Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at the recent history of accountability in higher education. It is from Chapter One, The Many Faces of Accountability by Joseph C. Burke, in, Achieving Accountability in Higher Education Balancing Public, Academic, and Market Demands, Joseph C. Burke and Associates. Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint. 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741. [www.josseybass.com] Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Left-Brained Versus Right-Brained: Which is Best for Learning?

Tomorrow’s Academia

————————————– 1,035 words ————————————–

THE MANY FACES OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Joseph C. Burke

Decades of Decline

Like most compacts, the one between American society and higher education became strained when rights and responsibilities moved from vague generalities to specific demands and competed for funding with other public services. Specifics always strain consensus, as do funding constraints. In addition, external complaints about the rampant costs, questionable outcomes, inadequate outputs, and the internal focus of colleges and universities raised successive questions about their economy, quality, productivity, and responsiveness to societal needs (McGuinness, 1997). Not surprisingly, recessions and failing revenues contributed to these complaints. As a result, says Massy, “universities and professors began a long slide from objects of awe to subjects of accountability” (2003a, p. 20).

The social compact that provided the glue between the general public and higher education stuck fairly well through the 1950s to the late 1960s, when student lifestyles and war protests alienated some of the general public and government officials. During these decades, the older public and private colleges and universities expanded, and new campuses emerged to meet the burgeoning demand for college education spurred first by the GI Bill that encouraged returning soldiers to enroll in college and then by the so-called baby boom of their sons and daughters. The following decades brought problems that undermined the consensus of the social compact. Although the problems and programs of accountability never fall neatly into ten-year spans, the decades described next capture the changing trends.

1970s

By the early 1970s, fissures in the social compact opened up, beginning with the falling revenues from a recession and fears of enrollment declines at the end of the baby boom. States adopted more centralized governance through coordinating boards and multicampus systems to control development of new institutions and program duplication (McGuinness, 1994). In response to an anticipated decline in enrollment demand, more centralized governance sought to limit the resources granted to higher education. With economy as the goal, regulation became the lever of accountability and bureaucrats the agents. A pattern developed in this first decade of decline in the social compact. Each partner started holding the other side to more specific and stringent tests. States and society reduced support and demanded more services; colleges and university requested more funding and started raising tuition, although not nearly to the degree as in the next decade.

The 1980s

By the 1980s, external concerns moved from economy to quality. Complaints about the lack of student learning in public schools, as voiced in A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), eventually moved to college campuses. Two-thirds of the states mandated, by legislation, that public colleges and universities adopt plans for assessing student learning. State officials dictated the policy but left the method of determination to campus professionals (see Chapter Five). Assessment shifted the focus of accountability from centralized state regulations to decentralized campus processes for identifying the knowledge and skills that graduates should posses, developing the method for assessing the extent of their achievement, and using the results to improve institutional performance. Although assessment programs focused on campus processes, the real goal was improving quality outcomes in student learning (McGuinness, 1997). This approach tried to!
combine public accountability with professional autonomy by tying external accountability to institutional improvement (see Chapter Five).

The 1990s

By the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, the expanded services provided by federal, state, and local governments shifted the emphasis of public accountability in government and public services from procedural protection to performance production. Osborne and Gaebler (1992) called for “reinventing government,” which focused on organizational results and customer services. Governments, in line with businesses, should decentralize authority while holding unit managers responsible for reaching designated results. Reinventing government combined decentralization with direction by being tight on setting goals and evaluating performance but loose in allowing managers to choose the means for achieving the desired results. Decentralization encouraged “managerial” accountability, while direction on the desired results ensured “political” accountability (Peters and Pierre, 1998, p, 232).

In line with reinventing government, the 1990s continued decentralization for higher education but this time with definite directions. Programs in the 1990s dictated the goals of efficiency and effectiveness through indicators measuring institutional performance but generally left campus managers to determine the means of achieving these ends (see Chapter Ten). Aside from deregulation movement, several factors forced the change. The first two stemmed from the decline in public funding and from what outsiders perceived as the slow response of higher education to the needs of a knowledge and information society. Burgeoning enrollment demand in the South and West as a result of the “baby boom echo” added to the pressure (King, 2000; Zumeta, 2001; Ewell, Paulson, and Wellman, 1997). State governments and coordinating boards adopted policies of performance reporting, budgeting, and funding (Burke and Associates, 2002; Burke and Minassians, 2002b; Chapter Ten). Whereas asses!
sment policies focused on campus processes, performance programs supposedly centered on outputs and outcome (McGuiness, 1997). State policymakers replaced campus professionals as the agents of the new accountability (Lively, 1992).

