The Development of Distance Teaching:
An Historical Perspective

Context:
This article, by the executive director of the International Extension College, describes five main types of distance education programs. The article was originally published in The Pakistan Journal of Distance Education.

Source:
Dodds, A. 1991. "The Development of Distance Teaching: An Historical Perspective." In J. Jenkins and B. N. Koul, eds., Distance Education: A Review, pp. 10–12. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Copyright:
Reprinted by permission of the Pakistan Journal of Distance Education.

Distance teaching: multi media for multi-purpose education

In this section, I will attempt to pick out and exemplify five major categories of distance teaching programmes.

1. University-level distance teaching

   Adults seeking higher education on a part-time basis have become possibly the second largest audience for distance education. There are three major modes of provision. One is the separate, independent large-scale Open University model which we have already explored. The second, more common until the 1970s when the UK OU was set up, is the setting up of a distance teaching department within an existing university, offering courses at-a-distance to part-time students, parallel to those offered internally to full-time students, and using the same staff, syllabuses and facilities. Important examples are the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, the University of Zambia, the Correspondence Departments of Indian universities and the COSIT [Correspondence and Open Studies Institute] of the University of Lagos, Nigeria. The third model is more common both in the USA and the USSR. Here many students take some of the university courses at-a-distance and then come into residence at the university for the rest of their programme.

2. Secondary-level distance teaching

   As we have seen, there are two main streams of distance teaching at secondary school level. The first is the in-school broadcasting and in some cases correspondence programmes used as integral parts of the school curriculum, either as enrichers or expanders of the school programme. An interesting recent example of the latter is the use of correspondence courses in British schools as a way of allowing them to offer a wider range of GCE 'A' level courses than economic cuts and shrinking numbers of students would otherwise allow. The second, and probably more important trend, is to use distance teaching to provide substitute secondary-level opportunities to out-of-school youth and adults. This has a very large following in many parts of the world among adults who were unable to complete school when they were young, and increasingly it is being used for the expanding number of young primary school leavers in the third world who cannot get places in the restricted number of secondary schools. The use of correspondence courses to offer adults a second chance to take educational qualifications they missed earlier has been the most common form of distance teaching. Most of the European and American commercial correspondence colleges fit into this category, as do many of the more recent public correspondence institutions in Africa. Two of the most outstanding examples of distance teaching being used as a secondary school substitute for young adult school leavers are the Malawi Correspondence College and the Zambian National Correspondence College, both of which have set up a network of supervised study groups in order to provide more structure and support for their young students.

3. Teacher education at-a-distance

   In most parts of the world, the demand for and commitment to the expansion of schools has led to a desperate shortage of trained teachers at all levels. Distance teaching techniques have been used widely and successfully in response to this demand. In many countries the aim has been predominantly to upgrade existing untrained or under-trained teachers. In Nigeria, Colombia and Pakistan university-level programmes have been used to upgrade secondary school teachers. Examples of primary school teacher in-service upgrading programmes are found in Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and Swaziland. More recently, distance teaching has been used to provide initial training to apprentice teachers recruited and put straight into schools, as a way of enabling the spread of schools to take place immediately, without wailing for teachers to receive pre-service training in college in the traditional way. This pattern has been used, for example, among Palestinian refugees in the Middle East in the UNRWA-Unesco programme, and with refugees in Somalia by the Institute of In-service Teacher Training. It has also been used by Tanzania as a way of moving rapidly towards universal primary education.

4. Non-formal and basic adult education at-a-distance

   Non-formal and basic education for adults in many parts of the world is aimed at an audience predominantly made up of illiterates. Distance teaching techniques which rely mainly on the printed word are of limited use in such circumstances. Therefore radio and study-group techniques have assumed leading roles in non-formal education. Radio farm forums, radiophonic schools and radio study-group campaigns have all been described above, and are important illustrations of this trend. Very recently, at the Allama lqbal Open University of Pakistan a new and interesting variant on this model has been developed. There, an experimental Functional Education Project for Rural Areas has used a combination of audiocassettes, printed but non-verbal flipcharts and organised and supervised study groups, to provide courses in basic practical functional education with evident success. In particular it has been able to use this combination with all-illiterate groups (including illiterate group leaders). Elsewhere, notably in West Africa by INADES and in Venezuela by INCE, programmes of agricultural and mechanical education respectively have been built round simple and highly illustrated correspondence texts. These have been used either with individual students who have a basic though low level of literacy or through literate group leaders.

5. Distance teaching in the education of refugees

   A final category of students of distance teaching courses crosses all these four levels of education, but is worth noting because of the relevance of the techniques to highly mobile and unstable communities. The number of refugees in the world, particularly in the third world, has grown rapidly in the last decade. Their access to educational opportunities is usually even more restricted than that of their fellows, either in their country of origin or in their host communities. Distance education is being used to train refugee teachers in the Middle East and in Somalia. It is being used systematically to provide secondary education among Namibian refugees in Angola and Zambia, South African refugees in Tanzania and Botswana, and Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees in the Sudan. Programmes of basic education for adult refugees are also being planned by the Namibian Extension Unit and the Sudan Extension Unit.

The future

As we have seen, there has been a phenomenal growth in distance teaching projects worldwide during the last twenty years. There seem to be three main reasons for this growth:

• distance teaching offers an economic use of sparse educational resources to provide large numbers of students with chances to continue their education
• distance teaching can reach students where they are, however remote that may be, and therefore allows students to continue earning while learning
• distance teaching is therefore, potentially, a great equaliser of educational opportunity

These qualities make it highly likely that the expansion will continue. I believe such expansion is likely to take four main forms:

• refresher and in-service courses for professionals and technicians, as a means of keeping them abreast of rapidly changing skills and technologies
• initial and up-grading courses for apprentices in various vocations and professions, allowing such initial training to become increasingly on-the-job, i.e. allowing people to be trained in the midst of practical experience rather than detached from it
• second-chance courses at secondary and tertiary level for adults who never had the opportunity to take such courses earlier in their lives, or who dropped out from such opportunities if they did; such courses will recognise that universal opportunity for education at any level is not enough: motivations and attitudes and even aptitudes change, hence the need for continuing education
• basic and remedial education courses through which adults, particularly those who have had little or no formal education as children, will be given access to it in later life.