Chapter Eight

Open Learning and Distance Education

A common response internationally to massive inefficiency in an existing system has been to propose new structures or systems. Given that at least one reason why this research project was initiated was a desire to explore the viability of establishing such a new structure – an Open School – we believe it is important to explore this possibility in more depth. This exploration is appropriate because it draws our analysis into issues of open learning and distance education, both of which are central themes in this research.

 What is an Open School? 

Many countries around the world, when faced with problems of learner access to the conventional schooling systems, have implemented some or other form of Open School as a response to these problems. As can seen from our international case studies (see appendices one to four), the reasons for establishing such systems are many and varied, depending on the context in which they are implemented. Nevertheless, they share a commonality, which forms the basis of our own definition of an Open School:

An educational institution operating in the spheres of primary and/or secondary education, providing courses and programmes predominantly through use of distance education methods. 

Most schools of this nature have been established for some time. The Correspondence School in New Zealand, for example, was established in 1922, while the Open School in India is over 20 years old. Reasons for establishing such schools have tended to revolve around accessibility to traditional schooling. In the two examples mentioned above, part of the motivation to establish the School was to provide access to students in remote farming communities (New Zealand) and access to large numbers of students whom the mainstream schooling system could not absorb (India).

Very often, establishment of Open Schools has also been motivated by intrinsic weaknesses in the mainstream, ‘contact’ schooling system, which policy makers have seen requiring years of structural change before large-scale improvements will become noticeable. Thus, Open Schools provide a handy, reasonably quick institutional solution to problems of educational delivery, which can operate largely outside of the mainstream schooling system and hence not be slowed down by the pace of these structural changes. On the face of it, these appear then to be structures of particular interest and relevance to South Africa. The country faces massive problems in the area of schooling, and there are concerns that changes to this massive system will seriously delay meaningful educational delivery to many South Africans. 

Under these circumstances, it certainly is tempting to consider establishing a new educational institution outside the mainstream system. There is, however, a very real danger implicit in this, namely that such expediency further retards the pace of change in mainstream systems. We believe that recent educational developments compound this problem, suggesting that, while Open Schools may have provided some sensible, ‘easy’ solutions to policy makers of yesteryear, they no longer remain a viable educational intervention.

 

 Open Schooling and Distance Education 

We believe that Open Schools are based on an historical distinction that has existed in educational systems between ‘distance’ and contact’ education. This distinction has been very useful for many years, particularly as it allowed for the establishment of innovative responses to educational problems – such as those contained in our international case studies – that could be set up and run without waiting for changes in mainstream educational systems. This flexibility was important to the success of many distance education institutions around the world, but has also had the unfortunate consequence of establishing two distinct educational systems, which have historically operated in parallel and created long-term policy problems. This problem has been compounded recently, as there has been an explosion of educational delivery options, around which it has become increasingly difficult to establish meaningful policy and regulatory frameworks.

The more research SAIDE has conducted in South African education, the harder we have found it to maintain neat categorizations, as these are increasingly containing too divergent a range of educational practices to remain relevant. This has become particularly problematic in the area of distance education. For example, distributed lecturing systems using video-conferencing equipment and systems using instructionally designed study guides and decentralized tutorial support find themselves located within the same category, although they bear almost no resemblance in terms of pedagogical approach, technologies used, and their financial implications. This is not to suggest that one is intrinsically better than the other. It simply points to the inadequacy of planning approaches that assume the planning requirements of both will be adequately met by a single framework called ‘distance education’. We believe that this conceptual problem lies at the heart of any concept of an ‘Open School’. Its implications are also, however, much broader than this.

 'Distance' and 'Contact': An Outdated Dichotomy? 

We believe that several recent research projects in South Africa have, if nothing else, demonstrated unequivocally that the traditional dichotomy of ‘distance’ and ‘contact’ education has outlived its usefulness. The growth of distance education methods of delivery has been a key feature of education in the twentieth century, a feature which has marked South African education as much as education in any other country in the world. Initially, these methods were developed as distinctly different from contact education, resulting in the establishment of dedicated distance education institutions such as the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the Technical College of South Africa. To most people, distance education came to be seen as provision for those people denied access to contact education (either because they cannot afford the latter or because circumstances demand that they study on a part-time basis), and distance education was regarded as a separate educational ‘mode’ operating through systems that ran parallel to contact education systems. 

