Speech by the South African Minister of Education

Speech by the South African Minister of Education,

Professor Kader Asmal, MP, at the All-Africa Ministers’ Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education

Cape Town International Convention Centre

Monday, 2 February 2004

Honourable Ministers of Education

UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, Sir John Daniel

President of the Commonwealth of Learning, Professor Dhanarajan

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

It gives me great pleasure in welcoming you, in particular, my fellow African Ministers of Education and the international participants, to this open learning and distance education conference, which is being held at the fairest Cape in southern tip of our great continent. South Africa is deeply honoured to host this important conference and we are gratified that so many Ministers of Education from across the length and breadth of the Continent have made a special effort to participate in the deliberations of the conference.

For South Africa this conference is of great symbolic significance coming as it does in the year that we celebrate the tenth anniversary of our liberation and the establishment of democracy. In playing host to this conference therefore enables us to acknowledge again the role of our fellow African brothers and sisters in contributing to the downfall of apartheid. And to reaffirm our membership of the African family of nations, which is united in its desire and commitment to the reconstruction and development of Africa in pursuit of a better life for all our people.

Our coming together at this conference is a recognition that education and training is a crucial pillar, indeed the foundation, for the reconstruction and development of Africa. It is a recognition that to educate our people is to invest in our development, as all the evidence suggests that sustainable economic development is dependent on an adequate and ever-increasing skills and knowledge base. It is also a recognition that the role of education goes well beyond its contribution to economic development; that it is fundamental to building and ensuring a sustainable democratic society, as it provides citizens with the tools to understand the issues that confront us, thus enabling them to actively participate in the building and governance of our societies.

This dual role of education and training in sustaining the economy and democracy is well-captured in Namibia’s policy framework for education, Toward Education for All – a Development Brief for Education, Culture and Training, which states:

“Education also improves the quality of our lives by helping us develop our abilities. As we learn more about our environment and the threats to it, we become better able to protect and preserve it. As we become better at identifying and solving problems, we also become better at creating jobs and increasing our income. As we develop our own ideas and technologies, we become less dependent on imported innovations and the conditions that often accompany them. As it helps us become more successful in setting and pursuing our own goals, education is liberating, both individually and socially”.

In short, education provides us with the tools to interpret and understand society and therefore with the tools to change it. It enables us to determine and define our own development agenda, which would give meaning and substance to our commitment, in the context of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), to make the 21st century, the century of Africa’s rebirth and renewal.

In education, as President Mbeki indicated in his address yesterday, Africa has embraced and is committed to the goals of Education for All, which have been aligned to and underpin the NEPAD framework for education and training. The goals are ambitious and wide-ranging and include, amongst others:

· Provision of quality basic education for all boys and, in particular, girls, with all that this entails for the massive development and re-training of our teaching corps.

· Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people, as well as those of adults, are met through equitable access to appropriate educational and life-skills programmes.

· Improving the level of adult literacy by 50%.

· Enhancing access to and improving the participation rate in higher education, thus contributing to the development of the high-level skills and knowledge necessary for social and economic development.

The goals that we have set are ambitious and achieving them will be no mean feat. This is not only because of the time-frame for their achievement, i.e. 2015, but more importantly, because of the resource constraints that we face. These are not only slim, and, indeed, often meagre, but also compete with a range of other equally pressing social needs such as in health, housing and welfare.

It is precisely because of the impact of resource constraints on our education systems that we agreed at the MINEDAF VIII Conference in Dar Es Salaam in December 2002, to convene a conference on the potential role of open learning and distance education as a possible solution that would enable us to successfully meet the challenge of Education for All. Our decision was informed by the need to explore and interrogate the promise and the claim that open learning and distance education provides a cost-effective solution to expanding access and enhancing the quality of education, especially at the tertiary level and in relation to ongoing professional development in the context of lifelong learning.

I want to suggest at the outset, two principles that should frame and act as the point of departure for our exploration of the potential and promise of open learning and distance education.

