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With the advent of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) Policy for the Provision of Distance Education in South African Universities, the Council on Higher Education saw it fit to provide guidelines for institutions wishing to offer distance education. The CHE commissioned Saide to develop guidelines on how general programme accreditation requirements need to be interpreted for a distance education context and the wide variations thereof, including the effective integration of supporting ICTs. This guide, the Distance Higher Education Programmes in a Digital Era: Good Practice Guide has since been published by the CHE and is available for use to all interested providers in the country, writes Ephraim Mhlanga.
Development process
The Good Practice Guide was developed through a consultative process between Saide, the CHE and higher education stakeholders in the country. In order to ensure that it is relevant and appropriate for the context, a series of consultative meetings and workshops were held between Saide and stakeholders as part of the process of developing the guide. Whilst the quality concerns of the CHE Programme Accreditation Directorate were taken into account in the development of this resource, a more important consideration was for the guide to address the needs for beginners in distance higher education provision.
Content of the Good Practice Guide
This guide is intended primarily to assist those involved in programme design and review at an institutional level, as well as CHE programme evaluators involved in the accreditation process of distance education programmes, whether technology supported or not. Structurally, the guide is divided into the following eight sections:
- Introduction and background.
- A conceptual framework for distance education in a digital era.
- Curriculum design, development and delivery for distance education in a digital era.
- Teaching and learning in distance education in a digital era.
- Assessment in distance education in a digital era.
- Partnerships and collaborations for distance education provision in a digital era.
- Managing distance education provision in a digital era.
- Concluding remarks.
The Good Practice Guide is uniquely positioned in that it is at the interface of distance education and technology, an aspect that is increasingly gaining importance in higher education internationally. It teases out pertinent issues relating to the role of educational technology in distance higher education and unpacks some of the complexities associated with such technology supported provision.
There is no doubt that use of this important resource will go a long way in providing essential guidance on how to design and roll out high quality distance education programmes.
Online course for CHE evaluators
As highlighted above, part of the reason for developing the Good Practice Guide was to try and enhance better interpretation of existing programme accreditation criteria for distance education programmes. This is important in the South African context because of the policy on use of a common set of criteria and a common quality assurance agency for distance as well as face-to-face programmes.
To further support CHE evaluators in this respect, Saide developed an online evaluators’ course from the Good Practice Guide. The course draws from the good practice in the Guide in order to interpret CHE programme accreditation criteria appropriately for distance education. In interpreting each quality criterion, evaluators’ attention is drawn to conditions that need to be in place in a distance education context. The course is mounted on MOODLE on the Saide server until such time that the CHE is ready for a transfer to their server. The main advantage of this online course is that it can be used for regular online training of evaluators, individual evaluators as well as for reference by individual evaluators in respect of specific aspects of distance education of concern to them. |
