Evaluative Study
By Greville Rumble and Badri N. Koul
July 2007
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Recent progress towards the achievement of the second U.N. Millennium Development Goal, Universal Primary Education (UPE), means that many more children are completing primary education and looking for opportunities to enter secondary education. There is little likelihood that governments facing the challenges of meeting the UPE target will be able to meet a further challenge of providing vastly increased access to opportunities for secondary education.
Rapid expansion of secondary provision to meet frustrated demand from primary school leavers and the needs of young adults previously denied secondary education opportunities will likely require investment in approaches that are less tied to traditional methods of schooling.
It is within this context that this study has been conceived. "Open Schooling for Secondary and Higher Education" explores the provision of secondary level Open Schooling in India and Namibia, which are vastly different in their basic characteristics. The study examines on the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) in India and the Namibian College of Open Learning (NAMCOL). The focus is on issues such as cost-benefit of the open school model, student profiles, how open schools complement the formal system, learner success, course development, open school management and quality assurance. The study was carried out by two experts in the field, Professor Badri N. Koul, who researched NIOS, and Professor Greville Rumble, who researched NAMCOL, between April and October 2007.
As defined by COL, Open Schooling involves "the physical separation of the school-level learner from the teacher, and the use of unconventional teaching methodologies, and information and communications technologies (ICTs) to bridge the separation and provide the education and training".
The use of technology both to facilitate and to overcome the separation of teacher and learner has a long history going back to perhaps as early as 1728 when in The Boston Gazette, Caleb Philipps advertised weekly lessons in shorthand to be sent to those wishing to learn the art. Further developments in correspondence education took place in Europe, North America and the UK in the late 19th century. Around the same time, university extension movement encouraged the use of outreach programmes using correspondence methods, sometimes combined with face-to-face tutorials. Early open schools tended to arise from efforts to help individual out-of-school children pursue their studies, either because they could not get to a school, or because they were unable to stay in school.
In current times, with the primary education system producing large numbers of graduates whose plans to go on to secondary level are frustrated through a lack of provision, the expansion of Open Schooling at secondary level has been seen as a way forward. Open schools have been set up to offer both junior and senior secondary education to adolescents for whom there are no conventional school places, to out-of-school young people and to adults. These open schools have been successful in both bringing down the costs of education and educating out-of-school youths as well as adult learners.
With one-sixth of the world's population, India is the second most populous nation in the world. It is highly diverse in terms of geography, languages, culture and income. The physical infrastructure and the related additional human resources required for secondary education do not exist, nor can they be created overnight to meet the impending deluge once UPE is achieved (the latest forecast is 2010). Much of the burden for universalising education will have to be taken by the Central Government, which is raising funds and also adopting alternative modes of education for the purpose. As earnings definitely increase with rises in educational levels for all in India, the need to provide access to education is clearly linked to the country's development goals.
India's National Open School (NOS) was established in 1989 to reach those who had dropped out of school or never been to school and who wished to study but were for a variety of reasons not studying in regular schools. Over the years, the role of NOS expanded beyond the provision of bridging courses, an alternative secondary/higher secondary curriculum and life-enhancing courses, to include from vocational education. Meanwhile, a number of State Open Schools were established, all with a similar pro-poor mandate to that of NOS. In 2002, NOS was re-mandated to act as the national apex body for open schooling, and re-designated The National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). NIOS is both a teaching, and an examining and accrediting organisation. There are currently close to 300,000 students enrolled in NIOS Accredited Institutions.
The Republic of Namibia has a population of approximately two million made up of 13 ethnic cultures and 16 language groups. Although Gross National Product (GNP) is relatively high, the country has inequalities in income that are among the highest in the world. Namibia has significant natural resources, but the potential for development is held back by a low skills base that hampers foreign investment. The country's Education and Training Sector Improvement Programme is aimed at improving the education and training system to support the achievement of development goals.
The Namibian College of Open Learning (NAMCOL) was formally established in 1997 as a distance education college within the Ministry of Education. NAMCOL took on responsibility for Namibia's existing distance education programmes and the Namibian Extension Unit, which provided courses to Namibian refugees in Zambia and Angola, before its independence.
NAMCOL's role in the Namibian education system is to act as a safety net that "picks up" and helps a population roughly equivalent to 18.1 per cent of the conventional school population. Most students are seeking not to study for the first time at these levels but to improve their grades and hence their job prospects. NAMCOL exists to give them a second chance and to make good the deficiencies of the formal system. The curriculum it is offering and the target it is reaching are relatively restricted. As Namibia builds more traditional secondary schools, it's likely that NAMCOL's traditional market will begin to dry up, first at the junior and ultimately at the senior secondary schools level, which is why we endorse NAMCOL's search for new markets in which to deploy its expertise and its facilities.