The Early 2000s

In the first years of the new century, the thrust of accountability seemed to shift again. Reduced state revenues from another recession and competition from rising costs of Medicaid and public schools once more reduced taxpayer funding for colleges and universities. As public support diminished, public demands escalated, confirming that taxpayer support and public demands are seldom in sync.

Increasing student enrollments and exploding state needs in workforce and economic development, as well as in public schools and teacher training, call for increased responsiveness from colleges and universities. Although the rhetoric on a college education as a public good remains in speeches by governors and legislators, students and parents are expected to pay a rising share of the costs through tuition and fees for what is often seen in state capitols as more of a private benefit for graduates. Private markets increasingly drive developments in public as well as private colleges and universities. “[N]ow it’s the market, not the commonweal, that calls the shots,” says Kirp (2003a, p. 2). States leave more and more of the directions and costs of higher education to private markets while managing them at times, by intervening to encourage public priorities through program and funding initiatives (McGuinness, 20002).

Folks:

The posting below is a follow-up to TP Msg. #626 Commonwealth Cooperation in Distance Education: Potential Benefits for Small States, posted on February 23, 2005. It is an interview about the Commonwealth of Learning with Sir John Daniel, a world-renowned authority in open and distance learning, conducted by George Lorenzo, from the July 2004 issue of Educational Pathways (www.edpath.com). Permission is granted for circulation.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Fishbowls

Tomorrow’s Academy

———————————– 1,777 words ——————————

TALKING WITH SIR JOHN ABOUT THE COMMONWEALTH OF LEARNING (COL)

The Commonwealth of Learning is a Vancouver-based organization with a noble mission “to create and widen access to education and to improve its quality, utilizing distance education techniques and associated communications technologies to meet the particular requirements of member countries.”

Member countries are part of the Commonwealth, which is a voluntary association of 54 independent nations originally linked together in the British Empire. The Commonwealth “has member countries all over the globe, rich and poor, large and small. It includes the world’s largest territory (Canada) and second largest in terms of population (India), and many of the smallest and most remote, including Nauru, the world’s smallest republic.”

This past June, Sir John Daniel, a world-renowned authority in open and distance learning was appointed president and chief executive officer of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), succeeding Gajaraj (Raj) Dhanarajan, who retired at the end of May.

Sir John, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1994 for services to higher education, has played a leading role over three decades in the development of distance learning on a global scale. He has served as assistant director of UNESCO, vice president of Athabasca University, vice rector of Concordia University, president of Laurentian University, and vice chancellor of the Open University in the UK. He has been awarded 20 honorary degrees from universities in 12 countries, is a past president of both the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) and the Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE), and served as vice president of the International Baccalaureate Organisation.

When Educational Pathways spoke with Sir John, he was getting ready for an educational business trip to New Zealand with a stopover in Fiji.

EdPath: Why do you think the U.S. is not a member of the Commonwealth?

Sir John: Obviously the U.S. would qualify to be a member, but they have never seen fit to join, partly because the U.S. does not tend to like being part of multilateral organizations that it can’t control.

EdPath: COL is doing lots of great things related to open and distance learning internationally. What does the U.S. need to know about COL, and is there any way that the U.S. can collaborate with COL?

Sir John: While by and large COL spends its money in doing projects and programs in Commonwealth countries, it operates an information service about developments in open and distance learning which is basically free and open to anyone. The COL “Knowledge Finder” (an online service that indexes about one million documents on education and development from selected Web sites related to education and development) is probably the most effective way of finding information about distance learning (on a global scale). A major service we provide is that we have probably the most comprehensive information finding service on open and distance learning, technology in education, and development in education in the world. I think we are pretty good at tracking all that stuff down and making it all available.

Also, the U.S., through USAID, is involved with helping countries to develop their education systems, and since that is the business that COL is in, there is nothing to stop USAID to fund projects that involve COL in various Commonwealth countries – and indeed they do.

EdPath: How would you describe COL’s mission?

Sir John: It is to help countries in their development by making their education systems more efficient and able to cope with more people. The focus is on trying to expand education systems at all levels in a quality way. The most successful and long standing example of that is in the open universities in places like India where they have massively expanded access to higher education and done so also in a quality way. And that is percolating down to other levels.

EdPath: Are you including online learning as a means to make education systems more efficient in the developing nations?

Sir John: Online learning in the developed world has not basically done much to increase access. It has increased flexibility. It has enriched courses for on-campus students, but it has not had the effect of increasing access in the way that earlier media has, and that is not really surprising, because earlier media were called mass media and reached a mass audience. Online technologies are not mass technologies, and therefore they tend to not reach mass audiences.