The examples and case studies presented in this and other reports,[1] however, reflect an ever-growing diversity of educational practices being clustered under this ‘catch-all’ phrase of distance education. Further, many educational practices using what might historically have been described as distance education methods are not labeled overtly as distance education by their protagonists, either because it has simply not occurred to them to do so, because they are conscious of the threat of seeing government subsidy reduced (a problem mostly restricted to higher education), or due to concerns about student perceptions. These practices are also being integrated into contact educational systems, as growth in such practices at traditionally contact institutions demonstrates. 

Awareness is now growing that elements of distance education have almost always existed in face-to-face programmes, while educators involved in good quality distance education increasingly recognize the importance of different types of face-to-face education as structured elements of their programmes. This trend has rendered rigid distinctions between the two modes of delivery meaningless. Compounding this problem, growth of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) has begun to make the notion of distance difficult to interpret, while creating a number of educationally and financially viable new means of providing education. Many educational providers in GET and FET are busy with processes of developing strategies to harness ICTs effectively.[2]

In many other research and policy processes, SAIDE has suggested that an appropriate solution to this problem is the conceptual introduction of a planning continuum of educational provision. This continuum has, as two imaginary poles, provision only at a distance and provision that is solely face-

to-face. The reality is that all educational provision exists somewhere on this continuum, but cannot be placed strictly at either pole. A major advantage of this blurring is that educational planners can turn from meaningless hypothetical debates about the relative virtues of particular methods of educational provision to consideration of the nature of learning and the educational value of a course’s structure and content. Educators often end up equating particular methods of education with good quality education, even when these methods are being poorly implemented. The notion of this continuum is free of such premature and unnecessary judgements about quality. We believe it should form the basis of any strategic planning processes undertaken to harness the potential of distance education methods in South Africa, rather than somewhat anachronistic efforts to set up ‘single mode’, distance education institutions such as Open Schools.  

Such an approach is vital in this context precisely because it can enable planners to remove the baggage of educational models developed for fundamentally different contexts (which continues to dog educational interventions in the country), while allowing them to draw on the lessons contained in the implementation of these models. This conceptual shift is vital in changing the structure of GET and FET systems in South Africa. In particular, it will allow for greater flexibility and open possibilities of collaboration, both of which are vital to improvements in educational quality and cost-effectiveness of educational provision, issues of particular relevance to South African policy-makers currently.  

We believe the above discussion suggests clearly that an Open School is neither a viable nor desirable intervention at this stage for South African schooling. It is based on a dichotomy that is losing relevance in educational planning, and is also likely to draw additional scarce resources away from solving fundamental problems dogging the mainstream schooling system.  

The international consultants we brought out for this research exercise agreed that, politically, it would probably not be possible in their countries to establish a separate, Open School under current circumstances. Most also agreed that, given the kinds of changes described above, it would also not be particularly desirable. Interestingly, the international case studies completed for this report (see appendices one to four) also reflect a growing trend for these ‘Open Schools’ to be providing support services to the educational system as a whole. We believe that this trend is significantly more interesting and relevant to South Africa, and it is therefore picked up again in the following chapter. Nevertheless, we believe that an Open School does not constitute a viable or desirable policy intervention in South African schooling. Efforts should rather be made to integrate the best and most relevant practices emerging from such interventions around the world into the mainstream GET and FET systems in South Africa, and this therefore provides the focus for the remainder of this chapter.

Distance Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning

Regretfully, the simplistic use of terminology outlined above has crept further into the field of educational technology. This new trend, particularly pervasive in American educational debates but now finding its way into South African educational discourse, has been to use ‘distance education’ and ‘educational technology’ interchangeably or even as a single, composite term. The most obvious problem with this is that is simply an illogical inference. Educational technologies are used regularly in face-to-face educational environments, whether they be ‘old’ technologies like print or whiteboards or ‘new’ technologies like data projectors or personal computers. 