The first principle is that education and the act of learning is a profoundly social act. The generation and transmission of knowledge, including intellectual development, is the product of social interaction and engagement, which involves multiple actors – parents, elders, peers and teachers, and occurs in a range of settings – the home, community, neigbourhood, church, workplace and educational institutions. As a social process, learning is not confined to the formal instruction offered in the classroom or lecture theatre and neither is it simply the accumulation of bits and pieces of information and the gradual adding of new skills. It is the complex interplay of all of these factors, including social values and mores, which in combination facilitate the individual learners cognitive and intellectual development, as well as ultimately, the individual’s understanding of the personal and social space that they inhabit.

The second principle is that technology is not a panacea for the challenges that confront education and training on our Continent. The allure and wonder of the new technologies must not blind us to their role in education and training. The new technologies cannot, as some purveyors would have us believe, in and of itself change and transform the learning process or solve the myriad of problems – human and organizational, that beset the education and training system. The solutions to these problems are a lot more complex than simply connecting a set of networked computers!

This is not to suggest an educational Luddism. On the contrary, I have no doubt that the new technologies, if properly used and mediated, has the potential to enable learners and teachers to have access to a range of learning resources and strategies, which would facilitate and enhance the quality of the learning process. The point, however, is not to give in to a narrow technological determinism in which technology substitutes for and replaces the human agency, which is central to the social act of learning. We must embrace the new technologies, but not at the expense of the social values and moral purpose that is the defining characteristic of humankind.

We must therefore guard against the uncritical introduction and adoption of distance education and the associated new technologies. Unless we do so, we are in danger of once again turning our countries and Continent into laboratories for educational experiments for external agencies, the failure of which in past decades has done untold damage to our educational systems. I am thinking here of the vocationalisation of the education system propounded by the World Bank and other agencies in the 1960s, as well as the subsequent emphasise on the provision of basic education at the expense of tertiary education, which played no small part in the demise of the great universities of our Continent.

What then is the promise of open learning and distance education? However, in order to assess its promise, it is necessary to first distinguish and clarify the relationship between open learning and distance education.

Open learning is an approach, which seeks to remove all unnecessary barriers and restrictions to learning. It is based on the principle that the provision of education must be flexible, thus enabling as many people as possible, throughout their lives, to take advantage of learning opportunities. It requires the establishment of structures and conditions that enable learners to learn where, when, what and how they want to.

Distance education on the hand is the mechanism that through its particular technique of educational design and provision, in which the learner and teacher are separated by space and time, makes it possible to give effect to open learning.

It is against this background that I want to suggest that the promise of distance education is four-fold:

First, it facilitates and enhances access to education, in particular, tertiary education, through removing two key barriers to learning, namely, lack of funds and location. In this regard, it enables people to learn while they continue to earn, and irrespective of whether they are close to an institution, which is critical for people in rural areas.

Second, it is cost-efficient and is able to achieve significant economies of scale as it enables institutions to increase enrolments without increasing staff levels and associated physical infrastructure.

Third, it enhances and promotes quality through the development and provision of learning resources, which can be used by teachers and learners, irrespective of their location. This is especially important given the fact that in many of our countries our teachers are either un- and/or under-qualified and our schools and other institutions are poorly resourced in terms of learning resources, in particular, libraries and laboratories.

Fourth, it facilitates and promotes access to lifelong learning, in particular, ongoing professional development, to those who have obtained formal qualifications but who are required to upgrade their knowledge and qualifications given the increasingly important role that knowledge and the processing of information plays wealth creation and economic development. There is no doubt that in the 21st century, education and training is not only about schools and universities, nor is it only about the young. No education qualification, whether it is technically or academically oriented, can be sufficient to prepare an individual for life given that the way in which we organise our societies, produce goods, and trade with each other is constantly changing.

The world has shifted from education for lifetime employment towards lifelong learning. Indeed, both the Education for All goals and the requirements of NEPAD make it clear that our education systems have to provide meaningfully for lifelong education. This of course means that educational opportunity cannot be provided in traditional ways, requiring students to attend fixed locations at fixed times for lengthy periods. We have to provide opportunities that fit with the constraints and exploit the possibilities of the complex and demanding lives of the learners.