You have to be clear about what you are trying to achieve. When I was at UNESCO, people would say that to solve education in Afghanistan was to give them all lab-top computers. The fact is about one in 60 of the population in Afghanistan has electricity, and about one in 600 has a telephone, so you are far away from doing that.

EdPath: So, in general what kinds of education systems are we referring to here?

Sir John: We are talking about the whole mixture; what we call multi-media distance learning. Radio, for instance, is a very important medium in rural areas, and it is also very important for people who are not literate. Television – not as a sole medium but as a back up – is important. Print is still very important. One of the lessons we’ve learned is that some purely online plays can collapse, and those that do collapse, tend to become multi-media operations. Students essentially have said that there was no point in ruling out books, because books are actually a convenient way of studying.

The most important technologies of distance learning are not technologies in the sense of things that plug into the wall and have flashing lights and so on. They are approaches. The essence of open and distance learning, and the key to expanding systems, is to use the very old industrial technology division of labor approach. The idea is to move away from the notion that all teaching and learning has to involve one teacher and a bunch of learners with the teacher doing everything from planning the lessons, delivering them, organizing them and so on. We can divide that out so that different people specialize in different parts of the operation in a way that we take for granted in almost every other aspect of life. Lots of what we are doing in COL is helping countries develop some of those changes and attitudes that enable them to get more bang for their buck. The technologies they use are to some extent secondary.

EdPath: You have obviously seen education systems all over the world. How would you categorize the Commonwealth world of open and distance learning?

Sir John: It is a strange mixture of states. You have a block of small states in the Caribbean. You have a block of small states in the Pacific. You have a mixture of states in Southern and Central Africa. And then you have very big countries in South Asia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent, Sri Lanka. So you have everything between India, with a population of 1 billion, and Nauru, with a population of 3,000. It is quite a challenge to serve them all, because obviously their needs are massively different. We try to let developing countries benefit from what other developing countries are doing. A program developed in India is much more likely to be useful to Africans than a program developed in the UK or U.S., because it is probaby more adapted to their reality – their management or environment – and because it will be a whole lot cheaper.

EdPath: So where do the online education technologies fit in with all this?

Sir John: The key message is the fact that online learning is wonderful, but there is beginning to be a strong feeling in the states that, while it may well deliver its potential in the future, the first years have essentially been disappointing. The point is that distance education is now a very complex reality, and people should realize that there are different approaches to different environments, and they fit different purposes. Even your biggest fanatics of online learning in the states I don’t think can yet claim that this is a mass medium that is opening vast new audiences.

The Indira Ghandi National University in India* now has 1 million students. Twenty percent of all Indian students are in distance education programs, and the Indian policy is to raise that to 40 percent. So this is a different kind of phenomenon, far from the phenomenon of online learning. I don’t mean innovation isn’t like that. People do things, and then they discover the consequences were not exactly what they expected.

It is just a case of understanding that and realizing the focus is not on the means – distance learning – it is on the end, which is to help countries in their economic, social and cultural development. Improving education is a means to that. Old methods won’t do, and you have to find a mix of methods and approaches and organization that will in fact enable people to have much more effective education and training systems at all levels.

EdPath: So, do you think we Americans are moving in the right direction when it comes to working with developing nations in building more efficient education systems?

Sir John: It’s changed a bit now. One of the things online learning has done is to move the perception of Americans and what distance learning is from pre 1998, when Americans assumed that distance learning meant extended classroom, and all the rest of the world assumed that it meant learning at home. Now I think the asynchronous technologies have managed to bridge that gap, and Americans have adopted much the same perspective as the rest of the world. In 1998, it was a real problem, because when you said distance learning, most Americans assumed you meant remote classroom operations by satellite, or landline, and interactive, and whatever. The nice thing about asynchronous is that it has put everyone on the same wavelength. It is a very interesting area, I think, and anything that can be done in the area of online learning, as in most other areas of life, that can get Americans to be a bit more aware of the rest of the world is a noble mission.

* Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has a multi-media approach to instruction that is comprised of self-instructional material and counseling sessions conducted both face-to-face and via teleconferencing. For courses in science, computers, nursing, engineering and technology, students undertake practical classes at select study centers. In the tradition of Open Learning, IGNOU provides considerable flexibility in entry qualification, place, pace and duration of study to students.

Folks:

The posting below looks at what it means to be a generally educated person in the early 21st century. It is an article by Jerry G. Gaff, senior scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities, appearing in, Peer Review, Fall 2004, Volume 7, Number 1. [http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/previous.cfm]. Copyright © 2004, all rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Talking with Sir John About the Commonwealth of Learning

Tomorrow’s Academy

————————————– 2.027 words ————————————

WHAT IS A GENERALLY EDUCATED PERSON?