More importantly, though, the use of distance education and educational technology as interchangeable or composite phrases introduces a blurring conflation of the terms, which – at least in many South African educational interventions – has led to poor quality strategic planning. In many ways, it is similar to the conceptual integration of open learning and distance education in the United Kingdom and Australia – open and distance learning – which created a real misperception that distance education was intrinsically ‘open’. In the same way, many people in South Africa harnessing educational technologies think they are harnessing the benefits of good quality distance education, when, in most cases, they are simply finding technologically clever (and often not so clever) ways of replicating traditional, face-to-face educational models. Many of these projects have blazed a sad trail of failed educational technology projects (most notably in applications of broadcasting technologies to transmit lecture-style programming), wasting huge amounts of time and money. On the positive side, these experiences have valuable lessons for South Africa, so there is no reason why we need continue repeating many of these costly mistakes.  

The key point here is that each educational intervention in South African GET and FET should be planned, implemented, and reviewed on its own merits, rather than forced into simplistic, dichotomous categories (such as ‘distance education’ or ‘face-to-face education’), which set arbitrary and unhelpful constraints. Leading on from this, attempts by South African educators to harness the potential of different technologies to support their educational interventions should not automatically be regarded as distance education interventions. Technologies can be applied in a range of ways, to support an almost limitless combination of teaching and learning strategies, and it is essential to keep options as open as possible. This flexibility should form the cornerstone of all educational planning processes. South Africa has a diversity of people with a wide range of educational needs. There is no single teaching and learning model that will equally meet these diverse needs equally well. This point seems obvious, but cannot be stressed strongly enough, particularly given the almost innate human desire to find simple, packaged solutions to complex problems.

Distance Education and Resource-Based Learning

Some years ago, in a report written for SAIDE, Wally Morrow described a fundamental problem in higher education as follows:

the traditional culture of Higher Education is based on a picture of teaching and an idea of Higher Education institutions which, in combination with each other, constitute a (perhaps the) major barrier to the accessibility and availability of Higher Education.[3]

He went on to suggest that the principle recommendation which can contribute to the dismantling of this barrier is to think of teaching in terms of resource-based learning.  

In the report to which Morrow contributed, SAIDE argued that the term ‘resource-based learning’ emerges as a logical consequence of the collapse of distinctions between contact and distance education, together with the increasingly exciting variety of media available and decline in production and reception costs of these media. In essence, it means that a significant but varying proportion of communication between learners and educators is not face-to-face, but takes place through the use of different media as necessary. Importantly, the expensive face-to-face contact that does take place need not involve simple transmission of knowledge from educator to learner; instead it involves various other strategies for supporting learners, for example tutorials, peer group discussion, or practical work. In this respect, therefore, resource-based learning draws significantly from the lessons learned in international distance education provision throughout the twentieth century. Critically, we argued that resource-based learning is not a synonym for distance education. Rather, it provides a basis for transforming the culture of teaching in the entire higher education system to enable that system to offer better quality education to significantly larger numbers of learners in a context of dwindling funds.  

This research project has, we believe demonstrated that this shifting conceptual framework is as relevant to GET and FET as it is to higher education. This is because we believe that the motivations for shifting to resource-based learning and those for turning to distance education have been conflated. The result is that an unfortunate qualitative value has come to be attached to the term distance education –namely that, de facto, it achieves the goals of resource-based learning – that is neither deserved nor useful. Therefore, having worked through the concept of an Open School – using this to propose much more flexible, open approaches to educational planning – we turn now to trying to develop a clearer understanding of why use of distance education and resource-based learning strategies is growing internationally. This analysis is important in deepening understanding of the nature of the practices, and also serves to highlight that cost is only one factor amongst many influencing educational planners. We believe that it is an important extension of the discussion surrounding an Open School, as it helps to give practical meaning to the concept of more open, flexible planning. 

Using the first-level definitions provided in the box below, we will examine briefly why a growing number of education institutions, including those in the GET and FET sectors, have been turning to growing use of distance education methods and to resource-based learning, and what range of practices this incorporates.

First-Level Definitions 

Distance Education

Distance Education describes a set of teaching and learning strategies (or educational methods) that can be used to overcome spatial and temporal separation between educators and learners. These strategies or methods can be integrated into any educational programme and – potentially – used in any combination with any other teaching and learning strategies in the provision of education (including those strategies which demand that learners and educators be together at the same time and/or place).  

Resource-Based Learning

Resource-based learning involves communication of curriculum between learners and educators through use of resources (instructionally designed and otherwise) that harness different media as necessary. Resource-based learning strategies can be integrated into any educational programme, using any mix of contact and distance education strategies. Resource-based learning need not imply any temporal and/or spatial separation between educators and learners, although many resource-based learning strategies can be used to overcome such separation.

