Distance education for out-of-school secondary qualificationsWhen governments in Africa began to become interested in correspondence education the target audience for the programmes they set up was the same people as had previously used commercial correspondence colleges-teachers, civil servants, other adults who needed secondary qualifications for job promotion. The programmes they designed assumed that such people would study largely independently, that printed correspondence courses sent out and tutored by post and occasionally supported by radio programmes would suffice. Initially this proved to be the case. Early achievements in the Zambia National Correspondence College, the Malawi Correspondence College, the University of Nairobi Correspondence Course Unit and the Makerere University Correspondence Unit all pointed to the potential for public distance education programmes to offer satisfactory opportunities for working adults to upgrade their academic qualifications and thereby to improve their career prospects. As formal education structures also expanded at secondary and tertiary level, however, the job-market requirements were increasingly met by the products of the formal system. A new pressure began to develop for distance education: the huge expansion of primary education was not matched by the expansion of secondary school places; the unemployed—and increasingly unemployable—primary school leavers began to demand (or their parents demanded for them) access to secondary education. If adults could be satisfied by correspondence courses, why not answer the demand from out-of-school youth in the same way? Distance education institutions, first in Malawi and Zambia and later in Botswana, Swaziland, Tanzania, Ghana and Zimbabwe, were enlisted to provide for this much younger audience. It rapidly became clear, however, that the individual home-study pattern, adequate for adults, was less suitable for adolescents who needed and expected more face-to-face support from teachers or tutors. Supervised study groups were born. In Zambia and Malawi the government correspondence colleges took responsibility for establishing and running such groups, usually on a daily basis, where students met together to study their correspondence courses, and listen to radio programmes under the supervision of tutors or supervisors who were redeployed part-time teachers, usually primary rather than secondary teachers whose role was seen (by the institution, though not by the students or their parents) as advisers and helpers rather than teachers. In Zimbabwe a mentor-system was supported by government in study groups using correspondence courses from commercial institutions. In Botswana the study groups met less regularly, more often in the evenings and weekends, with tutors who were themselves often secondary school teachers employed part-time as tutors. While the pressure for such facilities grew in the late eighties the resources for education generally in Africa began to decline. The distance education colleges, usually departments of ministries of education, suffered similar or often more stringent cuts as those suffered by their formal secondary school cousins. But they were not allowed to restrict their enrolments: they had been set up because distance education was cheap and could cater for very large numbers. They became, in many cases, political safety valves for the growing pressure to provide ever more secondary school opportunities for primary school leavers without sufficient resources. The standard of their services declined: they were unable to keep up with the course production demand to meet dramatically increasing enrolments; they could not pay part-time postal tutor-markers or course writers fees which were attractive enough to encourage them to meet deadlines; administrative and pedagogic supervision and support of local tutors working with study groups could not be maintained; tutors inevitably (and rightly in view of the lack of materials) reverted to face-to-face teaching—or cramming where study time was limited; exam success rates became depressingly low. In at least one country the phrase 'education for failure' has been used to describe the distance education system. And the content on offer, for students whose chances, though not their hopes, of continuing to Higher Education are very low, is identical to that offered in formal secondary schools, i.e. mainly academic but without science or technical subjects because of the cost and perceived difficulty of offering such subjects at a distance and with few or no attempts to orient the curriculum to vocational preparation or development of job-related skills. Papers and statements arising from Jomtien regularly stress the need to harness modem technology including distance education to the provision of education up to junior secondary level, to out-of-school youth. This has clearly led to a renewal of interest by governments in distance education to provide such opportunities. For this renewed interest to produce programmes which are more successful than their predecessors with such an audience lessons from the past must be learned. Some of these lessons apply to all levels of distance education and are elaborated in the last section of the chapter. There are three crucial conclusions, however, which must inform any future expansion of substitute secondary schooling for out-of-school youth by distance education: - traditional distance education/self-study methods are less appropriate for young students than for working adults: a larger component of face-to-face support and tutoring, though costly, is almost certainly necessary; the balance between such support and the use of distance learning materials may well need to be systematically changed, making perhaps for a more flexible or open learning rather than a distance learning system
- it is highly likely that considerable saving could be achieved by sharing course development costs between countries or by utilising course materials already in existence
- an appropriate curriculum for such an audience can and should include vocational and technical subjects: this again may well lead to special arrangements for practical face-to-face learning and supervision.