Jerry G. Gaff

The late Joseph Katz defined general education as “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that all of us use and live by during most of our lives–whether as parents, citizens, lovers, travelers, participants in the arts, leaders, volunteers, or Good Samaritans” (AAC 1988, 3). This definition invites individuals into a discussion about which knowledge, skills, and attitudes are most important for students to acquire and about which curricular and instructional practices are most likely to cultivate them.

It is important for campuses periodically to hold such conversations because the reasoning behind decisions previously arrived at tends to fade with the passage of time, eroding the social compact that explicitly defines the expectations for student learning and provides a rationale for the curriculum. Then faculty members tend to focus narrowly on their own courses and the interests of their departments and to forget the larger educational agenda facing their students. In such situations, faculty often advise students to “get their general education requirements out of the way” or teach their own courses in ways that neglect the broader purposes that nurture the qualities that characterize an educated person.

Another reason for initiating periodic conversations about the aims of education and the best curricular configurations for achieving them is that large numbers of today’s faculty have not been involved in such conversations. In August, I visited three universities launching campus-wide conversations about general education curricula. One had hired more than half of its faculty in the last five years, and the other two had large minorities of new faculty. The new faculty often did not understand the rationale behind certain requirements and lacked commitment to a curriculum that they inherited rather than invented. Most junior faculty welcomed conversations that invited them to participate in making decisions about the best curriculum for their students.

When an institution’s faculty and other constituencies are asked what is most important for their students to learn, they typically put the liberal arts and sciences–their content, methods, and perspectives–at the top of the list. For example, they commonly decide to emphasize knowledge of history and culture and of science and mathematics; skills such as logical and critical thinking and communication; and knowledge about diversity, intercultural skills, and engagement in the local community. Indeed, there appears to be a convergence about what used to be called the “marks of an educated person” across a wide variety of groups. Leaders of the professional accreditation bodies for business, education, engineering, and nursing have declared the qualities of liberal education to be central to the successful practice of all those professions. They and their colleagues in regional accrediting and in several educational associations have agreed that students should acquire the !
following attributes: breadth of knowledge and capacity for lifelong learning; abilities to analyze, communicate, and integrate ideas; and effectiveness in dealing with values, relating to diverse individuals, and developing as individuals (AAC&U 2004a).

The General Education We Need Today

Why are liberal and general educational outcomes valued so highly today? In part, it is because the United States has moved from an agrarian economy, through an industrial economy, to a knowledge-based economy. Labor economists have determined that, for a knowledge-based economy where many people work on solving unscripted problems, a liberal education is excellent preparation for the best careers (Carnevale and Strohl 2001). These views reverse the old saw, derived from the time of the industrial economy, that liberal and general education are impractical, irrelevant, or unnecessary and that only the major or professional preparation is of value. Indeed, a contemporary liberal or general education may be the most useful career preparation for the knowledge-based economy.

In addition, this nation is far more diverse than it ever has been, and it is engaged in global affairs in regard to such matters as defense, the environment, health, and justice. Educated people need to be able to understand the similarities and differences among people and to develop the capacities to bring different people together to solve problems, whether in the workplace, one’s community, or internationally.

How to Secure Agreement about Aims?

How can campus-wide agreement about the most important goals of a college education be secured? When faculty are invited into a conversation about the curriculum, they tend to emphasize the issues important to themselves, such as disciplinary turf, workload, and resources. Understandably, they want to protect their own courses and departments, are wary of any extra work that a curricular revision might entail, and suspect that there may not be enough resources to support change. Although these are important issues, they ought not to drive the conversation. In fact, if turf issues predominate, curriculum discussions become little more than a political tug of war dominated by the strongest factions. I typically advise campus leaders to set aside these issues and to take up staffing, faculty workload, and resources later, when specific curricular proposals are considered.

Instead, the conversation should be driven by learning goals for students and the educational principles that are shared among the faculty. My experience is that curriculum committees or task forces tend to rush too quickly into the design of a new curriculum. It is important to take enough time to discover what is common among the faculty and to secure basic agreement about what they think students should learn and about what qualities should characterize a high-quality, coherent college education. If a faculty has done a lot of such talking and has worked across departments and schools on innovations in teaching, learning, and the curriculum, then agreement about these fundamentals may come fairly quickly. On the other hand, if a faculty has done little talking or experimenting, it will take faculty members longer to get to know one another, to determine what they have in common, and to agree upon a curricular framework for their students.

