Monthly contact sessions are an integral part of the support offered to students of a management course of the Free State Gengold Management Development Programme. While much time is spent planning these three-day sessions, facilitators1 are ambivalent about their format, given the fact that quite a few students use only this concentrated time to engage with the course materials.

Various questions were raised during evaluation of the course, which SAIDE conducted in November 1997. Should facilitators 'fast track' students through the materials because many of them have too little time to engage in independent study outside of contact sessions? How do facilitators provide support without contributing to the dependency cycle? How can facilitators overcome their own need to control and direct the learning process? How can facilitators use contact sessions to encourage more independent study?

During my recent review of key elements of the management course I was able to engage creatively with these questions. Before I share some of the discoveries I made during my interactions with the facilitators, I would like to present enough background information to put you in the picture, and to sketch the type of contact sessions offered to students.

The Free State Gengold Management Development Programme is a collaborative project, which aims to increase the capacity of managers of health and social welfare in the Free State by providing them with needs-based management education and development. It is envisaged that a well-trained corps of managers would be able to contribute significantly to the restructuring of health and social welfare services.

At the beginning of 1997, thirty-five senior middle level managers drawn from the health and social welfare sectors started the management course. A multi-media materials course package of an acclaimed distance education course, Managing Health Services, was imported from the Open University, United Kingdom, and made available to students. This practically-oriented course was adopted as the core course and supplemented with locally produced materials for areas not covered.

Three-day monthly contact sessions were organized in Bloemfontein by the course manager, Dr Nic van Zyl, who was also the facilitator. He designed a contact session format to suit the needs of this group of students, who are scattered across the Free State. Their work is very demanding and they have little additional time for self-study. Furthermore they are mainly second language English users, many of whom have not experienced distance learning before.

The first of the three days was earmarked for self-study. Students were encouraged to engage with the materials on their own and to identify any difficulties they experienced. During the subsequent two days, students interacted with each other under the guidance of the facilitator, exploring solutions to problems they experienced in the workplace, in this way coming to grips with work related issues and problems. The contact sessions were used to customize the course and make it relevant for the South African context. The overall response from students was positive, as one student remarked: 'The contact sessions are useful for bonding, interaction with colleagues about real work issues, and problem solving.'

In July 1997, a second cohort of 160 students - operational and middle level managers - enrolled in the course. A new decentralized learning support model was designed to cater for this larger group of students. Six facilitators, some full-time and some part-time, were appointed and trained to offer support to students in their own region. Each facilitator is responsible for two or more modules for the year. They rotate from region to region on a monthly basis, and, as a result, each group of students is exposed to six different facilitators and the modules are not presented in sequence. This innovative model was chosen in order to build the capacity of the six new facilitators. Rather than expecting each one to become familiar with the whole course, it was decided to make each facilitator responsible for a few modules. This would allow them to gain experience and confidence as they progress from group to group.

After the first contact session with the second group of students, the format was altered in response to requests from students and facilitators. The first unstructured day of independent study and minimal support from facilitators was scrapped and a more tightly controlled three-day session was agreed upon. Apparently some students perceived the first day to be wasted and only came for the remaining, more structured days.

While most students and facilitators seemed happier with this new format, I had some reservations before I began my tour of the different regions to observe the contact sessions. What I discovered allayed some of my concerns. The sessions were not run as seminars during which the facilitator lectured while students listened passively. In the sessions I observed, the facilitators provided students with opportunities to engage with selected parts of the materials, and they arranged individual and group activities during which students were able to share their experiences and discuss work related issues. This was done more effectively in some sessions than in others, depending on the expertise of the facilitator.

A nagging concern remained: could time not be spent more effectively building skills if students had done some work on their own outside contact sessions? Should time not be spent dealing with problems in depth rather than present a superficial summary of the module? When I put these questions to facilitators during one-to-one interviews, they agreed that this would be the ideal and would make life much easier for them. However, most of them felt that this was expecting too much from students who had very demanding jobs, many of whom lacked the confidence to engage with materials on their own. One facilitator commented, 'How will I know they have covered the module? At least now I know they have covered the most important parts.'

This type of dilemma is all too familiar to facilitators of distance education courses in South Africa. Empowering students with the skills they need to take responsibility for their own learning and to engage independently with course materials remains one of our greatest challenges. But how do we solve the problem? I think we tend to focus too much on the barriers presented by students. But what about the facilitators? How much of the problem lies with them? How do we get them to overcome their need to take charge of the learning process? How do we convince them that their role is to support students to work with course materials, particularly where these are well designed.

During a post-evaluation workshop for facilitators, which I conducted at the beginning of the year, I grappled with this problem. How could I free facilitators from their self-imposed burden of taking responsibility for students' learning by covering all the key aspects of a module during contact sessions? I devised a practical activity, which I hoped would encourage facilitators to examine materials in a more discerning way than they had done before. Facilitators worked with the grid reproduced above to scan a section of a module.

The grid is a useful tool to plan contact sessions. By scanning sections of the module in this way one can determine which activities students can easily do on their own and which are better done during contact sessions. The criteria we used for students' own activities were:
•    relevance to work situation;
•    accessibility of text; and
•    complexity of activity.

Only those activities which facilitators felt that students would struggle with conceptually, or those which required an examination of the South African health context were reserved for contact sessions. One facilitator noted that a modified scanning device could help students to plan their own study time.

By engaging in this activity, facilitators discovered the importance of scanning materials before contact sessions, in order to anticipate difficulties which students might experience. This enabled them to focus on the issues which are problematic and require more thorough exploration. They began to look more critically at their own role and that of the student in the learning process, realizing that their role extends beyond contact sessions and includes communication with students before and after sessions. As a result of the activity, facilitators decided to draft a memo to students before contact sessions, in which they would specify what they expected students to prepare for and bring to the contact sessions. They also decided to invite students to draw up a plan of action with clearly stated outcomes for implementation after each contact session.

Whatever the reason for a student's lack of independent study, the success of distance learning courses depends to a great extent on the students' ability to cope on their own. Supporting students to use materials in order to achieve the goals of a course is one of the main purposes of contact sessions. Facilitators can use contact sessions to break the learning dependency cycle, if they structure them in such a way that they motivate and support learners to do things for themselves. As students gain more confidence, they will be able to drive their own learning process and be assertive about what they want to get out of contact sessions.

Footnote
¹ Facilitator is the term used in this article for tutor.

Christine Randell is a SAIDE consultant specializing in course design and professional development