Malawi College of Distance Education
SAIDE

Context:
While collecting information for this global distance education network, SAIDE held several interviews with organisations in Southern African countries. Impressions of each country were generated to give some introduction to distance education and technology use in the area. Each interview has also been written up separately as a case study.

Source:
SAIDE country visits conducted in 1999

Copyright:
Permission granted

The Malawi Correspondence College was established as a department of the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1965. In 1973, this college merged with the Schools Broadcasting Unit to form the Malawi Correspondence College and Broadcasting Unit. In 1987, the College changed its name to the Malawi College of Distance Education (MCDE). The College is part of the Ministry of Education. It was founded by government to achieve the following four objectives:

1. To provide formal education to school-going children who fail to secure places in the conventional system due to limited space;
2. To provide a second chance to adults who missed formal education during their youth;
3. To upgrade teachers from T4 to T3 then to T2; and
4. To prevent a drain of much needed foreign exchange to correspondence colleges in neighbouring and distant countries

MCDE is a department of the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture. It is headed by a principal who reports to the Secretary of Education through a desk officer and sometimes directly. The College comprises of the following six sections or divisions:

• Tutorial / editorial;
• Schools broadcasting unit;
• Student services;
• Computer services
• Accounts; and
• Registry.

It has two regional offices, one in Mzuzu that services the North and one in Lilongwe that services the Centre. The Head Office in Blantyre also doubles as a regional office for the South.

The mission statement of the MCDE is as follows:

Malawi College of Distance Education exists to provide alternative formal primary and secondary education of the same standard as offered by conventional schools to students who fail to secure places in the conventional system.

Initially, MCDE was a correspondence college. As of the early 1970s, new forms of distance education provision with an element of face-to-face teaching integrated into the delivery model emerged. Until recently, the MCDE enrolled three types of students:

• DEC students (Distance Education Centre Students);
• Home-study students; and
• Night Secondary School students.

The term Distance Education Centres (DECs) refers to schools that were established by communities to provide a face-to-face component to the distance education programmes offered by the MCDE. At these institutions, students are supervised, receive counselling, and listen to radio broadcasts or recordings on audiocassette in groups.

Communities raised their own funds to run these programmes. Often, these centres did not have their own premises and had to share premises with primary schools. DECs used to receive their instructional materials from the MCDE. As the MCDE’s budget was inadequate, the materials received by the DECs were often not enough and had to be shared amongst students. DECs were staffed by primary school teachers (called teacher-supervisors) who had not been oriented in the principles and practices of distance education.

Students who are unable to secure places at conventional schools, Night Secondary Schools, or Distance Education Centres (DECs), or who are unable to attend these schools, study from home. They receive learning materials, but no face-to-face tuition.

Persons who work during daytime – often working class people who have not completed their secondary schooling – may enrol at Night Secondary Schools where they receive tuition for two hours per day. These schools often make use of secondary school premises and secondary school teachers teach learners.

In 1998, enrolments at the MCDE according student type was as follows:

Of the above figures, only 500 learners in total were enrolled for the Primary School Leaving Certificate of Education (PSLCE).

In 1995, the new government adopted a policy of free primary education. The principle of free primary education is also enshrined in the Constitution as a human right. As a result of this policy decision, enrolments in primary schools increased by more than 70% and went up to approximately 3.2 million. To cope with the increase in numbers on primary school level, government recruited 22 000 untrained teachers and sent them on a two-week training course before placing them in schools.

The increase in primary school enrolments had three direct results. First, the gap between the number of learners that complete primary school and the number of places available in secondary school widened significantly. Second, perhaps as a response the first issue, the number of Distance Education Centres (DECs) increased from 350 in 1993 to approximately 520 in 1998. Third, teachers who had only completed their primary school training were placed in the DECs.

The period after 1994 saw a very rapid growth in the number of Distance Education Centres. Many of these centres were simply established by communities, without the proper procedures being followed. Thus, some of these DECs were not even registered.

Interviewees put forward a number of reasons to explain this rapid growth of Distance Education Centres.

The expansion of DECs can in the first place be attributed to pressure from the communities in which they were established. Learners attending these centres were generally between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and had difficulty in studying independently. Furthermore, communities wanted their children to be able to complete their Junior Certificate (JC) and Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) studies in two years each, as is the case in the conventional secondary schools, rather than the five years each advised by the MCDE.

