapter 5. The essence of it is that it enables students to learn without attending an institution. That has made it attractive for students who, for practical, economic, social and geographical reasons cannot get to college. It also makes it particularly appropriate for audiences that are scattered, and audiences that cannot leave their jobs to attend full-time courses. The world’s sixty million teachers are like that.
CHAPTER TWO
PRINCIPLES OF OPEN AND DISTANCE EDUCATION
The reasons are varied. It has been used to reach trainees in geographically challenging areas such as the riverain regions in Guyana, mountainous areas in Nepal, the dispersed communities of the Indonesian archipelago and the small island states in the Caribbean and Pacific. In some high population countries such as China and Pakistan, distance programmes have played an essential role in providing teacher education on a huge scale. In many Latin America countries distance education has been used widely to support curriculum reform and teacher upgrading. Teacher education by distance is being used to redress inequalities in teaching qualifications in post-colonial Namibia and Zimbabwe and in South Africa, as a tool for reconstruction of the teaching service in Uganda. In other countries, it is being used to reach marginalized communities such as refugees in Sudan, itinerant communities in Mongolia, and minority- groups in northern Pakistan.
Using distance education for teacher training has various potential advantages. Large programmes have brought economies of scale. In contrast to college-based training, distance programmes can provide access to courses on a much larger scale and wider geographical reach. It can overcome regional differences in access to teacher education.
It provides a means of side-stepping the slowness and dilution of the cascade approach. In continuing professional development, distance education can help avoid the cost of replacing a teacher who has gone to full-time education. It can open up access to teacher-training opportunities for teachers with family responsibilities who are earning an income and need to remain within their communities. The establishment of a decentralised distance-education structure can also be used to support training in the districts and serve as a basis for the development of a programme for the continuing development of teachers. In print-poor countries, self-study materials can become a permanent resource. It can also ‘put information about curricula and teaching approaches directly in to the hands of individual teachers’ (Robinson 1997: 125) and cut down the time between learning about new teaching practices and trying them out in the classroom. This is particularly important in curriculum reform and short professional development courses. Carefully balanced mixed-mode teaching can help to double and triple a college’s training output per year. Where the infrastructure for them is in place, new information and communication technologies have opened up a range of new opportunities for course- and resource-based learning in teacher education.
Three general points need to be stressed. First, distance education is of potential benefit to teachers because it can reach scattered populations and can offer them education and training without their having to leave their schools. Its has great logistical advantages. This means that it offers the chance of accelerating the supply, or the updating of teachers, beyond what could be done through conventional means.
Second, good programmes of open and distance learning have benefited from its strengths and avoided its weaknesses. Some aspects of teacher education need to be done face-toface, or need close interaction with a tutor or with other students. Others do not.
Programmes that combine conventional and distance methods are likely to be better than those that rely on a single approach.
Third, and for that reason, the more successful programmes have been carefully integrated into the structure of teacher education as a whole. They have not been designed as second-class alternatives to conventional education but as a part of a complementary system using a variety of different approaches, each chosen for its appropriateness to the curriculum and the audience.
TEACHERS LEARN PRACTICAL SKILLS
In chapter one we distinguished between four functions of teacher education. In one sense, all teacher education needs to be oriented towards the ways in which teachers support children’s learning and so to the fourth of those functions, of strengthening teachers’ practice in the classroom. But there are differences in the emphasis that has been laid on this function between different programmes.
Where these are concerned simply to raise teachers’ background education, or where they are designed to help experienced teachers learn about new subject-matter, classroom activities may be downplayed.
In asking about practical skills it is therefore legitimate to ask how far this is part of the role of a distance- education programme. The question is critically important for the planner for economic, logistical and educational reasons. The economic ones follow from the fact that the supervision of classroom practice is likely to be labour-intensive and will not show economies of scale. Indeed, if supervisors are to travel and visit teachers in their schools, then the costs of travel may be a significant part of the budget. The logistics are inevitably complicated and likely to involve a partnership of the kind discussed in chapter 4.4; a distance-teaching organisation will seldom itself have the staff to undertake this work so that it is likely to involve other partners who in turn need management,
support and often training. From the educational point of view, changed activities within the teacher’s own classroom are, as we have argued, of the essence of teacher education. This has implications not only for any teaching-practice component within a course but for its structure and content as a whole. Even theoretical elements of a course, including materials presented in print or on radio, can be designed so that they relate to classroom practice. Open and distance learning has a potential advantage in terms of integrating theory and practice where it enables practising teachers to raise their skills by study at a distance and it is worth seeking strategies that will maximise that advantage.
