Consultant's report
The Use of Distance Education in Non-formal Education
Professor Tony Dodds
International Extension College, UK
March 1996
This is a report on a survey carried out for The Commonwealth of Learning by the International Extension College, UK. Prepared by Dr. Tony Dodds, the report documents information on 73 projects, in 56 developing countries and 17 industrialised countries, and presents a number of conclusions and proposals for further action. The survey found that there is considerable activity in non-formal distance education but that it is not well documented. It notes that non-formal distance education projects are often poorly funded, which often leads to low quality, disappointing results, and lack of sustainability. It was jointly published by The Commonwealth of Learning and International Extension College in 1996. (63 pages)
Extract:
Introduction: Why and How?
In 1972, a year after the International Extension College first came into being, it published its first Broadsheet. This was called 'Multimedia Approaches to Rural Education'. There are three interesting features to this title: it emphasised the IEC's priorities; it showed that distance education and distance learning were not yet phrases in common use in English; and it indicated that non-formal education had not yet been invented. This report by the IEC on a survey commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning on the use of distance learning in non-formal education in one sense, therefore, marks a generational change. Both phrases are now common educational parlance (though it is my guess that both will have disappeared in another 25 years). Distance education literature and practice, however, still pay scant attention to non-formal education. It is my hope that this report, emphasising as it does the need for further attention, careful research and experimentation and more diligent documentation, will coincide with a change of emphasis. As we move perilously close to the year 2000, by which time the international community is pledged to have achieved 'Education for All', it is very clear that we are going to fall disastrously short of that target, at least as far as educationally deprived adults are concerned. It is therefore a matter of urgency for us - or at least for governments - to seek ways to harness the powers of distance learning which are becoming internationally recognised for higher levels of education to meet the needs of adults who were earlier in their lives deprived of opportunities to go to school.
This concern is not new. Long before either phrase - distance education or non-formal education - became common, those involved in education and training for adults outside the structures and curricula of formal schools and colleges were looking for ways to use the media of communication - books and magazines and newspapers, radio and television - to expand their coverage and their outreach. Agricultural and health education or extension magazines, radio doctors, farm radio forums, go back to the early days of both extension and broadcasting. Development support communication grew out of this interest in the mass media by development workers. It was strengthened by the belief in and research findings about the role of mass media in national development by education and communication pioneers such as Wilbur Schramm. These interests, however, and the more traditional curricula and methodologies of formal educators remained - and often still remain far apart.
In the early 1970s, however, international planners, such as Philip Coombs and Ahmed Mansoor, Jim Sheffield and Victor Diejomaoh, began to draw the attention of both the professionals and the financiers of formal education to this wide range of educational activities, mainly for adults, going on outside the formal structures of education. They stressed the vital importance of such activities in accelerating economic and social development in developing (and industrialised) countries and they coined the phrase 'non-formal education' to describe them.
Both educational and extension professionals moreover have, in recent years, begun to recognise the power of the technological media to improve and extend their ability to communicate with their respective audiences. This power is once more on the brink (or slightly over the brink) of another and yet more dramatic technological revolution with the growing access to and the ever expanding range and speed of computerised communication. At this juncture, therefore, it is of great importance to catalogue and analyse the experience to date of the use of media and information technology, the methods of distance education, in the spread and facilitation of the highly diverse range of educational activities now commonly classified under the heading of non-formal education. That is the major purpose of the survey of which this is the report.
In carrying out the survey and compiling the report two major problems have been encountered. The first is the problem of definition and categorisation. Neither distance education nor non-formal education are precise phrases. It is possible to put several different interpretations on both, as is evidenced in the growing literature and the common controversies concerning both (eg. Carron and Carr-Hill 1991 and SAIDE 1995). To what extent can distance education programmes incorporate and even become dependent on face-to-face tuition and still remain distance education? How far can non-formal education reflect or even equivalence what goes on in formal schools and colleges, even to the extent of having fixed curricula and common examinations, and still remain non-formal? At what point does an open broadcast development information programme with no organised or structured discussion or study by its audience become an organised educational (even a non-formal educational) activity?
