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October 3, 2013 could well have been labelled ‘National Distance Education Day’ as delegates from around the country met at the Birchwood Hotel in Johannesburg to discuss the Council on Higher Education's (CHE) draft “Distance Education Programmes in a Digital Age: Good Practice Guide”. The Annual General Meeting of the National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa (NADEOSA) was included on the programme for the day. Tony Mays reports.
The workshop began with a keynote address by Professor Asha Kanwar, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL). Professor Kanwar noted the expansion of open and distance learning provision in response to the growing demand for access to higher education opportunities worldwide. She observed that expansion of access must not be at the expense of quality and that the two were not mutually exclusive: for example the UK Open University has consistently been ranked number one in terms of comparative studies of student satisfaction in the UK and is currently ranked fifth (above Oxford) in comparative university rankings in the UK overall. She noted the evolution from quality assurance as an external process of teaching and learning towards the development of an internal culture of quality which each individual staff member has a responsibility to maintain or build. Professor Kanwar identified the advent of Open Educational Resources (OER) and platforms for Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) as two of the recent initiatives helping us to re-imagine distance provision.
Following Professor Kanwar’s address, Ephraim Mhlanga and Brenda Mallinson of Saide provided background to the development of the Good Practice Guide and then Rachel Prinsloo from the Directorate for Strategic Planning and Quality Assurance at Unisa and Krish Govinder from Regenesys provided initial responses to sections of the draft guide.
The approximately 60 delegates present in the workshop then broke up into four smaller groups to discuss and recommend improvements on the CHE’s draft Good Practice Guide. The draft guide comprised 8 sections as follows:
- Introduction
- A conceptual framework for distance education
- Curriculum design and development
- Teaching and learning
- Assessment
- Partnerships and collaborations
- Managing distance education provision; and
- Concluding remarks linked to programme review criteria and lines of enquiry for distance provision.
Feedback from the breakaway group discussions, together with any individual feedback received by email will inform a revised version of the Guide.
In closing the workshop, Professor Kethamonie Naidoo of the CHE Accreditation Directorate thanked delegates for their active participation and cautioned that the Guide should focus on the key issues needed to help evaluate distance practice.
A number of delegates stayed on to participate in the NADEOSA Annual General Meeting. In his presentation of the Executive Report, outgoing President, Louis J Van Niekerk, noted that the last few years had been quite difficult ones for NADEOSA in light of the changing landscape of education in the country but observed that emerging policy promoted expansion of quality distance provision in South Africa within a more flexible and holistic post-schooling system. This development re-emphasised the need for a national forum such as NADEOSA.
At the end of the AGM meeting, a new NADEOSA Executive Committee was elected as follows:
- President: Mpine Makoe, Director of the Institute for Open and Distance Learning at Unisa
- Vice-President: Tony Mays, Saide
- Executive committee members:
- Eleanor Johannes - Unisa
- Jean Grundeling – Da Vinci Institute
- Krish Govender - Regenesys
- Martin Combrink – North West University
- Matshepo Matoane – Unisa.
- Ruth Aluko – University of Pretoria
Mancosa have also been invited to participate on the Executive and we will be holding our first meeting shortly and hope to arrange a conference for early 2014. |
