Open and Distance Learning: Why all the Fuss?

15CCEM Mid-Term Review for Africa and Europe

15 November 2005

Freetown, Sierra Leone

Open and Distance Learning: Why all the Fuss?

by:

Sir John Daniel
President & CEO
Commonwealth of Learning

Introduction

I am both honoured and nervous to have been asked to deliver this public lecture. Honoured first, because it is a privilege to address the Ministers of Education for Africa and leading citizens of Sierra Leone.

The Ministers of Education of Africa have some of the most difficult jobs n the world. Not only do they have the massive task of trying to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of Universal Primary Education and the wider Dakar Goals for Education for All, but they have to do this in very difficult circumstances. Moreover they know that their success or failure is likely to have greater consequences, good or bad, for the future of their countries than the actions of any of their other ministerial colleagues.

I am honoured to address some of the leading citizens of Sierra Leone because you have a particularly steep hill to climb in rebuilding your shattered country. We admire the progress that you are making and I am sure that you hold before you, to motivate and inspire you, the memory of Freetown as the Athens of Africa.

When he gave a similar public lecture in The Bahamas on the occasion of the Caribbean Regional Meeting of Ministers in July, your admirable Minister of Education, the Honourable Alpha Wurie, evoked in moving terms the history of Freetown as a great centre of African learning. I hope that you can one day recover that glory.

So I am honoured to address you. But I am also nervous because I am substituting for an eminent minister from the Caribbean. In the last year, since coming to the Commonwealth of Learning, I have visited all regions of the Commonwealth. I hope that no one will be offended if when I say that it is in the Caribbean that I have found the greatest tradition of oratory and the most eloquent use of the English language. Today, unfortunately, you will have to accept my more prosaic style.

I have entitled these remarks Open and Distance Learning: Why all the Fuss? My purpose is to explain briefly why open and distance learning is important to Sierra Leone, to Africa and to the world. I shall, of course, place open and distance learning in the wider context of the growing use of technology in education, training and learning in its widest sense. I observe a rapid increase in the use of open and distance learning in Africa. Many countries sometimes with COL's help, have developed policies for its use. Why are you doing this?

Learning: our common wealth

I am proud to be the President of the Commonwealth of Learning. It has a most evocative name. We should all be guided by the ideal of making learning the common wealth of humankind.

Two jobs ago, I was vice-chancellor of the UK's Open University. In that post my core task was to make the opportunity for higher learning more widely available. The Open University was created on the premise that quality education need not be exclusive education. Today distance education is making a massive contribution to the expansion of higher education. In the Commonwealth alone we estimate that there are some six million distance learners in higher education. For example, 20% of all tertiary-level students in India today are studying at a distance and the government wants to raise that to 40%. The Indira Gandhi National Open University alone enrols 1.5 million students. In South Africa a majority of all Africans enrolled in higher education are in distance learning courses.

From the UK Open University I moved to UNESCO, where my core function was to drive forward the global campaign for Education for All, defined by the six objectives that were formulated at the Dakar in 2000.

Distance learning has a an enormous contribution to make to the EFA agenda, although I think it is fair to say that it has not yet scored the spectacular and prestigious successes in relation to schooling that the open universities have achieved in higher education. Nevertheless, India's National Institute for Open Schooling has 800,000 pupils and we find great interest in open schooling here in Africa.

Today, at the Commonwealth of Learning, my lens on learning has an even wider angle. We are still involved in higher education. We are very much engaged with Education for All. But our overall focus is learning for development and the Millennium Development Goals define our framework of action. You are all aware of the eight MDGs. They set targets for progress in reducing poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, removing gender disparities, improving health and reducing infant and maternal mortality, ensuring environmental sustainability and creating a global partnership for development.

My first fundamental point is that to achieve any of these goals will require a massive increase in human learning. Clearly each MDG has its special requirements: to develop better agricultural techniques; to make markets work better; to improve health services; or to find environmentally friendly ways of doing things. All these are vital, but I stress that the efficacy of their impact will in all cases depend on human beings learning new things and new ways of doing things.