How can one engage the faculty and keep them focused on deciding what a high-quality education for students should consist of? One way–usually a prescription for disaster–is for the members of a curriculum leadership group to confine the conversation among themselves, develop the best proposal they can devise, distribute it to their faculty colleagues, and then hold a public hearing. Without prior conversations, awareness that there are problems with the current curriculum, and agreements about what students should learn, faculty are sure to attack any proposed change, no matter how well thought out or cogently expressed.

A better approach is to lead the faculty into a collective inquiry involving several dimensions:

* An analysis of problems with the current curriculum to preempt the sure-to-be-heard remark that “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”

* Data from student evaluation of courses, surveys of student experiences, exit interviews of students withdrawing, and evidence about student retention, for example, which can provide useful information that is not widely known

* Studies of national curriculum trends and of what other institutions are doing

* Analyses of the professional literature containing issues and concerns that may resonate on the campus

* Comments of community advisory bodies or employers about what they look for in hiring new employees and the perceived strengths and weaknesses of their graduates

Such new information is part and parcel of the kind of intellectual inquiry already familiar to faculty members.

One other tendency of curriculum task forces is to hold discussions with departments and schools. Although these groupings surely must be heard, meetings in their departments tend to elicit protection of disciplinary or departmental turf. At least at an early stage, it is better to organize small interdisciplinary groups to discuss what students should learn and to share educational ideas among individuals who may not have discussed these matters. This can elicit more creative responses, as individuals play off the ideas of their colleagues. These small groups are more conducive to open, inclusive, and constructive dialogue than are department meetings where a few voices tend to dominate.

One particularly interesting way to stimulate dialogue is by changing the terms and getting outside the usual discussions. For example, one technique I have used is to ask faculties to complete a brief questionnaire and then discuss their various responses. In an exercise I call “The Fives,” faculty are asked to list the five ideas and skills they want students to learn, the five persons (living or dead) they would want their students to know, the five places they would like their students to visit, the five musical or artistic performances their students should see, the five books students should read, etc. Individuals can then discuss their answers and the reasoning behind them. In another questionnaire, Assessing General Education (Meacham 1994), individuals are asked to rate their general education program on twenty-eight different dimensions identified as important in various AAC&U publications, such as the clarity of student learning goals, coherence of the curriculum!
, and evidence of effectiveness. Then responses can be compared, and discussions can focus on items where there is much disagreement or on those dimensions with high or low scores.

Two Remaining Challenges

After more than two decades of serious attention to assessing the outcomes of a college education, few colleges and universities can answer legitimate questions about how much their students are learning. While there are good tests for measuring effectiveness in business, law, and other professions, the outcomes of general education remain elusive and relatively unstudied. In a recent statement from its board of directors, AAC&U (2004b) urges institutions to focus on five widely valued sets of educational outcomes and to concentrate on assessing them. The outcomes are (1) analytical, communication, quantitative, and information processing skills; (2) understanding inquiry practices of the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts; (3) intercultural knowledge and collaborative problem-solving skills; (4) proactive sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and social choices; and (5) habits of minds that foster integrative thinking and the ability to transfe!
r knowledge and skills from one setting to another. (An abridgement of this statement is published in this issue on pages 26-29.)

Another challenge is to entice individual departments to incorporate attention to general education goals into their major programs. In traditional practice, general education has been separated from study in the major, and preprofessional education has stood apart from other college programs. Yet, as noted in AAC&U’s report Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (2002, 31), “the goals of liberal education are so challenging that all the years of college and the entire curriculum are needed to accomplish them. Responsibility for a coherent curriculum rests on the shoulders of all faculty members working cooperatively.” Indeed, the recommendation that college curricula integrate general education and study in the major, including preprofessional programs, lies at the very heart of the Greater Expectations vision.

Complex liberal learning outcomes ought to be developed across the curriculum, creating a coherent educational experience. Through their course requirements for the major, departments can do an excellent job of addressing skills such as critical and analytic thinking, communication, and the use of technology. They also can incorporate attention to ethics and help students attend to diversity in their courses of study. At institutions that value these kinds of learning, it is a mistake to neglect the power of majors to embrace and cultivate them. As the late Ernest Boyer reminded us (1988), “rather than divide the undergraduate experience into separate camps, general versus specialized education, the curriculum of a college of quality will bring the two together.”

Shared Responsibility

In the words of the seminal publication Integrity in the College Curriculum (AAC 1985, 9), the task is “to revive the responsibility of the faculty as a whole for the curriculum as a whole.” It is the corporate quality of the general education program that makes it so difficult to secure agreement among the faculty about the aims and principles of education. It would be easy for each individual to describe his or her concept of an educated person, but the reality is that it is a community that must reach agreement. This is the first and necessary step in renewing a general education program, one that intentionally cultivates the essential qualities of an educated person.