Teacher education at-a-distanceAs already stated, much of the early use of private correspondence courses and of the pioneer government-backed distance education programmes was by teachers seeking to upgrade their academic qualifications for purposes of career advancement. Primary school teachers, in fact, became the primary target audience of several such programmes, for example in Kenya and Uganda. Initially such programmes tended to see their main purpose as upgrading the subject knowledge base of existing teachers—through courses leading to formal secondary school qualifications. Very early, however, as Kinyanjui (1992) has pointed out in relation to the Kenyan programme, the discussion began about the appropriate balance between academic content and pedagogy and teaching methodology both in terms of their respective importance in making better teachers and in terms of distance education's ability to provide effective learning. But, though the debate continues, the reality has been that academic content has heavily predominated in such programmes, as it has in the curricula of most primary pre-service teacher training colleges in Africa. Such primary teacher education programmes are, in Africa, predominantly pre-tertiary training programmes, providing secondary-level content upgrading at the same time as professional training—and are likely to remain so in many countries, for at least the next decade. Two special trends marked the 1970s and 1980s in distance-based teacher training programmes in Africa. First was a series of limited-time programmes in which, with UNESCO support, governments set up programmes to train a finite number of untrained teachers in their schools by a combination of distance education/correspondence courses and vacation in-college courses. These projects drew inspiration from the UNWRA/UNESCO Institute of Education's programmes for Palestinian refugee teachers in the Middle East (Clark and Erdos, 1970). They are best exemplified by the Botswana Francistown College programme which upgraded approximately 600 teachers in Botswana in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the William Pitcher College training programme in Swaziland. The second trend to a large extent grew out of the successful experience of the first: a series of initial training programmes by in-service methods using distance education where suddenly there was a need for huge numbers of new teachers to meet crisis situations created by political events. Tanzania decided in 1975 to move rapidly to universal primary education which created a demand for approximately 50,000 new primary school teachers in six years; Zimbabwe made a similar commitment immediately after independence in 1980 and its primary school population nearly tripled in ten years (Chivore, 1993); in Somalia a huge refugee influx in the early 1980s of approximately one million Ogadeni Somali's from Ethiopia created a demand for large numbers of primary schools in the refugee camps where they were settled-a demand which could only be met on an in-service basis. All three drew on the UNWRA-UNESCO and the Swaziland and Botswana experiences to create large-scale crash training programmes, again combining residential training courses (varying in length from three weeks to one academic term) with correspondence courses. All three recognized the need for some form of continuing tutorial support during the periods while students studied their correspondence courses and taught in schools, and created different patterns of field tutorial networks where students met tutors in or close to their schools on a regular basis and received advice both on the subject matter of their courses and on problems they encountered as teachers. By the middle of the 1980s, according to Nielsen, eighteen African countries had distance education programmes to train teachers (Nielsen, 1990 quoted in Murphy and Zhiri, 1992). There is a general consensus that these programmes compare favourably in effectiveness and cost with their college-based counterparts (Perraton, 1993). There now appears to be a new wave of programmes for teacher upgrading sweeping through Africa, sometimes building on, sometimes complementing, sometimes replacing previous programmes. In many of them, however, there is a new emphasis on local support for the teachers-in-training and on pedagogical training rather than purely on academic and theoretical knowledge. This is partly in recognition that some of the previous programmes have suffered, or even broken down in the face of limited resources to print and distribute course materials leading teachers to rely on self-help tutorial and study groups (Wort et al., 1993) and partly in recognition that teachers need continuous access to local resources and advice if they are to put into practice new methods and new attitudes learned in their courses. In several new experiments, therefore, the combination of distance education courses, on both content and methodology, with tutorial support through local teacher resource centres is being tried. Distance education for adult basic and nonformal educationAdult and nonformal education