Because of increase in number of DECs and the number of secondary school pupils, as well as cuts in the MCDE’s funding, the College was unable to supply learning materials (called sets) to each student and the materials therefore had to be shared. The lack of materials coupled with severe overcrowding (up to 100 pupils in a classroom) meant that teachers often had to take the materials and start teaching. Unfortunately these teachers were not trained in the methodologies and philosophy of distance learning. Moreover, these teachers were not qualified to teach at secondary school level. In order to cope with demands from learners and the pressure placed on them by communities – who often described these teacher-supervisors as lazy – these teachers developed a very authoritarian model of teaching.

In practice, these developments meant that DECs had unofficially become conventional secondary schools, but were lacking basic resources and qualified staff.

The decision to provide free primary education also had an impact on private provision of school education. Whereas the practice of private education had been well established in Malawi prior to 1994 through mission schools, the period after 1994 saw a rapid mushrooming of the number and types of private providers offering schooling. Interviewees argued that the issue of quality of private providers has become a major issue. Whereas some of the private providers are well resourced and have good teachers and materials, others are of the fly-by-night type, and teach in dilapidated facilities with almost no resources and unqualified teachers. An emerging practice that is of concern to the MCDE is that some of these poor quality providers have resorted to photocopying MCDE materials to use in their schools. The overflow of primary school leavers, that is those learners who were unable to secure places in conventional secondary school, generally tended to enrol at the MCDE. After 1994 and the mushrooming of private secondary schools, individual parents sometimes seem to demonstrate a preference for sending their children to private schools because of a perception that the quality of face-to-face tuition is better than a distance education model.

The sharp increase in the number of DEC students coupled with dwindling funding made it impossible for the MCDE to provide enough materials to learners. That, together with other issues such as poor discipline in DECs, had a disastrous impact on the pass rate of MCDE students in the Malawi School Certificate of Education examinations. The pass rate for MCDE students for the MSCE examination fell from 11,2% in 1996 to 9,3% in 1997 to reach an all-time low of 4,9% in 1998.

The MCDE pass rate has to be seen against the background of the fall in pass rate for MSCE examinations in Malawi in general. In 1998, the overall pass rate for the MSCE examination was only 16%, with a mere 31,3% of learners from government and grant aided schools successfully completing the MSCE. The calculation of the number of students that have passed the examinations only includes students that have completed six subjects. As MCDE students are encouraged to slowstream their studies by completing the two-year programme over four or five years, the MCDE’s pass rate for MSCE examinations does not accurately reflect their students’ success rate.

It should be noted that, despite increased enrolments, MCDE students continued to do well in the Junior Certificate examination, achieving a pass rate of 88% in 1996 and 83,6% in 1997. On the whole, MCDE students fare better in Junior Certificate examinations than their counterparts in conventional schools.

The response of the MCDE to the growing concerns about the dismal pass rate and problems facing Distance Education Centres was to investigate the possibility of moving towards resource-based learning methodologies in DECs. In 1996 and 1997 the Danish government sent an advisor to assist with a pilot project that included twenty-five Distance Education Centres (DECs). The idea was to establish libraries and to ensure that these centres were adequately resourced. The pilot project could then be used as a model for introducing these methodologies at all the DECs to improve conditions and standards. Unfortunately, before the project – which seemed to be functioning very effectively – was concluded, the government announced a decision to convert DECs into Community Day Secondary Schools, thereby effectively taking it away from the responsibility of the MCDE.

In December 1998, the Malawi College of Distance Education had under its care almost 520 Distance Education Centres. In ?, the Malawi government announced that all DECs are to be converted into Community Day Secondary Schools, which meant that DECs would cease to exist.

The MCDE welcomed this move by government, as they had for a long time wanted the Ministry of Education to take responsibility for the DECs, which they regarded to be underprivileged and under-resourced. It had also become clear that fees charged at the DECs, coupled with the low success rate, meant that studying through DECs had become very expensive. Interviewees felt that the government’s contribution in terms of teaching staff were not sufficient any more. The conversion of the DECs also meant that most communities would now have a fully-fledged secondary school, which the MCDE regarded as a positive development.

The conversion of DECs into Community Day Secondary Schools entailed that the government, in particular the Ministry of Education, would be contributing more than just the salaries of the teacher-supervisors. The Ministry would accept responsibility for purchasing and disseminating relevant textbooks and would also ensure that properly trained teaching staff be seconded to these schools.

Despite the fact that the MCDE thus generally welcomed the move by government to convert DECs, this did, however, have two very important implications for the MCDE.