References

Association of American Colleges (AAC). 1985. Integrity in the college curriculum. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.

—. 1988. A new vitality in general education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.

Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). 2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

—2004a. Taking responsibility for the quality of the baccalaureate degree. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

—. 2004b. Our students’ best work: A framework for accountability worthy of our mission. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Boyer, Ernest. 1988. College: The undergraduate experience in America. New York: HarperCollins.

Carnevale, Anthony P. and Jeff Strohl. 2001. The demographic window of opportunity: Liberal education in the new century. Peer Review 3(2): Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Meacham, Jack. 1994. Assessing general education: A questionnaire to initiate campus conversations. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Folks:

The posting below is of an address by Sir John Daniel. president of the Commonwealth of Learning –Commonwealth Cooperation in Distance Education: Potential Benefits for Small States, given at the Caribbean Regional Association for Distance and Open Learning. It looks at the role of the Virtual University in small nation-states that has the support of over 30 minsters of education. My thanks to Nick Gao, Co-ordinator, Information Resource Centre, the Commonwealth of Learning in
Vancouver, BC. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: What Is a Generally Educated Person?

Tomorrow’s Academia

————————————– 2,879 words ——————————-

COMMONWEALTH COOPERATION IN DISTANCE EDUCATION:
POTENTIAL BENEFITS FOR SMALL STATES

Sir John Daniel
Introduction

It is a great pleasure to be here in Trinidad and in the Caribbean. In my first year as President of the Commonwealth of Learning I am trying to visit each of the six major regions of the Commonwealth: Central and West Africa; East and Southern Africa; the Pacific; South Asia; Europe/North America, and the Caribbean.

Two weeks ago I was in West Africa, in Ghana, where, after I had met President Kufuor, my hosts took me to the Castle at Cape Coast which was a main centre of the British slave trade. During my time at UNESCO I had visited the ële de GorŽe, in Senegal, which was the shipping point for the French slave traders. But Cape Coast Castle is an altogether bigger affair. They told me that somewhere between twelve and twenty million people went out from there, through what they called The Door of No Return, to the waiting ships.

Some of those people were the ancestors of many the wonderful people that I have met in this trip to the Caribbean. Seeing both ends of the slave route in the space of two weeks has brought home to me the enormity of this blot on human history and the horror of this shameful example of man’s inhumanity to man. Today I am here to celebrate and develop the positive links between Commonwealth countries, but we must not forget the terrible triangular trade that linked Britain, West Africa and the Caribbean for more than a century.

But, if I turn now to contemporary cooperation within the Commonwealth, I am delighted that my first trip to the Caribbean as President of the Commonwealth of Learning, which I shall call COL, should coincide with the launch of CARADOL. COL is pleased to support this new organisation whose purposes fit perfectly with our own. The creation of CARADOL also evokes the title that you have given me for this short talk, namely Commonwealth Cooperation in Distance Education: Potential Benefits for Small States. The creation of the Caribbean Regional Association for Distance and Open Learning signifies a desire on your part to take cooperation between you a step further. I shall announce a little later one very tangible way in which the creation of CARADOL allows COL to increase its work in this region.

I shall begin by emphasising that all Commonwealth cooperation, whether in distance education or in other fields, is very much about small states. Small states account for two-thirds of the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. Furthermore the small states of the Commonwealth account for three-quarters of all the world’s small states. This means that small states are central to the notion of the Commonwealth and therefore that the work of the Commonwealth should be of special importance for small states.

After making some comments about the special situation of small states I shall outline what the Commonwealth of Learning, COL, is doing to help small states. We are always eager to increase the relevance and impact of that work. I shall talk particularly about the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth which the Ministers of Education have asked us to establish.

However, I do not want to leave the impression that COL’s agenda is mostly about higher education. I like to think that COL has already made a useful contribution to higher education in the Caribbean in various ways, and that will continue. But ministerial priorities evolve and COL’s task is to be sensitive to new needs.

Throughout the world governments have committed themselves, since 2000, to using the Millennium Development Goals as the framework for their action. That action, of course, varies from country to country, depending on how far the different goals have been attained in a particular jurisdiction. COL now organises much of its work within the general framework of the MDGs whilst orienting its particular actions in line with the priorities of each country.

The timing of my visit is also important because COL is already developing its plan of work for the 2006-09 triennium, which we shall present to the Commonwealth Ministers of Education at their conference next year. To underpin the plan we have commissioned environmental scans in the different regions of the world. Dennis Irvine and Nancy George are leading the scan for this region. We are also holding regional consultations, like the event that we held here last evening, and these have already involved hundreds of people around the world. In this way we shall ensure that COL acts in response to your needs.