have in almost every country at all times been the Cinderella of education provision. Unhappily this is equally true for distance education in Africa. As already stated, radio was used very early in its life as a mass medium in Africa for community development education as a supplement to agricultural or health extension services. To begin with this largely consisted of open broadcasting to farmers, or to families, with information and messages about better health or agricultural practices. As it became clear that information on its own did not change attitudes or practices radio began to be used as part of multi-media programmes, supported by print materials and used as the basis for group discussion. The Canadian and Indian farm or rural radio forum model was introduced to Africa by UNESCO in Ghana in the early 1960s and rapidly spread to many other countries in Africa. But it never caught on or grew to the size and significance it had had in India or Canada, possibly because it never attracted the wholehearted support of government departments and was left to the radio stations to run and coordinate. The rural forums, however, inspired the much larger use of radio study groups in national adult education campaigns in Tanzania, Botswana, Zambia and Northern Ghana in the 1970s and 1980s. In these campaigns limited series of messages (on health and nutrition, civics, reafforestation, land usage, co-operative organisation, water and hygiene) were made into radio series lasting between two and three months, supported by printed study guides, and were distributed to networks of study groups, meeting under briefly trained group leaders organised and supported usually by consortia of ministries and adult education institutions. The most successful campaigns clearly reached very large numbers and appear to have made significant impacts on the knowledge and attitudes of many participants. They tended, however, to be one-off, isolated learning events, with little or no localized follow-up and it proved difficult or impossible to sustain the momentum they created. Two other programmes of nonformal distance education programmes developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s and have survived, with significant though smallscale success. In Francophone West Africa, from a base in the Ivory Coast, INADES has run a programme of agricultural education by simple correspondence materials, mainly aimed at groups of peasant farmers through local extension officers. The programme spread through many of the countries of Francophone West Africa in the 1970s and set up branches in Kenya and Ethiopia in the 1980s. In Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia programmes of correspondence education for members, committee personnel and staff of local cooperative societies, run by the local cooperative colleges, were set up in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s respectively and have continued to offer education and training. Their impact and profile has varied with the differing political emphases put on cooperative development. A similar pattern of training for rural health workers has been developed by the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMRIEF), a Kenya-based medical NGO working also in neighbouring East African countries. Most of these programmes have achieved successful results but usually either on a small scale, or for a limited period of time. They have failed to catch the sustained imagination of politicians or administrators or educators and so have failed to establish for themselves an institutional niche from which they could expand and prosper. At this level also, as at secondary level and in teacher training there are signs of renewal. Large scale adult literacy drives are in fashion again (Namibia, Ghana, South Africa, Sudan) as 'education for all by the year 2000' is seen to include adults, and as the World Bank remains convinced that a literate farmer is more productive than an illiterate. But what is the role of distance education in such adult literacy or adult basic education drives? Because the experience has been spasmodic and often isolated there is very little evidence from carefully conducted research nor even a pattern of received wisdom. Four tentative conclusions can however, be drawn: - it can be used successfully to spread the impact of nonformal education much more widely than can be achieved by traditional face-to-face methods
- it can be used successfully to train and support adult education and extension workers, teachers and facilitators
- it can boost the interest in the practical or functional themes which make mass adult literacy into functional literacy and emphasise the links between them and with literacy and numeracy, and provide opportunities for real learning around these themes which the literacy facilitors usually cannot provide themselves
- it can provide opportunities (perhaps the only realistic opportunities) for continuing learning at post-literacy level without which newly mastered literacy and numeracy skills can rapidly disappear.
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