Reasons for Using Different Teaching and Learning Strategies

We have separated our analysis along a slightly arbitrary line, differentiating between distance education and resource-based learning (using the first-level definitions outlined above). This is important because it helps to draw out some of the tensions inherent in the range of educational practices with which SAIDE has engaged over the past few years.  

It would, of course, be näive to believe that the motivations of all educators and educational providers using resource-based learning and distance education methods are educationally driven. Many organizations and individuals in South Africa are using certain distance education methods and cheap versions of resource-based learning to increase student numbers and/or income with little or no concern for impact on the quality of that provision. Likewise, we do not wish to create the impression that educational institutions and programmes are driven by systematically understood and articulated reasons. Much of the work we have explored has evolved organically, driven by the enthusiasm and interests of individual educators. Nevertheless, we believe it is important, in reflecting on the effect of such activity, to pull together broader trends that might have influenced or emerged from people’s work. Hence, the motivations outlined below aim to move beyond these simplistic interpretations of motivation to explore other reasons why educators committed to quality of educational provision have been implementing such changes.

Why the Use of Distance Education Methods?

Whether consciously or unconsciously, attempts to make use of distance education methods in South Africa over the past few years have been driven by a desire to build on some or all of the following lessons emerging from the history of distance education practices: 

1.              Providing access to students who would - either because of work commitments, geographical distance, or poor quality or inadequate prior learning experiences - be denied access to traditional, full-time contact education opportunities. This motivation has possibly been the key motivating factor behind use of distance education methods. The drive has been motivated partly by growing awareness of the importance of lifelong learning and corresponding attempts to respond to market needs. It has also been motivated by dwindling student numbers in some of the more traditional areas of educational provision (for example, in some areas of FET), and a corresponding need to find new educational markets. 

2.              Seeking to expand access to educational provision to significantly larger numbers of learners. This motivation is linked to, but not the same as, the previous one. Its difference lies chiefly in the scale of programmes. Many programmes motivated by a desire to provide access to students who would be denied access to traditional full-time contact education do not really have goals of reaching significantly larger numbers of learners. Indeed, it is notable that large-scale distance education programmes are, in general, confined to very few educational sectors, most notably nursing and teacher education. Most other programmes we have engaged with tend to be small-scale interventions, although it is fair to suggest there may be a change in this regard as alignment between industry/commerce and programme providers gathers momentum. 

3.              Shifting patterns of expenditure to achieve economies of scale by amortizing identified costs (particularly investments in course design and development and in effective administrative systems) over time and large student numbers. This motivation draws together the above two motivations, and has been an underlying economic rationale for many distance education institutions around the world. Its success depends on limiting numbers of courses, while maximizing enrolments on these courses. Many distance education programmes we have worked with simply have no intention or capacity to exploit these economic benefits. Reasons for this are varied, but are most commonly because market demand is simply not big enough to create programmes enrolling thousands of learners or because institutions or programmes have neither the financial nor human capacity to make large-scale venture capital investments in course design and development or administrative systems to support large-scale distance education implementation. The latter problem is exacerbated by the reality that administrative systems at these institutions have been so narrowly designed to support full-time, contact education that the investments necessary to adapt these systems would often be more than would be necessary to set up new systems from scratch.  

Under the above discussion, we have outlined various reasons for adopting different teaching and learning strategies that we believe are largely linked to opening access to more and new kinds of students. We have, however, separated out various reasons for adopting such teaching and learning strategies that pertain more directly to use of resources. The intention behind this has not been to set up new artificial dichotomies. Rather, it is to illustrate more vividly that moves to resource-based learning do not, de facto, achieve the goals of distance education as articulated above, and vice versa. Thus, while most of the distance education programmes we have examined over the past few years seek to overcome temporal and spatial separation through use of resources, some seek only to overcome distance using direct communication via telecommunications technologies (such as video-conferencing). Conversely, many efforts to develop educational resources have not systematically focused on achieving the economies of scale that have historically provided such a central motivation to most distance education programmes.

Why the Move to Resource-Based Learning?

Efforts to integrate use of instructionally designed resources into courses and programmes have been influenced by various motives. It is worth noting that these objectives have often incorporated efforts to overcome temporal and spatial separation, but not always. When they have incorporated this aim, the result has generally been an integration of distance education and resource-based learning strategies. 