My second fundamental point is that conventional methods of instruction simply cannot address the scope and scale of this massive challenge of learning. I saw this clearly when I travelled in the eight Commonwealth countries of southern Africa in August. Africa alone needs to train five million new teachers just to achieve universal primary education. Only distance learning can begin to address that challenge. In the absence of a cure or a vaccination for HIV/AIDS the only hope of arresting the pandemic is for people to learn to avoid it. Conventional instructional methods cannot address the scale of that challenge either.

The route to world development must lead through improvements to life in the rural areas and to the livelihoods of the millions of farmers and smallholders on which it is based. Conventional ways of providing advice to farmers through agricultural extension services cannot address the challenge. We must allow farmers to learn their way to better livelihoods easily and quickly.

So there is a massive worldwide challenge of learning that conventional methods cannot address. Achieving a better world for humankind in this 21st century requires new approaches. In nearly all other areas of life technology has transformed the way we do things, making products and services both better and cheaper - and therefore available to more people.

It is time for us to use technology to transform education, training and learning.

What role for technology in learning?

The challenge is to provide more extensive opportunities for learning in the great diversity of fields that define the functioning of a modern society such as government, health care, disease prevention, development management, teaching, business and entrepreneurship.

What characteristics must these opportunities for learning have? Three seem particularly important. They must be widely accessible, they must be of good quality and they must cost as little as possible. I find it helpful to think of a triangle defined by these three vectors of access, quality and cost.

When you do this you realise clearly the limitations of conventional methods of teaching and learning. Suppose that you want to increase access, as some counties in Africa have done recently by making primary education really free. Much larger numbers of children come to school but the recruitment and training of teachers cannot keep pace. Class sizes increase and people will think that the quality of learning has gone down.

Suppose that you want to increase quality by providing more books and learning materials. The cost of schooling will go up which may mean that it can be offered to fewer people and access will go down. My general point is that if you try to improve one side of this triangle it usually changes the other two sides in undesirable ways. For this reason I refer to it as the iron triangle. It has been a straitjacket on the expansion of education throughout history.

The revolutionary feature of technology in general, and of open and distance learning in particular, is that it can break open the iron triangle. You can increase access, improve quality and cut costs - all at the same time. This is because of the economies of scale and consistency of quality that come with using media. That is the good news.

The even better news is that these advantages seem to grow with every new generation of media. CD-ROMS and DVDs cost less to print than books. Distributing material on the Internet costs almost nothing once networks and computers are in place.

Independent and interactive learning

I explain the impact of technology on the iron triangle by noting that learning takes place in two ways.

First there is independent learning: learning that you do by listening, watching or reading. Most of our learning is of this type - the more so as we get older. People sometimes say that learning in a classroom or lecture hall is interactive, because there is a teacher present, but in reality most of the time in the classroom is spent in a one-way flow of information and you are learning independently. You are learning independently at the moment - assuming that you are listening to me.

Real learning and retention of learning usually requires more interaction than that. By interactive learning I mean a situation where another human being, who might be a fellow student, a teacher or a tutor, reacts directly to a comment or a question that you make. The moments of interaction can, of course, be very important. Asking a question can enable the teacher to clarify a misunderstanding. Even more valuable is when the teacher comments on or corrects something that you have done as a learner to demonstrate your understanding of a topic.

In the early days of distance education its great strength was to concentrate on the independent component of learning by producing quality self-instructional materials, almost always in print form. What did this do for the iron triangle?

First, printing has economies of scale. Once you have printed a thousand copies, the marginal cost of printing a few more is small, so that acts on the first two sides of the triangle. By getting the cost down you make it possible to increase access, because you can provide learning materials to more people. The potential effect on the third side of the triangle, namely quality, flows from these two. If you are producing in volume then it makes sense to make the initial investment necessary to ensure that the materials are of high quality in both content and pedagogy.

These principles apply even more strongly to later forms of media, particularly the mass media. Once you are broadcasting a TV or radio programme it costs you nothing when extra people tune it. Provided that they have a TV or radio set it costs them very little too, just a little electricity. The economies of scale of the media and technologies of independent learning are the foundation of the success of the many open universities around the world, which has put open and distance learning on the policy agenda of governments.