The special needs of small states

So let me focus for a moment on the general needs of small states. It would be superfluous for me to talk at any length about life in small countries, whether they are landlocked states like Swaziland, Lesotho and The Gambia, or small islands like most of the Caribbean Commonwealth. Most of you come from small states so you know more about the opportunities and the challenges that they face than I do. Looked at in a world perspective and from the perspective of the Millennium Development Goals, small states face some special challenges.

The most obvious is simply being small. A small territory means that natural resources are limited in quantity and variety. A small population makes it difficult for a country to have skilled and qualified people in all the many occupations and trades that underpin a modern economy.

Then there is the tyranny of transport. Small landlocked states face difficulty and expense in getting their traded goods to and from ports in neighbouring countries. Island states face the challenges of distance from markets and the cost of sea and air links.

Lately we have become more aware of the special environmental challenges that face small states. Even more recently the occurrence of natural disasters such as the hurricane in Grenada, the tsunami in the Maldives and the floods in Guyana has reminded the world that small states are both particularly prone to natural calamities and especially vulnerable to their effects. A huge country like India has the resources and people to help the very small proportion of its population that suffered from the tsunami along its south-eastern coast. In the Maldives, on the other hand, although the number of casualties was much smaller than in India, the effect on the society and the economy is much greater.

COL is helping small states in a number of ways. At the most general level we try to make it easier for these states to work together on educational matters. Thus we have supported meetings of the Chief Education Officers of the Caribbean, because we believe that it is helpful for these senior officials to compare notes on a regional basis. The CEOs meeting previous to this one was actually held in Dunedin, New Zealand, last July, at COL’s Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning. A memorable moment at that event was a gathering of the Caribbean CEOs with their equivalents from the Pacific Islands, where the two groups discovered and discussed numerous challenges they have in common.

A recent example of COL’s role in the Caribbean is our work with the Caribbean Examinations Council, the CXC, to train and equip the staff to develop learning materials for subjects in the CSEC and CAPE curricula. The Minister, Mrs Manning, held a little ceremony here yesterday to mark the adoption of these materials in Trinidad and Tobago. >From COL’s point of view this is a nice example of a sustainable innovation that clearly improves the education system. The CXC now has the capacity to continue producing materials on more subjects and has built this into its budgets. The materials themselves help teachers by giving them clear points of reference for the curricula and they help students, particularly adult students, by making it possible for them to do much more study on their own.

That is an example of COL’s work in helping an institution to develop an application of open and distance learning. The other areas in which we help governments and organisations are in the formulation of policy on technology-mediated education and in the creation and improvement of technology-based education and training systems. We are very pleased to have been of service to our host country, Trinidad and Tobago in its impressive work on developing an ICT policy for education.

Our overall aim is to help countries in their development by making it easier for people to learn. When you think about it the attainment of any one of the Millennium Development Goals will require a massive increase in human learning.

I am not just talking about those goals that refer specifically to education, like the goal of attaining Universal Primary Education by 2015, but all the goals. We shall never attain the goals for reducing hunger and poverty unless millions of farmers and smallholders learn new ways of growing crops and ways of growing new crops. The achievement of the health goals, whether in the reduction of disease, of infant mortality or maternal mortality, requires not just improved health services but for millions of people to learn how to live more healthily.

All of COL’s work is based on the principle that traditional methods of teaching and learning cannot cope with the scale of the task. In most other areas of life technology has transformed the way we do things, mostly for the better. COL’s aim is to harness technology to increase the scope and scale of learning.

So here in the Caribbean, for example, we are working with farmers in several countries to bring them knowledge that could improve their livelihoods. Agriculture in the Caribbean is facing a crisis as terms of trade change. Agricultural extension units, working in traditional ways, struggle to serve the multiple needs of the region’s many small farmers. Through COL’s media empowerment programme we provide extension units and NGO’s with the equipment and training necessary to enhance the scope, scale and impact of their information messages in a way that generates productive dialogue amongst the farmers themselves.

To mention a quite different example, at the level of policy we are helping governments to get to grips with the changing scene of higher education. Open and distance learning has a long history in the Caribbean but ODL is changing, notably with the development of eLearning, and higher education is changing, notably with the growth of private providers and the expansion of cross border provision, both distance learning and the creation of offshore campuses. Most governments are trying to make sense of all this so that they can take advantage of the trends to increase access to higher education for their citizens whilst protecting the student, as consumer, from fraudulent operators and low quality provision.