1.            Breaking down the traditional notion that a talking teacher is the most effective strategy for communicating curriculum. While this motive has not been exclusive to distance education programmes, it has been most systematically applied in such programmes. Nevertheless, many contact courses and programmes in GET and FET incorporate use of instructionally designed resources as educators have learned the limitations of lecture-based strategies for communicating information to students. It is important to stress that this motive does not imply any intrinsic improvements in quality of learning experience. The extent to which shifting communication of curriculum to instructionally designed resources leads to improvement in the quality of education is entirely dependent on the quality of resources developed. Experience has demonstrated that, while spending more money on educational resource development does not necessarily lead to improvements in quality, under-investment in design of such resources is very likely to diminish the quality of the final resource. Many of the programmes we have examined operate under very severe financial constraints, and are not able to make investments of sufficient scale in the resources that they develop. Thus, while the motive may be to use resources to communicate curriculum more effectively, investments made in designing those resources often does not allow for achievement of the intended goal. 

2.            Directing a significantly larger proportion of total expenditure to the design and development of high quality resources, as a strategy for building and assuring the quality of educational provision. This motive is linked to the previous one, but contains notable differences. Importantly, many people motivated by the desire to use resources to communicate curriculum are not similarly motivated by a desire to shift patterns of expenditure in this way (or are unable to do so because institutional financial policies make it impossible). This can lead to the problems outlined above, where communication of curriculum via resources rather than a talking teacher does not lead to improvements in the quality of pedagogy. There is, however, another tension that this motive creates when people do seek to shift patterns of expenditure in this way. This can occur when additional money is actually invested in design of resources, but this investment is then still spread over very small student numbers. The consequence of this can be to drive up the per-student cost of the educational experience significantly, leading to unsustainable educational practices. This practice is prevalent in many traditionally contact education institutions. We believe its impact on public education may be profoundly unsettling in the long-term, as it is proliferating unsustainable educational programmes. 

3.            Implementing strategies to shift the role of the educator.[4] This motive has been important in many education programmes, where educators have sought to maximize the educational impact of contact time with students. As this time is generally the most significant component of variable educational costs, many educators have sought to use it to stimulate engagement and interaction rather than simply talking to mostly passive students. Again, though, we wish to stress that this shift is not a feature of all of the programmes we have examined. Many educators continue to use contact time to perform very traditional functions, leaving no space for meaningful engagement between educators and learners. As importantly, many educators do not embed the logic of engagement into resources themselves, often simply creating resource-based versions of traditional lectures. This trend is particularly pervasive in web-based learning, where many courses simply involve electronic mark-up of lecture notes into web-compatible formats. 

4.            Investigating the potential that the integration of new educational technologies into teaching and learning environments has for supporting, improving, or enhancing those environments. Given the explosive growth in use of ICTs in education around the world, we felt it was important to add this motive to the list of motives for engaging in resource-based learning. Significant money is being invested in testing this potential by developing resources of different kinds. This exploration is very important, and is yielding interesting results with potentially important consequences for opening education to more people. It is, however, worth noting that there is nothing intrinsically good about applications of new technologies in education, and we have observed many very expensive failures. Typical reasons for such failures have included:

•               Imposition of inflexible technological choices made without reference to educational need and context;

•               Lack of investment in integrated curriculum and course design and development processes;

•               Integrating technologies into programmes based on poor pedagogical practice, which usually leads to worse quality pedagogical practice;

•               Unexpectedly high operating costs, and a very high percentage of total expenditure on recurrent costs, which militates against achieving economies of scale;

•               Underestimation of the need for well-developed systems of student support, designed as an integral part of overall courses;

•               Lack of attention to designing and implementing effective management and administrative systems; and

•               Paucity of people with the necessary skills and expertise to staff programmes, and a corresponding absence of clear professional development strategies designed to overcome this problem.

Implications for GET and FET Systems

The growing integration of distance education and resource-based learning methods and practices into GET and FET systems is putting tremendous strain on the capacity of those systems to administer themselves efficiently. It threatens to undermine many attempts to open access to education, because educators are finding themselves spending large quantities of time working against administrative systems that are designed almost exclusively for full-time, contact educational provision aimed at young adults. The point here is not that full-time, contact educational provision is problematic per se, but that it represents only one configuration amongst many educational alternatives. Changes in institutional, provincial, and national administrative systems have lagged quite considerably behind processes of building new educational configurations (such as those described in the previous section).

