NADEOSA's Response
to the CHE's Shape &
Size Document
Article from the Mail & Guardian, vol.16, no.41, October 13 to 19 2000.
Education Report Gets Another
‘F’
by David Macfarlane
Another severe hammering has been handed to the Council on Higher Education's (CHE) recent recommendations for fundamentally redrawing South Africa's tertiary landscape.
The National Association of Distance Organisations of South Africa (Nadeosa) has delivered a strongly worded critique of the CHE report to Minister of Education Kader Asmal. This comes shortly after the country's vice-chancellors flatly rejected the heart of the CHE document in their formal submission to Asmal.
The most controversial proposal is that some of the country's 36 universities and technikons be combined. While the report explicitly rules out closures, academics fear this is precisely what will happen as a result of rationalisation.
While Nadeosa applauds the CHE's "recognition that distance education and face-to-face education can no longer be easily conceptualised as separate, easily distinguishable" systems, and recognises other "positive" features of the report, it is also scathing on the report's "problems" and identifies severe conceptual weaknesses in it.
The CHE's proposal that a single, dedicated distance institution be established draws especially strong fire. This proposal, says Nadeosa, "stands in direct contradiction to the [CHE] report's acknowledgement" of substantial changes in, and debates around, what distance education is and should be. It also illustrates "monopolistic tendencies still dominant in sectors of South African society", Nadeosa argues.
Nadeosa's membership includes more than half of all organisations involved in distance education. And huge numbers of South Africans are engaged in distance learning: 600 000 was Nadeosa's estimate in 1996 - a figure that it says is approximately similar now. "Lots of organisations are cagey about revealing their own student numbers," says a representative of the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide)- an observation that points to this education sector's most marked vulnerability: fly-by-night outfits offering trashy qualifications while leeching off this lucrative market.
Yet distance education has moved light years beyond the limited and discredited notion of correspondence courses: there are multiple and developing technologies of distance learning now, some still experimental. Equally significant has been the emergence of "dual mode" institutions. Reputable universities such as Pretoria, Stellenbosch and Rand Afrikaans in particular now have substantial distance learning programmes - and substantial student numbers: Pretoria University, for example, has an on-campus enrolment of 27 000 students, and an equal number enrolled in its distance programmes. Other traditionally contact-tuition universities that now offer some distance programmes include Natal and Potchefstroom.
The CHE report expresses "major concerns" about quality of provision in distance education, and Nadeosa's submission to Asmal is forthright on this point too: "While Nadeosa shares the CHE's concerns about standards and quality, we find it unfortunate that [these concerns] are [expressed] specifically in reference to distance education practice ... It is surely a problem plaguing the entire system."
Fatally for the CHE's recommendations on distance learning, Nadeosa charges that "the authors [of the CHE report] appear not to have engaged with documentation about the changing roles of distance education and educational technology in South African higher education". And Nadeosa pinpoints as its "biggest concern" what the CHE report "does [itals]not[itals] cover", especially the still-uncompleted reworking of the formulae for funding of the tertiary sector - a lack that "hampers all efforts at restructuring higher education", Nadeosa argues: the CHE's "proposed chronology - more planning first, then new funding formulae - is simply not adequate".
"To focus first on academic restructuring is to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic," says Saide representative Neil Butcher, who stresses the need for redesigning educational administrative structures first. Otherwise, he argues, there is the high risk that such planning will from the outset introduce systemic inflexibilities that will constrain necessary future change. Even Britain's Open University, long hailed as a model for progressive distance education, is now suffering from such inflexibilities, he says.
Asmal is due to take a draft national education plan, based largely but not only on the CHE report, to the Cabinet in January.
Mail & Guardian, vol.16, no.41, October 13 to 19 2000.
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