This is particular challenge in the Caribbean where the first step, which is to reach agreement on the need for action at the regional level, seems to be very difficult. If each country makes its own offers on education under the General Agreement on Trade in Services without consulting the others, and if each country tries to set up its own accreditation service, the result is likely to both costly and unhelpful to students. However, if a political will to act regionally does emerge, COL can help with the development of policies and structures. We have been closely involved in the exercise of developing guidelines for cross border education that is being completed by the OECD and UNESCO.

Finally, I must say a word about a new initiative of the ministers of education which is meant to serve the Caribbean, namely the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. This idea emerged at the Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers held in Halifax, Canada in 2000. At that time, you will recall, the dotcom frenzy was at its height and the talk was of an unstoppable revolution in education that would sweep away all previous educational methods. The ministers from small states, concerned that their countries did not have the critical mass of expertise and technology to operate confidently in this new world, asked COL to work with them on a proposal for a Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth.

The key idea was that by acting collectively these states could be players in the world of eLearning, and would not need to depend solely on offerings from bigger countries. The ministers revisited the idea when they met in Edinburgh in 2003 and asked COL to proceed. In doing so we are operating on three principles.

First, we are building the VUSSC from the bottom up. Instead of offering a ready-made institution with a programme of courses we have asked governments and institutions to tell us what their priorities are for such a vehicle. As particular areas emerge as priorities for several countries COL will put together coalitions of the willing to develop the necessary courses and systems.

Second, following from the decision to be guided by country priorities, we do not have any preconceived notions about the level and content of provision. The ministers called the VUSSC a ‘university’ but we imagine that provision will cover a range of areas, probably with the main focus on various technical and vocational topics related to livelihoods.

Third, although the ministers used the word ‘virtual’, we interpret that in its widest sense to mean any appropriate use of technology, be it print, radio, video or eLearning. All the experience of the last thirty years teaches us that what counts is not the particular medium used but the quality of thinking that goes into curriculum development, pedagogical design and student support.

However, we expect that many countries will see this as an opportunity to increase their capacity to exploit the Internet and develop eLearning. COL is well equipped to respond help those who want to move in this direction because we are at the centre of the various developments that are coming together to facilitate eLearning.

I refer first to Learning Management Systems, which are the software platforms on which eLearning courses run. COL’s aim here is to help countries and institutions make good choices that do not lead to nasty surprises of large additional costs just as the project is getting operational. In this respect Ken Sylvester’s earlier presentation about CKLN was music to my ears, because CKLN is clearly going to be a force for getting the region to converge on an open source Learning Management System.

Second, I refer to learning objects and the repositories in which they are stored. One of the great advantages of eLearning is that it is cheap and easy to share learning materials, which we call learning objects. This also makes it much easier for people in different countries to work together on developing learning objects, which is one of the aims of the VUSSC.

In both these areas, Learning Management Systems and Learning Objects, COL will promote and facilitate the use of Free and Open Source Software, or FOSS for short. The extension of the concept of open source software to the arena of learning objects is one of the most hopeful developments in education in years, because it will make the sharing, adaptation and re-use of learning materials so much easier. Here is a product of globalisation and technology that could be of great benefit to developing countries and a break with the sad tradition that new technology often results in a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

So, in closing, I pledge COL’s support to work of the members of CARADOL. I hope that you will use COL, and particularly the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, as catalyst for cooperation within this region. I found the presentation on CKLN enormously encouraging because that will provide much of the infrastructure and the glue that will make collaboration on the creation of learning objects possible.

In this context I had an excellent meeting this morning with Mr Colm Imbert, the Minister responsible for tertiary education here in Trinidad and Tobago, who has a clear vision of what this Virtual University initiative should and should not be.

In expressing my best wishes to CARADOL I have a happy announcement to make. Every two years COL holds a Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning. The first was held in Brunei, the second in Durban, South Africa and the third in Dunedin, New Zealand, last year. At the Dunedin conference we invited bids to host the 4th Pan-Commonwealth Forum and received four offers, including one from the Caribbean coordinated by Professor Stewart Marshall of UWI.

I am delighted to announce that after a rigorous selection process the choice has fallen on the Caribbean. Late next year practitioners of distance and open learning from all over the Commonwealth will come to Jamaica to share experiences and initiate further cooperative ventures. I am absolutely delighted by this decision and I am sure that hosting the whole Commonwealth will be a most exciting opportunity for CARADOL and its members. I congratulate all those involved.

My colleagues and I look forward to working with you to make the 4th Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning a stellar success. Meanwhile, I congratulate you on creating CARADOL and wish the new association well.