Wednesday, October 3, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Bernadette Robinson Scholar Calls for Governments to Take a Realistic View Toward Distance Education By DAN CARNEVALE Bernadette Robinson is a professor of comparative education in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Nottingham, in Britain. At the university, she has a special appointment to conduct research and help develop international collaborations. She has acted as a consultant to 37 different countries, most of them developing nations, that are creating distance-education programs. From her vantage point, she has been able to see the growth of distance education from a global point of view. Q. When you serve as a consultant for educators in different countries, what are some of the key points you make? A. Take a realistic approach to distance learning and what it can and can't do. I think many governments and many institutions think that distance education is going to be a cheaper way of providing courses and programs, especially with the IT developments now. And I think quite a lot of the research where IT is involved is showing that you may get some improvements in quality, but not always. But you actually don't always save money by delivering online. You need high initial investments. Q. Do you see any trends in how developing countries are using distance education? A. It's being used a lot for teacher education. It's being used quite a bit in higher education. There's been an enormous growth of distance-teaching universities in Asia, for instance. I think there are well over 60 distance-teaching universities in the world -- you know, just distance-teaching universities, whose only methods of teaching are through that. And the biggest expansion has been in Asia. So they're providing high degrees, teacher education, some vocational education, a whole range of things. Q. Are these countries doing this for their own citizens, or do you see any of them trying to reach an international audience? A. It's primarily for their own citizens. But in fact, some developments are spreading out now. The Open University of Hong Kong was set up for its own citizens. But in fact -- well, of course, it's now part of China -- it's now drawing students from China and some other Asian countries, too. The Indira Gandhi National Open University in India is primarily for Indian students, but it is now drawing on students from other countries near India. You know the story in higher education. As universities in Western countries and countries like Australia look for new markets, they're obviously getting very international in their focus and setting up courses which are delivered in many countries or partnership countries. Q. What are some of the barriers you've encountered when helping countries develop distance-education programs? A. One is understanding, really -- understanding at the decision-making level, the policy-making level. A country will say, "We want to have an open university," or, "We want to have distance education for training teachers," or whatever. But they don't actually understand what that means in terms of setting up the infrastructure to do that or the delivery means. And they don't understand the cost structure, which is different from traditional education. So you get high initial costs and lower recurrent costs. And they think it's all going to be so much cheaper. And it's not always the solution to the problems that they have. The second one, I think, is human capacity -- the training needed. Some countries now have built quite a good capacity. [In] other countries, the human resource needs building in order to operate, so we've quite a big training task there. ... Since 1994, I've been working on five or six projects in Mongolia. And when I first went there, nobody had heard of distance education -- you know, the whole vocabulary was foreign. But now I see good materials being produced, good radio programs. There's been quite a steep learning curve. And people have really taken on board the ideas and actually can deliver the goods in quite a difficult environment. So training and staff development is another one. And I think the third barrier is money -- not understanding that you actually need some money to fund this whole thing from the start. So some countries try to do it on the cheap. And of course it turns into a second-rate enterprise. Q. So it looks like these countries are going through the same learning curve that the United States and Britain had to go through. A. Yes, I think so. I think there is a difference, too, in the understanding of distance education in the U.S.A. and the U.K. The U.S.A. perception has been of a kind of electronic classroom. That's been the mode and the idea of delivering through the electronic-model classroom to various locations. And there have been lots of examples of this -- two-way video and that sort of thing. I think the U.K. model has been different. It's been much more individual learning, small learning groups -- quite a different conception, I think, about teaching and learning. So it's not just lifting the classroom model into the technology. It's redesigning the whole thing to create a learning environment, whether you use IT or not. Q. So how does the British model work, exactly? A. That model works by having local groups meet with a tutor. There has been very high tutorial input to the U.K. and the Open University, for instance. So there's a student-support system which works throughout the U.K. and Europe. And the students get their learning material, whether it's print, video, audio -- I mean it's usually a mixture, it's not just one medium. They work through the material, they write assignments, they meet with their personal tutor in a group of about 20 or less at regular intervals and interact with other students. And they do that either face to face in local groups, or, for low-population courses, they would telephone or e-mail. Q. How have cultural differences hampered creating distance-education programs around the world? A. You can't pick up a distance-education model and just transplant it in another country, unless that country is very similar, and I don't think you can do it even then. I think you do have to adapt. I think one difference has to do with the way materials are produced. For example, the model for producing good self-studying materials here in the U.K. would be to go through a series of drafts, work in a team, have the team give feedback in a meeting and in written form on each draft -- constructive, but tough -- and then the author of the different parts of materials takes it on board and redrafts and manages the whole process. Now that assumes that people can work in a team. It assumes that even though you are a very important specialist in your field, you'll get constructive criticism from a junior member of the team, and some people are commenting on the specialist's content. Some people will be commenting on what the learner's perception might be and how they experience it as a learning material. A lot of different specialists would be giving their input about what the material was like for them. Now if you're working in a country where there's high social status between the top and the bottom in pecking order, you are not able to work in a team the same way. So the junior members do not dare to say anything about the materials. And the senior academics or specialists would not accept any criticism of their materials from a junior person. So that sometimes is a barrier. You can't get well-known specialists writing materials to improve what they write because they reject the criticism because they are specialists -- they know best. So that's one barrier that's to do with the social dynamics of groups and the way organizations work, but it comes out in what the materials look like. The whole idea that you work in a team and it's a team effort doesn't work so well. And that is a problem in a number of countries where the social structure is very hierarchical. That's also reflected in organizational structures. And one of the things you need to do in distance education for local support of students [is that] you've got to get feedback up to the center about what it's like to be a student and what it's like to study those materials. But if the idea is that the student's place is to be quiet and to take what they receive and not to ask questions or to criticize ... then you've only got a top-down flow of information -- it doesn't come back up. And so the students are at the bottom of the heap. They have no voice in saying what they should receive, or what it's like, or how they could change it for the better. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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