While NAMCOL is essentially complementary to the formal system, NIOS can be described as offering an alternative system to formal schooling. The vast majority of NIOS's secondary school students are out-of-formal-school learners and school drop-outs, working adults, housewives, learners from disadvantaged sectors of society and learners living in remote areas of India. The scale of the demand for secondary education places in India means that NIOS and the various State Open Schools will continue to have a major role in the future. The addition of vocational educational opportunities alongside more academic school subjects must reflect an appropriate response to the needs of some learners, while the continuing emphasis on academic subjects is clearly important in generating potential entrants for the university sector.
Like NIOS, NAMCOL enjoys strong government support. Both institutions receive government grants. In the case of NIOS, Government grants declined progressively from 34 % of its income to meet only 10.01% of the NIOS expenses, (covering the period 2002-2007). The Central Government does not use any standard funding formula (i.e. @ per student or per subject enrolment) to fund NIOS. Instead, plan-grants are given to NIOS on the basis of their budget estimates. Other than such developmental plans, the rest of the expenditure is expected to be met from NIOS' own earnings/resources. The overall conclusion is that at the secondary level of education in India, ODL operations such as NIOS are significantly less expensive than the conventional schooling systems.
In the Namibian case, funding is based on a formula "on the principle that the provision of secondary education via NAMCOL should not be more expensive than providing secondary education via formal education". In 2007/2008 the formula will generate a Government subsidy of 63.9% towards operational costs in NAMCOL's budget. The study confirms that economically NAMCOL is very efficient, in terms of its unit costs per student, in comparison with the formal system.
Although the part-time system (of which approximately 90% are from NAMCOL) never equals or surpasses the full-time system in effectiveness, in a number of subjects - and with one or two comparatively rather poor results (Biology and Economics IGCSE) - it approaches the full-time system in respect of the proportion of students gaining grades A to G (JSCE) or A to G (IGCSE examination). NIOS students perform well in comparison with the students taking other Boards' secondary education examinations, they do not perform as well at higher secondary level.
Like all distance education systems, the success of NAMCOL's pedagogic system rests on three key factors: the quality of its course materials, the quality of its student support sub-system and the quality of its logistics. The quality of its course materials is not in doubt; subject by subject, they are good to excellent. Logistically too the College performs well: the turnaround time on assignments is on a par with the best of correspondence systems. NAMCOL's management systems and its student support systems are well-designed and function well. Students are registered efficiently; the materials get out to them on time; assignments are handled expeditiously and tutor marking and performance is monitored. Yet if there is a question mark, it hangs over the effectiveness of the student support system and how it could be improved in order to ensure that a higher proportion of students achieve their aim of getting an A to C grade in the national examinations. One approach would be to simply increase the amount of face-to-face support per subject per week. This may well be an appropriate response, but arguably NAMCOL also needs to build a much more individually targeted support system that identifies those students who are struggling and targets help at them. Unlike the case of NIOS, examinations are not a competency of NAMCOL, but of the Directorate of National Examinations and Assessment.
NIOS has well-defined processes for curriculum development, and approval of courses and subjects are approved prior to the development of the materials by subject experts. Administrative and academic support is provided to the learners through the Accredited Institutes, which are selected against strict criteria. Activities that take place at these Institutes, including teaching and assignment marking, is monitored by academic facilitators attached to the Regional Centres. However, there is some doubt as to whether the monitoring processes at Accredited Institutes are adequate, and there is no current means of planning and reviewing a system-wide process of evaluation and quality assurance.
While open schools have not been without their problems, such as low status, under funding and poor results, there is strong evidence that open schools can effectively deliver secondary education to remote pupils that have never before had such opportunities. There is evidence that, organised in the right way and with an attention to cost reduction, open schools can be set up to reap the benefits of the economies of scale that distance education holds out as a possibility. The study confirms that open schools can be either a complementary or alternative system to the conventional school system. As an alternative, open schools can reach new markets through an expanded curriculum.
Given the crisis in secondary education admissions, this study finds strong evidence to support further investment in understanding what it is that makes for success in Open Schooling and investment in the establishment of more open schools to face the challenges of frustrated demand that so many countries face. This will be of key importance as the world faces the challenges of the next three or four decades - of environmental change, population growth, and resource and energy supply. It will be difficult if not impossible to meet the demand and need for secondary education on the scale envisaged without resorting to Open Schooling approaches.
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