Conventional as well as distance-education programmes have, with varying success, confronted this need to turn what teachers know and believe into what they do to support children’s learning.
Many conventional programmes fail to attend to this and some produce teachers who are formally qualified but have had only a token or minimal supervised school experience. In some countries, practical teaching forms no part of the final assessment of teachers. The issues for a distance-education provider are about managing the supervision and assessment of students in distant locationsand how to design materials and activities in ways which integrate knowledge or theory with practice.
In the cases set out in chapter 3 we have examples of different strategies: a support structure for local action-groups of teachers (Brazil), delegation of supervision and assessment to school staff, with varying degrees of prescription and support (Nigeria, Britain, and UNISA in South Africa), the
provision of teaching content, models and sequenced structure in the lessons provided for children (OLSET in South Africa), the design of course-work to require a practical application (Britain and Chile), the exchange of practical experience in workshops and newsletters (Mongolia and Brazil) or through websites (Britain and Chile), the demonstration of model lessons through television or video (China), the use of applied projects rather than examinations on theory and the inclusion of the assessment of performance in the final grade on formal programmes (Britain and Nigeria). Some of the projects place the practice of teaching at the centre of programme design and organisation, others assign it a relatively minor, or even marginal place, not because of the logistical difficulties involved for a distance education provider but because of the traditions and perceptions of teacher education in the different countries, and its role in conventional teacher-education programmes.
In general, strategies to integrate theory with practice fall into the three categories identified by Robinson (1997):
• Knowledge about practice (a teacher is able explain what multi-grade teaching is and produce an essay or examination answer on it);
• Knowledge applied to practice (a teacher can plan the organisation of multi-grade teaching or materials for it and show how these might be used in the situation or report and reflect on work done);
• demonstration of knowledge and understanding through performance (a teacher shows the use of multi-grade teaching through the conduct of teaching and learning activities, observed by others).
The different categories have different logistical and cost implications for distance education.
One danger here is that activities in the first category are (wrongly) assumed by programme providers to result in the outcomes found in the third (competence in performance) as a matter of course. The challenge for the planner is to design a programme so that knowledge is carried through from the first of these to the third and to build in a system of assessment and feedback that tests how successful the programme is in doing so. In many cases this involves more than, say, the integration of work based on classroom activity in assignments or videoconferencing sessions that look at classrooms and requires arrangements for a supervisor to see how
teachers are working within their classrooms.
CHAPTER THREE
STRATEGY/METHOD OF OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING
In chapter one we drew distinctions between programmes of initial education or training and those of continuing professional development, and between programmes for experienced and for inexperienced teachers. Initial teacher education and training is the programme of studies which leads to qualified teacher status according to the official standards of a country. It is the basic or first level of qualification for a teacher. It may be taken as a pre-service programme (before a trainee teacher begins work as a teacher) or an in-service one (while an untrained teacher is working as a teacher). Continuing professional development enables teachers to extend existing knowledge and skills and develop new ones. Some of this takes the form of long structured courses leading to formal qualifications (diplomas or bachelor’s or master’s degrees). Other forms are shorter, concentrate on skills in managing children’s learning or curriculum change and do not lead to additional qualifications. In some countries, qualified and unqualified teachers alike participate in continuing professional development. It may be provided as in-service activities (on-the-job learning) or out-of-school courses of varying length (off-the-job or in vacations).
In order to document recent international experience, UNESCO carried out a set of case studies on teacher education at a distance in 2001. The case studies fell into four groups which reflect differing uses of open and distance learning. They are summarized, which distinguishes programmes for initial teacher education, for continuing professional development, to reorient teachers for curriculum reform and to support career development. Their main features are then described in box 3.1 while a fuller account of them is available in the companion book to this one Teacher education through distance learning: technology, curriculum, cost, evaluation (Perraton, Robinson and Creed 2001).