But the more successful open universities did more than produce excellent materials for independent study. Understanding that the possibly of interaction with teachers and the institution is vital if most learners are to achieve their goals, these universities set up systems for interactive learning, usually by making part-time tutors available to mark and comment on students' work, to answer questions, and sometimes to hold face-to-face meetings. Such arrangements are inherently more expensive per student than the independent learning media, but if the institution organises itself well there can be economies of scale here too.

The evidence shows that the combination of high-quality materials for independent study and effective arrangements for interactive tutoring is the basis for successful open and distance learning whatever media are used. Those media evolve steadily. I spent nearly 20 years in open universities on both sides of the Atlantic, including a decade at the UK Open University. When I joined the UKOU in 1990 few students had computers at home. By the time I left to go to UNESCO in 2001, 150,000 students could connect with it online from their homes.

Institutions that teach at a distance incorporate new technologies as they emerge. The Indira Gandhi National Open University now makes extensive use of satellites. The recent agreement with the African Union for India to make its satellites available across Africa will bring new resources to this continent.

The combination of independent and interactive study is what makes for quality. When I left the UK Open University it had risen to fifth place in national rankings of the quality of teaching in English universities. Very recently, a survey of students in all UK universities showed that Open University students had greater satisfaction with the services they received than the students of any other university.

This is the revolution of open and distance learning. To combine wider access with higher quality at lower cost. This is what technology has done in other areas of our lives. It is now creating the same revolution in education.

The Internet

My final lesson from the Open University is that when students are asked which aspects of the University's distance-teaching system are most helpful to them, the printed materials and the tutors consistently gained the highest ratings.

I make this point to urge the Ministers present, as Africa's educational leaders, not to be mesmerised by the new technologies that you don't have. I have used open and distance learning (ODL) rather than information and communications technology (ICTs) in the title of this short address because ODL represents the timeless principles - going back nearly 2000 years to Saint Paul - of a new form of education. ICTs are the rapidly evolving tools.

Newer tools are coming to Africa rapidly and I am proud of the work that COL is doing to create a cadre of African specialists in eLearning. We are now sending those experts to hold workshops for us in other parts of the Commonwealth, most recently the Caribbean.

The older methods of distance learning are effective and robust. However, communication through the Internet can have a wonderful effect in speeding things up. Students like to get feedback on their assignments as soon as possible and e-mail is inherently much quicker than regular mail - provided, of course, that the tutor also acts and corrects the assignment expeditiously.

Another notable feature of the Internet, which is a relatively greater advantage for you in Africa where libraries are rare, is the wonderful resource of the Web, which just gets better and better. More and more people, when they want to find something out, simply go to Google or to that remarkable collective intellectual endeavour of humankind, Wikipedia. Then there are the increasing numbers of collaboratively developed electronic course materials known as open educational resources.

The advantages of online communication go well beyond formal learning. A key programme at COL has been support to Schoolnets/eSchools, particularly here in Africa. The advantages of school networking are not just the capacity for online learning but include the creation of communities of interest amongst teachers and new opportunities for professional development. This defines the primary purpose of a Schoolnet, namely to facilitate collaboration between school communities using ICT for educational purposes.

That brings me to my final point. Connectivity makes collaboration much easier. One very important manifestation of collaboration through connectivity, which COL is supporting strongly, is the development of what are called open educational resources. The term refers to open course content, open source software and tools. The essence of open educational resources is to develop course content, often in a collaborative manner, and then share it freely so that others can adapt it for their own use and share their adaptation with others too.

COL is supporting this in various ways, but particularly through the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, a vision that the Ministers of Education developed at their Conference in 2000 and refined in 2003. We are now making that vision a reality and I am pleased to say that all the small Commonwealth states of Africa are participating: Botswana, The Gambia, Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles and Swaziland. Using the concept of open educational resources they are teaming up to develop courses in professional development for teachers, life skills, and business and management.

This is just the latest application of open and distance learning in Africa. I hope I have showed you why it is right to make a fuss about the potential of open and distance learning. Open and distance learning gives Ministers of Education new opportunities to achieve education for all and, beyond that to offer opportunities for lifelong learning for all and to make learning our common wealth.