Strategic Options

We believe that this leaves five basic strategic directions open to education providers working in the GET and FET sectors. These strategic directions appear, on the face of it, to be directed primarily at institutions other than schools, such as technical colleges or private providers. Nevertheless, we believe that the discussions outlined below are equally relevant to schools, and hence these institutional types should remain in the reader’s mind when reading this section. The operational implications of these ideas would, in all likelihood, focus less on individual schools than on school systems functioning at provincial level. In brief, the options are as follows:

1.       Committing an institution to operating according to the status quo, with some minor strategic interventions to improve efficiency and cut costs. Substantial research conducted locally and internationally suggests that this will not really be a viable long-term strategy, and current national, provincial, and institutional policy commitments already carry an implicit – and sometimes explicit – awareness of this. This and related research exercises have also demonstrated that most institutions have already begun to introduce new educational practices that seek to shift the status quo, while commitment to various changes in pedagogical approach have also been embedded into many institutional policies and plans. Most institutions have therefore, already dismissed this strategic direction. 

2.       Walking a path of in-principle policy commitment to increased flexibility in educational provision, while maintaining the status quo in administrative, logistical, and financial systems. In many ways, national policy walks this path, which, in practice, is not very different from option one, except to the extent that it allows a small conceptual space for innovation and flexibility. Most policy statements developed since 1994 contain statements about distance education and resource-based learning, which demonstrate unequivocal commitment to the development of these concepts as important parts of a transformed education system. This is not, however, reflected as a general commitment that runs throughout the entire policy environment. Rather, it has been compartmentalized into separate sections of individual policy documents, with only brief references in other sections of these documents. Because this theme does not run systematically through policy frameworks, many of the proposals made elsewhere are either in tension with or even contradict the commitment made by the Ministry of Education. 

Implemented at institutional level, this strategy relies heavily on the energies and enthusiasm of committed individuals as the engine for institutional transformation. This is because it creates a conceptual space for educational innovation and the development of better quality, more flexible educational provision, but then does not back this up with necessary administrative and logistical infrastructure. The capacity of these individuals is then taxed heavily as they grapple to offer educational programmes based on assumptions that run counter to all of the operations of the institution.  

It ends up being a very expensive and wasteful strategy for encouraging innovation, because it leads to fragmentation and duplication of effort, as well as preventing meaningful focus of investment that will create long-term educational and financial sustainability for organizational operations. Unintentionally, therefore, it can become a strategy for adding serious and continuous strain to the capacity and resources of educational providers, which might, if left unchecked, gradually erode that capacity entirely. This path is likely to be just as harmful in the long term as simply maintaining the status quo.  

Some institutions have moved further than others in supporting the integration of new pedagogical approaches and programmes aimed at new target markets into institutional practices by redesigning existing systems and/or adding new systems. In many cases, though, this process is either taking place too slowly or without the kind of financial support it requires to be implemented successfully. In many institutions, though, this work is simply not taking place, leading directly to the negative consequences described above. 

3.       Committing a traditionally contact institution to integrate the use of distance education methods into all provision of education. Setting this as a strategic direction is both very difficult and potentially problematic. Embedded in this strategic direction is a simplistic argument in favour of moving an institution towards becoming a full-scale distance education provider. This would be difficult because it entails levels of initial investment in substantially different administrative infrastructure that are simply not affordable in the current financial climate. Furthermore, it would generate tremendous resistance within the institution, especially because it poses such a direct challenge to the modus operandi of most elements of the institutions concerned. Finally, it might potentially set up new systems that are equally as inflexible as those that have developed to support full-time contact education. This can be intensified in some cases, as it can tend to prioritize simplistic models of financial sustainability – often based on potential student numbers and matching income and expenditure – above all other motivations for running education programmes. Such models sometimes do not take account of a wide range of other important motivations for running education programmes, some of which are very difficult to measure quantitatively (such as likely social impact of the programme on those who complete it successfully).  

At the school level, a variant of this option would be to establish an Open School. We believe that the above discussion is directly relevant to such a policy option, and that the problems we describe are equally applicable to the concept of establishing an Open School. Thus, this adds further weight to the discussion above. 