In order to avoid unnecessary semantic argument, for the purposes of this report I have used the following inclusive definition, of non-formal education, taken from a chapter in a recent book on 'multi-channel learning':
"under the heading of non-formal education we include all such learning programmes about life for adults (and even for young adults) which take place outside the school, college or university system. These programmes may take place in school buildings on a part-time basis. They may or may not be taught by teachers. They may or may not have curricula, examinations and certificates. They may or may not include literacy and numeracy as well as basic knowledge and understanding of science, society and the environment. They may or may not cover subjects in skills taught in primary (or post-primary) schools. But they are organised; they do not happen by chance; students join with a specific goal and know that to succeed they must pursue that goal for a significant period of time. And, at the end of that time, if they are successful, they will have achieved a state of knowledge, skill and understanding they did not have before!'
(Dodds, T in Anzalone 1995)
Similarly 1 have taken as wide and open a definition of distance education as possible: any organised learning activity in which a significant proportion of the teaching and learning takes place with the teachers and the learners at-a-distance from each other. The exact proportions and emphasis on distance media on the one hand and on face-to-face discussion and tuition on the other is not seen as important. Also the length or the intensity of the study is not taken into account.
The second major problem has been the paucity of information readily available on such programmes. This is in part because distance education has been much less widely and less consciously used for non-formal education than it has for university or secondary or vocational and teacher education. More serious however is the fact that many such programmes do not automatically come under the headings which are the common ways of describing and categorising education in general and distance education in particular. Literature searches and survey enquiries which have used these descriptors have failed to identify the kinds of programmes we have been looking for. Finally, almost by their very nature and origins, many such programmes are not recognised by their originators or practitioners as distance education or non-formal education. Such people are often primarily concerned with the content and purpose of their programme - health, agriculture, business development. If they make use of media to achieve their goals, this is purely incidental rather than central to their activity. They do not see what they are doing as education, and certainly not as distance education. So their reports on such activities do not refer to these characteristics, and they often therefore do not appear in lists of either non-formal or distance education activities.
Two less important problems have also affected the collection of accurate information for this report. First it is difficult to be sure that the information quoted is up-to-date. In fact much of it isn't. It's drawn from case-studies wherever possible published in the last five years. By publication date such case studies are already one or more years old. It has not always proved possible to cross-check the currency of that information in 1995. For that reason the date of the t information is given in each entry. I have tried to limit entries to projects for which the information is no more than five years old and have therefore not included many interesting projects of non-formal education at-a-distance which were in existence in the 1980s and before but which may not exist any longer.
The second problem is the language problem. Part of this is my own limited range of language competency; probably more serious is the bias in the identification and selection of projects created by working mainly from texts in English and with libraries and data-bases which are in English. There is very limited literature in English (or even references to literature in French, Spanish or Portuguese, for example) on the experience of Francophone Africa or of Latin America.
For these reasons the directory which follows is as comprehensive as it has proved possible to make it: but it is far from complete. There is no doubt that many more relevant programmes are not included, unintentionally, than are included. It is hoped that it will trigger off a much more comprehensive cataloguing process in the future than has been possible in this survey.
The terms of reference for the study referred to an environmental scan on non-formal education projects using distance education methods. This was agreed to mean both detailed bibliographical exploration and a mapping exercise of what existed based on whatever other sources of information could be identified.
The terms of reference also indicated that the study should neither be exclusively limited to the Commonwealth nor to developing countries, though it was agreed that the bias of research should concentrate on both these categories. The report reflects this agreement: there are many more examples drawn from Commonwealth developing countries than from the rest of the world; most of the rest of the examples are non-commonwealth developing countries; and very few indeed are from non-commonwealth industrialised countries. The following table shows this breakdown of the 73 projects reported:
| |
Developing |
Industrialised |
|
Africa
|
Asia/
Pacific |
Latin_America/ Caribbean |
Australia
|
Europe
|
North America |
|
Overall total |
31 |
17 |
8 |
4 |
9 |
4 |
|
56 |
17 |
|
Commonwealth Total
|
22 |
10 |
1 |
4 |
3 |
4 |
|
33 |
11 |
|
Non-Commonwealth Total
|
9 |
7 |
7 |
0 |
6 |
0 |
|
23 |
6 |
Four main approaches have been followed in carrying out the survey.
