COL Quality Assurance Toolkit Project

As reported earlier the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) requested SAIDE to facilitate a week-long workshop on quality assurance for open schools in September last year. This workshop was attended by 23 delegates from 16 different Commonwealth countries across the globe. Recently, COL asked SAIDE to support the quality project further by developing a quality assurance toolkit. The kit aims to provide guidelines to people working in open schools in setting up and maintaining robust quality management systems to enhance quality open and distance learning (ODL) provisioning. Ephraim Mhlanga reports.

The last 15 years have seen exponential growth of primary school enrolments as countries strive to achieve universal primary education by 2015. Unfortunately, this expansion has not been matched by corresponding expansion at secondary school level. In spite of substantial investments being made to expand secondary educational provision in many developing countries, the majority of primary school leavers are failing to access this level of education. Abrioux (2009) noted that in Sub-Saharan Africa, only one child in four participated in secondary schooling in 2006, leaving some 78 million of the region’s school-age children out of school. In the forward Sir John Daniel highlighted that UNESCO estimates that to achieve a global secondary net enrolment of 80% would require secondary places to be found for 200 million more youngsters. The amount of resources needed to meet such demand through conventional schooling is just beyond the means of countries.

Many countries are gradually realising the potential of ODL in expanding access at secondary school level. Open schooling is thus gradually gaining importance and this has triggered the mushrooming of open schools in many developing countries. The potential of ODL to expand secondary school access in cost-effective ways is increasingly being realised. In Southern Africa, Namibia and Botswana are good examples of countries where ODL has significantly opened access at secondary school level. Whilst this is a positive development in terms of broadening access, the issue of quality remains a big challenge as often priority is given to physical access and not epistemic access. In many countries, open schooling has been introduced without sufficient start-up investment, and this has obviously compromised the quality of offerings. Unless open schooling opens access to quality education, its introduction becomes counter-productive since the millions who go through the system stand the risk of degenerating into illiteracy after school and fail to make meaningful contributions in the developing economies. The quality of education is as important as the quantity provided. It is out of this concern that COL, through various ways is supporting countries in enhancing the quality of ODL offerings.

Work on the COL quality assurance toolkit commenced in earnest at the beginning of September with an internal workshop at SAIDE. The workshop had the following aims:

• To review the toolkit as conceptualized at the 2008 workshop and make further input,
• To review the NADEOSA quality criteria and their appropriateness to open schooling, and
• To conceptualize and plan the processes of developing the resource.

In terms of structure, the toolkit will consist of three main components:

• An introduction which deals with quality and quality assurance concepts, quality assurance principles and policy issues;
• A second part which provides quality criteria around which quality should be built;
• Lastly, case studies that exemplify good practice around specific criteria outlined in the second part of the resource.

The case studies will be written up by people from the various open schools in the Commonwealth, with guidelines and support from SAIDE.

In developing this toolkit, SAIDE is aware of the great diversity that exists amongst the schools in terms of putting in place quality assurance systems. Whilst those with established quality assurance systems are likely to find it easy to apply the kit guidelines, those that are just starting are likely to experience initial difficulties. As a way of catering for such embryonic systems, SAIDE decided to include a case study on how to start a quality management system in an open school. This case study will be written up by an institution that has successfully managed to put in place such systems and manage them for some time.

One of the key strategies that will be used to maximize relevance of the resource as well as ensure buy-in is to involve all the open schools that attended the initial workshop in Johannesburg in the development process.

Subsequently, SAIDE has held a teleconference with participants from open schools. The teleconference gave participants an opportunity to make their input on the drafted criteria and the constituent elements, as well as agree on the allocation of case studies and timelines. The writing-up of the case studies will be an iterative process that will involve constant dialogue and exchange between SAIDE and case writers as well as amongst the writers themselves.

A second workshop for participants from open schools is planned for March 2010, by which time a complete draft of the toolkit is anticipated to be in place. The workshop will provide participants with a forum for reviewing the entire toolkit, from different angles of analysis (like relevance, appropriateness, adequacy and user friendliness) and refine it in preparation for submission to COL for publication. The intensive involvement of participants is meant to ensure that at the end of the day, they own the resource and they can use it when it is published. The importance of the toolkit lies in how it impacts on practice in institutions, and its ultimate result must be improved quality of offerings in open schools.