4.       Committing an institution to integrate distance education programmes (or contact education programmes) with a view to developing a dual-mode institution. This option is similar to option three above, except to the extent that it involves greater realization of the difficulties of transforming an entire institution and thus narrows its focus slightly. Although possibly less threatening than option three to people within the institution, it nevertheless poses some threats to those who have become accustomed to the status quo. In addition, it creates similar problems, although of a smaller magnitude, in terms of the need to invest in new administrative and logistical systems (which will then function separately alongside existing systems). As well as entailing expense that is probably not currently affordable, it can also lead to the development of new types of administrative and financial inflexibility that are not justifiable in a rapidly changing environment. Like option three, it also carries the potential danger of snuffing out short-term innovation because of the time and human investment required to develop a dual-mode institution. Finally, it can serve to entrench distance education and face-to-face education as separate systems, rather than seeing them as part of the same continuum.  

There is, however, evidence that this approach has been followed by some educational providers with which we engaged. Unsurprisingly, this approach is limited to those historically advantaged institutions able to mobilize sufficient resources to support the creation of these new systems. While we do not see this as a problem per se, we do believe that it will be important to engage all institutions on the choices they have made, particularly given some of the concerns raised above. Our major concern in this regard would be to ensure that investments made yield the maximum possible return, and we are not convinced that setting up parallel systems achieves this goal. For this reason, we propose below a fifth option, which is, as yet, not really evident at most GET and FET providers (although some are starting to move in this direction).  

5.   Focusing institutional transformation efforts on creating a flexible environment supportive of increasingly diverse teaching and learning strategies and groups of learners, which draw on the significant experiences that have developed through distance education and resource-based learning provision (both in South Africa and around the world). The respective histories of distance education and resource-based learning contain valuable lessons for GET and FET provision (including educational provision at schools), many of which have been picked up in an ad hoc fashion by traditionally contact institutions.  

As we have noted above, the conceptual collapse of easily identifiable boundaries between contact and distance education creates a growing space for educational providers to choose, from a wide variety, those methods that are most appropriate to the contexts in which they will be providing educational programmes. Our research into distance education practices revealed a growing tendency to exploit this space by introducing a range of new teaching and learning strategies into programmes. We believe that it has to be reflected in a commitment to creating more flexible administrative, logistical, and financial management structures and procedures. This commitment is likely to be the one which will best equip traditionally contact education providers (as well as traditionally distance providers) to provide meaningful educational opportunities in the long term, while ensuring that short-term support is secured for programmes attempting innovation and flexibility of provision. This is because it includes commitment to transformation, without setting up the potential conflict that occurs when a strategic direction demands that all programmes commit themselves to very similar types of transformation.  

It opens up the space for educational innovation and the development of more flexible – and better quality – educational provision, while ensuring that administrative and financial management structures and processes are transformed to support greater flexibility. Another strength of this option in an ever-changing environment is that it carries an implicit awareness that creating and maintaining large, inflexible institutional structures will impinge severely on the ability of education providers to find relevant – and changing – roles for themselves as the environment in which they operate continues to change. Unfortunately, adopting this strategic direction is, in many ways, also the most difficult, as it contains an implicit recognition that there are no ‘quick-fix’ solutions to the many pressures impacting on GET and FET. It acknowledges that the process of transformation is going to require major planning, design, financial restructuring, political strength, and hard work. This will be intensified by the continual need to develop short-term ‘fire-fighting’ strategies to deal with urgent problems, while ensuring that these are harnessed towards a longer-term vision of creating much more flexible and open educational opportunities. 

National Support Requirements The above discussion has attempted to outline some of the challenges facing educational providers across GET and FET as they seek to integrate resource-based learning and distance education methods into their educational programmes, a trend which was already gathered momentum across the GET and FET sectors. These are not simply issues for consideration by individual institutions. We believe the above discussion also further illustrates the importance – in a changing educational environment – of establishing national systems that have the flexibility to accommodate this change. This provides further support to the policy recommendation we made earlier concerning Open Schools. Removing artificial distinctions between distance and contact education practice can help to simplify the national policy framework, while leading to the type of flexibility that supports ongoing adaptation and improvement of educational practices at all educational providers (including schools).  