First a very detailed literature search based on published books, journals and bibliographies on related subjects has been carried out. Where these have identified but not described in up-to-date detail projects or programmes which appeared to be of interest, attempts have been made to follow them up with direct enquiries to obtain more detail and more up-to-date information.
Secondly, searches of as many data-bases on the same subjects have been requested, and, in most cases, carried out. These include the International Centre for Distance Learning (ICDL), ERIC, the International Development Information Network (IDIN), the British Education and Training Listing Service and CESO. Again, wherever possible and necessary, attempts have been made to follow-up interesting leads and references which have emerged from these searches.
Thirdly, contacts have been made with a wide range of international organisations with remits which include some aspect of non-formal or distance education. These include the UN agencies such as UNESCO, FAO, WHO, ILO and HEP, the World Bank and also bilateral agencies such as ODA, and national research or educational professional agencies such as the Deutsches Stiftung for Internationale Entwicklung, the Advancing Basic Education and Literacy project and specialist university departments. Many of these have supplied bibliographies and catalogues which have then been treated in the same way as the first category.
The follow-up enquiries which have arisen from all of these first three approaches have produced a disappointingly limited amount of detail and further information for this survey. It is possible, as is suggested in the final chapter of the report, on further research needs, that these follow-up attempts could form the basis of much more detailed and exhaustive enquiries.
Finally widespread use has been made of the grapevine: personal cries for help have gone out to a wide range of personal contacts in the twin fields of non-formal and distance education. Many, with remarkable speed, good grace and generosity have responded with invaluable information which has helped to swell the directory quite considerably. That range of contacts, however. reflects a strong personal bias and possibly accounts for the somewhat idiosyncratic distribution of projects which the directory reflects.
I wish to express my personal gratitude and thanks to all agencies and individuals who have responded in any way to any of these approaches. The information which follows is almost entirely based on their responses. The interpretation - and any mistakes in that interpretation -are entirely my own. Finally. and most fully, I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the work, especially on the first three approaches, which was carried out by Elizabeth Taylor, IEC's Librarian and Resources Officer until the end of July 1995. Without that hard work, right up to and after her leaving IEC, the report could not have been written. It's layout, appearance and consistency is the work of Maureen Stirling, IEC's Office Manager and the Executive Director's Secretary who has managed to make sense - and given the readers a chance to make sense - of a somewhat muddled collection of information. My thanks go to all of the above.
The information collected from the survey is presented in three different ways. First it is presented geographically, by region and by country. This is the main body of the directory, in which is contained some detail of the content and subject matter of each project or programme, their target audience or audiences, the distance education methods used and the governance or administrative structure of the project. Some information about the history of the project and evidence of its impact is also included in these main project entries. Secondly the projects are all regrouped under content, subject area or field of activity headings, and thirdly under the main media and methodological approaches used. These last two groups are for purposes of cross-reference only and do not repeat the project details which are given under the first, geographical, entries.
The third part of the report has three chapters. The first two try to draw out evidence of major trends and patterns which emerge from the survey and to arrive at some tentative conclusions about the experience it represents. The final chapter suggests an agenda for further research on the subject, including action research, and proposes a list of and guidelines for up to 15 varied but interesting case-studies, out of the directory, which seem to be worthy of much more detailed examination.
One final caution in reading the directory which follows: I have included some entries, which are based on very limited and inadequate information, but which I considered to be interesting enough to include nevertheless: these are clearly labelled as being based on a brief reference (B/R).
It is my hope that this report will be seen as a first draft, or, at best, as the first, very preliminary, stage of an ongoing research activity. This will explore in much more detail in the future the experience to date, the potential, the effectiveness, and the major constraints and problems in the use of distance education and open learning approaches in non-formal, and, in particular, adult basic education. Only on the basis of such research can the growing rhetoric on the importance of and possibilities for non-formal education be turned in to reality. Without it the commitment to Education for All - at least for the worlds' adults - will remain no more than a dream.