In the first place, it led to a drastic reduction in MCDE’s student numbers. If one look at the 1997 and 1998 Primaru School leaving Certificate of Education figures this becomes clear. Over the last two years only about 10% of the approximately 110 000 primary school leavers were able to secure places in the conventional secondary schools. Private schooling could accommodate another 10 000 learners. That meant that the bulk of primary school leavers (approximately 90 000) would enrol with MCDE. Of these students, 50 000 would enrol with the DECs, 40 000 would be home-study students, and the remaining 10 000 students would be accommodated by night secondary schools. The conversion of DECs meant that the MCDE would loose the DEC students.

In the second place, it led to a major shift in the type of students enrolled at MCDE. A government circular indicated that Community Day Secondary Schools could take a maximum of 50 learners per class. That means that Community Day Secondary Schools can accommodate 26000 learners (There were 520 DECs in 1998). The remainder of the 50 000 students who would have enrolled at the DECs, that is 24 000, therefore becomes home-study students. Whereas the MCDE thus looses all its DEC students, its number of home study students increases with 24 000. Because of severe funding constraints, the MCDE is unable to provide learning materials for each of the learners. As a strategy for dealing with this, MCDE materials are now being sold.

Night Secondary Schools continue to exist. In February 1999 there were forty-three such schools registered. There is, however, a lack of policy on Night Secondary Schools and the future of these schools remain unclear.

In February (1995/1996) a process got underway to develop a new curriculum for secondary schooling in Malawi, as it was felt that the existing curriculum was outdated. In 1996 the new curriculum for the Junior Certificate was finalised. In January 1999 the draft syllabus for the curriculum was published and it is believed that it will be implemented by 2000. Plans are also in the pipeline for revising the Malawi School Certificate of Education. Government, with financial and other assistance from funding agencies, has undertaken to commission the development of materials for the new curriculum and to supply textbooks to schools in Malawi.

The environment in which the MCDE operates has changed significantly over the last few years. The College is understaffed and under-funded. One of the possibilities the College is exploring is to move more into the publishing of educational materials. That entails bidding with other agencies for tenders to develop materials for the new curriculum.

Staff indicated that they would also like to diversify in terms of the programmes that they offer. Two of the options mentioned are to offer general education such as Accounting programmes and to yet again start offering programmes for teacher training.

The College would like to see itself move to become an open learning agency that that produces high-quality resource-based learning materials.

The College has ceased to offer teacher orientation and upgrading programmes, and is increasingly specialising in the secondary education provision, as it is felt that the high numbers on these programmes justify distance education strategies. The College currently offers the following courses:

• Junior Certificate (JC)
• Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE)

Courses are delivered through printed materials – referred to as sets - which are self-instructional and cover the whole syllabus for each subject. Radio broadcasts used to supplement and support the print materials. As a result of Malawi’s structural adjustment programme, there is a strong drive for government institutions and parastatals to cut costs and to move towards financial sustainability. This is equally true for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). The rates charged by the MBC for broadcasting programmes developed by the MCDE in support of their courses became too high and government discontinued its funding for the radio broadcasts. The MCDE provides a service whereby they put the radio programmes on audiocassette for anyone that sends them a blank audiocassette.

MCDE initially developed materials by making use of tutors. Because of a high staff turnover, the College was forced to consider alternative strategies. Currently some of the development work is contracted out to external materials developers. Some materials are also developed through a workshop method.

In the beginning of 1999, MCDE’s printing equipment was moved to the Malawi Institute of Education. The idea is that MCDE should outsource their printing to commercial printers. Financial constraints make this very difficult for the College, and the printing of materials is currently a major problem.

Examinations are set and certified by the Malawi National Examinations Board (MANEB). All students, whether they are in conventional schools or study through distance education at MCDE, write the same examination. The College had seen some students, usually around three students per year, qualifying for admission to the University of Malawi.

Interviewees indicated that an indication of the quality of the materials as well as their appropriateness in the Malawian context is evident from the fact that MCDE materials are widely used in conventional schools.

Interviewees identified a lack of systemic planning in the way in which resources are allocated and strategic priorities are determined as the one element most seriously impacting on the ability of the College to position itself. Other issues are the shortage in staff and the fact the College remains seriously under-funded, which in turn has a negative influence on the College’s ability to conduct research, to offer tutor-marking of assignments, and to offer orientation programmes to teachers.