As a second step, we believe it is important to examine a range of national policy implementation frameworks to establish the extent to which they support or impede the kinds of systemic changes at institutional level that we have described in this section. For example, educational providers’ management information systems are a critical part of administration. Part of the change implied above includes investigation of every level of data structure, to ensure that these systems do not embed anachronistic assumptions about contact or distance education into the organization’s operations. Possibly the most obvious assumption – although it is only one of many – would be that students study full-time, enrolling in February or March and writing examinations in May and June and/or October and November. Once assumptions such as these are embedded, they become very difficult to extract from these management information systems. Consequently, it will be crucial for institutions to investigate the relationships between data sets in management information systems to ensure that these rigidities are removed where they are unhelpful. 

However, almost all management information systems at individual educational providers have, unsurprisingly, been set up to supply data required at national level. Given the legacy of artificial categorizations like ‘distance’ and ‘contact’ and the historical focus of GET and FET education systems on full-time, contact education offered in year-based programmes, it is entirely conceivable that national statistical requirements perpetuate the existence of inflexible institutional management information systems, thus constraining change. Therefore, we believe that it is essential to work systematically through and adapt these statistical requirements to ensure that they do not unnecessarily constrain educational innovation and growth in new areas, thus preventing the type of work described in the previous paragraph.  

In addition, national and provincial education structures have a vested interest in helping educational providers to work systematically through these problems, as systemic inefficiencies constrain the capacity of the system to produce what it has been set up to produce. Unfortunately, though, the human resources required to implement effective re-design of institutional administrative systems are few and far between, and also generally struggling to cope with the volume of workload already facing them. We believe it is worth exploring the possibility of making small strategic investments in building the capacity of those managers and administrators tasked with implementing systems changes at organizational level, and supporting them in their work (thus building on recommendation four above). This would signal an important shift away from policy implementation that seeks to regulate and control what people are allowed to do towards support for moving in strategic important directions, a shift that is critical in the current education environment. Describing the exact nature of this investment falls outside of the scope of this study, but we believe that, with the right team of people, it need not take more than a month to establish the scale of such investments and where best to make them.

 Conclusion 

This chapter has discussed a range of issues pertinent to open learning and distance education, seeking to draw from distance education experiences those lessons most relevant to South Africa’s GET and FET systems. With this analysis complete, we now turn our attention finally to the GET and FET systems themselves, drawing together the work of the previous chapters to present key recommendations emerging from this study.

 Footnotes 

[1] The reader is referred, for example, to:

•      Departments of Education and Communication. 1999. The Feasibility of Establishing a Dedicated Educational Broadcasting Service in South Africa. Pretoria. Department of Education.

•      SAIDE. 2000. Distance Education in Traditionally Contact Public Higher Education. Report prepared for the Council for Higher Education.

[2] This research report has not focused explicitly on exploring issues relating to educational technology, primarily because they have recently been covered in some detail in The Feasibility of Establishing a Dedicated Educational Broadcasting Service in South Africa. That report contains many examples of GET and FET educational providers exploring use of ICTs.

[3] SAIDE, The Green Paper on Higher Education: An Open Learning Perspective, unpublished paper, p. 97.

[4] In the TELI report, this changing role is described as follows:

•       They will become facilitators and managers of learning in situations where they are no longer the source of all knowledge.

•       They will plan, negotiate for, and manage the integration of learning in formal institutions, in the workplace, and in communities.

•       Many educators may spend a considerable proportion of their workloads contributing to the preparation of courseware.

•       Many will interact with learners at a distance through any one, or any combinations, of a variety of media (of which real-time face to face interaction is only one of many possibilities).

•       Preparation, management, and logistics will vary greatly between the following modes of communication:

–           interaction with learners;

–           presentation of one way television broadcast;

–           video conference that hooks up a number of remote sites;

–           written response to a learner’s assignment; and

–           face to face facilitation.

•       It will be essential that educators design and administer complicated, increasingly computer-based record-keeping systems that keep track of learners’ progress through their individual learning pathways, pathways that reflect individual variations in learning content, learning sequence, learning strategies, the learning resources, media and technologies chosen to support them, and the pace of learning.

•       Increasing proportions of educators’ work will involve them as members of teams to which they will contribute only some of the required expertise, and of which they will not necessarily be the leaders, managers, or coordinators.