CHAPTER FOUR
CHALLENGES FACING OPEN AND DISTANCE EDUCATION
The planning of open and distance learning may involve policy issues at international, national and institutional level.
The international issues arise in part because the forces of globalisation are affecting the content and practices of education, in part because new policy issues arise when education is no longer confined within national frontiers. Programme planners are thus increasingly exposed to innovations in teacher education and need to make judgements about the desirability, feasibility and acceptability of these internationalised ideas within their country and programme.
Changes to more practice-based teaching education, for example, have been encouraged internationally and become part of the common discourse about education. The has major implications for the local planning, implementation and management of
programmes for teachers. International conventions on the role and status of teachers as agents of change naturally affect national policy. At the same time, educational cooperation across borders, and cross border enrolment, put on to the decision-maker’s agenda jurisdictional questions about cross-cultural transference and language and about the control of crossborder enrolment and its accreditation or recognition.
At the national level, lines of responsibility for open and distance learning within government are likely to be complex and do not just lie with the education sector. Increasingly, the development of distance education raises questions that have to be answered within a national communication policy, part of which will be a policy for the educational use of communications.
Political, economic, technical and regulatory issues may all need to be considered. Some of these issues concern the respective roles of the private and public sector; educational institutions are likely to seek access to telecommunications on favourable terms, possibly through the use of governments’ regulatory powers in the telecommunications sector, or may want more freedom to use telecommunications than has traditionally been available. Other areas to be considered in a communications policy include:
• Investment policy, in relation both to the public sector and to the encouragement of particular areas of private-sector investment;
• Policy on tariffs and on any common carrier requirements;
• Government purchasing policy, and policy for the use of communication technologies for government’s internal communication;
• Technical standards including frequency allocation, systems reliability;
• The national development of national capacity and expertise;
• scheduling, influence, control over content and intellectual property;
• Issues of equity and access.
Within the education sector, decisions about such issues as the allocation of resources, fee policies, the recognition of qualifications, the regulating and monitoring systems needed or the use of teachers college facilities or staff are all likely to have implications for the educational service as a whole. Questions need to be addressed about the most appropriate contribution open and distance learning can make to different levels and types of education, including primary, secondary and tertiary education, and technical and vocational education and training, as well as to teacher education. Questions are also likely to arise about the national or regional location of responsibility for distance education. Many planning decisions will affect people outside a ministry of education: teachers’ associations and unions will, for example, be interested in the conditions of service for teachers working in a new role.
For institutions changing to dual-mode status, a key issue will be the balancing of resources allocated to open and distance learning against those of conventional provision and the systematic planning of policies to manage institutional change effectively. This is likely to include new faculty policies (new contractual and workload agreements, training, renegotiation of union contracts, evaluation and support); student policy issues (materials delivery, library access, counselling, financial aid, registration and record-keeping, technical support) and legal policy development (intellectual property including ownership of materials, copyright, and faculty, student and institutional liability).
REFERENCES
Arizona Learning Systems 1998 Preliminary cost methodology for distance learning, Arizona Learning Systems and the State Board of Directors for Community Colleges of Arizona
Avalos, B. 1991 Approaches to teacher education: Initial teacher training, London: Commonwealth Secretariat
Beeby, C. E. 1966 The quality of education in developing countries, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press
Cerda, C., Leon, M. and Ripoll, M. forthcoming ‘Teachers learning to use information technology in Chile’ in UNESCO International case studies of teacher education through distance learning.
Chivore, B. R. S. 1993 ‘The Zimbabwe Integrated Teacher Education Course’ in Perraton 1993
Clark, R.E. 1983 ‘Reconsidering research on learning from media’, Review of educational research Department for International Development 2001 Imfundo: partnership for IT in education Inception report, London.
Mählck, L and Temu, E B 1989 Distance versus college trained primary school teachers: a case study from Tanzania Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning.
Moon, B. and Leach, J. 1997 ‘Towards a new generation of open learning programmes in teacher education: the Open University (UK) pre-service teacher education programme’, paper presented to the Distance education for teacher development colloquium.