The promise of distance education can, however, all too easily be negated by bad practice, as bitter experience in relation to higher education in South Africa, as well as the observations of others, has made me painfully aware. In this regard, aside from the peril of technological determinism, which I have already discussed, I want to highlight other perils that we must guard against, including, amongst others:

· Emphasis on increasing enrolments, with scant regard for the quality of the learning experience, or the number and/or quality of the outputs.

· Poor quality of the programmes on offer, which bear little or no relevance to skills and human resource development needs.

· Inappropriate approaches to curriculum design, development and delivery.

These perils are largely the result of the development of distance education programmes by educational institutions driven primarily by financial gain. This is unacceptable and should not be countenanced. There is hardly any point in pretending to open access to learning opportunities to students if there is little or no likelihood of them succeeding. We must ensure, if we are not to waste scarce resources, that the opportunities offered by distance education give learners a reasonable chance of success, and moreover, that the qualifications they earn will ultimately have value in their lives, or, more specifically, in the occupational market-place. In the final analysis, it is only a waste of precious resources.

This requires that we recognize that the development of quality distance education programmes, contrary to widespread belief, is not cheap. The fact that it is not cheap does not necessarily mean that is not cost-effective and efficient. It is therefore imperative that adequate resources are allocated to ensure the development of multi-media courses, with appropriate curriculum design and high-quality learning resources, as well as ongoing tutorial and student support systems.

In addition, the appropriate infrastructure needs to be in place for students to receive their study materials, post and collect their assignments or even e-mail their tutors. So we should not fall into the trap of assuming that a grant or loan to kick-start the development of a distance education programme would be sufficient to ensure its sustainability. Instead, we need to find ways of shifting our patterns of public expenditure to ensure that distance education is adequately and appropriately resourced.

How then can we harness jointly the promise of open learning and distance education in support of the reconstruction and development of our Continent? There are exciting possibilities and prospects, which if properly investigated and nurtured, could play a critical role in supporting the implementation of NEPAD. President Mbeki alluded in his address to the potential of a network of distance learning centres scattered across the Continent, networked with each other, with universities and with government departments, which would facilitate the delivery a range of development-oriented educational programmes, in particular, in relation to enhancing the delivery of public services. The role of the AfricanVirtualUniversity, which is presently being revamped, should be investigated in this regard.

Furthermore, the development of a NEPAD research network could play a vital role in mobilising our dispersed intellectual capacity, both within the Continent and in the Diaspora, which would enable the development of the necessary critical mass to address the common development challenges that we face. This would be a springboard for the development of new ideas and knowledge and their application in the real world.

We should also consider investigating the feasibility of collaborating in the development of multi-media programmes and learning materials, which could address the development of skills in priority areas such as teacher training, as well as contribute to enhancing the quality of the educational system. This may well be difficult given national and regional differences, including language differences. However, it may be possible to develop generic materials, which could be adapted to suit different circumstances.

In this regard, I want to indicate that South Africa stands ready and willing to put its distance education resources in the service of the Continent. We have, as you may be aware, launched last week the (new) University of South Africa (UNISA), which was established through the merger of the erstwhile UNISA, Technikon South Africa and the distance education campus of VistaUniversity. The (new) UNISA is a mega distance education institution, and the largest in Africa. It could play a crucial role in enhancing access to higher education across the Continent. It already does so to some extent and I know that the Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Barney Pityana, who is participating at this conference, is keen to expand the role of the (new) UNISA within the Continent.

Indeed, some of our contact higher education institutions have also developed distance education programmes, which are being offered in various parts of Africa. I am especially concerned that South African institutions operating in the rest of the Continent must avoid the perils of distance education that I have referred to and which we are currently in South Africa. It goes without saying that the participation of South African institutions in general and the (new) UNISA in particular, in the provision of higher education in the rest of the Continent must be done in a manner that is consistent with the spirit and ethos of NEPAD.

In the interest of moving forward in formulating guidelines for good practice in distance education, we offer to this conference a discussion document: A Draft Code of Conduct for Cross-Border/Transnational Delivery of Higher Education Programmes. This discussion document is an opportunity for us to agree on basic guidelines that are in keeping with the mission of higher education as we face the challenges of a new global education market.