Launch of the Quality Assurance Toolkit for Distance Higher Education
Colombo, Sri Lanka
22 June 2009
Open and Distance Learning for National Development and Reconciliation
Sir John Daniel
Commonwealth of Learning
Introduction
Honourable Minister; Vice-Chancellors, Colleagues:
It is a pleasure to be back in Sri Lanka and an honour to say a few words at this important launch. I am becoming a regular visitor to Sri Lanka thanks to the relationship that has been developed between your country and COL on a number of fronts. At the centre of this relationship, alongside our Focal Point, Mr Wijerathne, is my esteemed colleague Professor Uma Coomaraswamy.
Lifelong Learning for Farmers
She first developed a productive relationship between Sri Lanka and COL as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University of Sri Lanka but that link has only grown stronger since her so-called retirement. She has done brilliant work in developing our Lifelong Learning for Farmers programme here. That programme aims to increase rural prosperity by helping farmers improve their livelihoods by learning their way to higher incomes and bringing banks, universities and communities together for this purpose.
Two years ago I was privileged to visit that programme in Hambantota. I could see its tremendous impact when I visited this farmer who had switched from growing rice to cultivating bananas from locally grown cultures. Thanks to his increased income his family had moved from house on the left to the house on the right. Also in the picture is Professor Kshanika Hirumburegama, who had engaged the University of Colombo in developing a system of banana tissue culture.
She and her team have trained young women straight from school in the neighbouring village in the technology and they supply the local farmers with the cultures that they can use to start growing bananas. Professor Hirumburegama’s reward was to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Colombo. That gave us great pleasure because it is unusual to have a vice-chancellor who puts the third element of the university mission, namely service to the community, right up there as a priority alongside the two elements of teaching and research.
Lifelong Learning for Farmers is a splendid cooperative initiative that I was privileged to discuss with President Rajapaksa during my visit. He sees this project as fitting perfectly into the gama neguma rural development programme, which I discussed on a more recent visit with the Minister responsible for gama neguma, Basil Rajapaksa.
On that more recent visit I went to see the L3 Farmers project in Battacoloa, where the focus is on growing vegetables but the principles of grassroots learning, linkages with the local banks and universities, and the use of ICTs is the same. I have promised Professor Coomaraswamy that on my next visit I will go to see the L3Farmers project in the north of the country and gradually work my way around to all the projects.
COL’s other links in Sri Lanka
Meanwhile, Professor Coomaraswamy has not let the grass grow under my feet on previous visits last year I was proud to speak at the launch of UNIVOTEC, which seems to be developing steadily, though sadly without much attention yet to ODL.
Two years ago I took part in the launch of SLADE, the Sri Lankan Association for Distance Education, and on each of these visits I have visited the Open University of Sri Lanka to nurture COL’s links with that important institution, where COL has facilitated the development of several Masters programmes. I am very proud to be an honorary doctor of OUSL.
So I think I can say with justice that links between COL and Sri Lanka are strong and that this is a country to which I have devoted lots of time personally. I feel very much at home here and I believe that COL and Sri Lanka do good things together. Until last year, when the post rotated to another country, Sri Lanka represented the whole Asian region on COL’s Board in the person of Dr Tara de Mel.
Ever since I have been coming to Sri Lanka as President of the Commonwealth of Learning I have made visits to the Distance Education Modernisation Project and the Distance Education Partnership Programme – and not just to the offices here in Colombo but to the learning centres in the parts of the country to which my travels have taken me.
Here again Professor Coomaraswamy in her quiet but omnipresent way has played a central role in developing the quality assurance policies around this great programme for the development of distance education in Sri Lanka.
In recognition of the tremendous role that she has played in giving distance learning credibility in Sri Lanka and around the world, COL made Professor Coomaraswamy an honorary fellow of the Commonwealth of Learning last year at our major conference in London, PCF5.
Quality in Distance Education
I am honoured to be here today for the launch of something that is particularly close to her heart, the Quality Assurance Toolkit for distance education in Sri Lanka. Since the whole day will be devoted to quality assurance in distance higher education any remarks from me on that topic risk being either superfluous or unsophisticated or both. But let me leave two thoughts with you. Each involves the number three.
I imagine that most of you here believe that distance education is the wave of the future. But we also know that it drags behind it a legacy of past prejudice that makes the public doubt its legitimacy.
My first point is that it is actually easier to demonstrate quality in distance education than in face-to-face instruction. I do not say that it is easier to achieve quality but I do assert that if you have achieved quality it is easier to prove it to other people. That is because – as all of you involved in the DEMP know very well – in distance education you have to make things explicit.
I hope that I will not offend the technology enthusiasts among when I say that technology in distance education – if you want to be successful – is not primarily about bits and bytes and bandwidth. They will come and go. More important are the fundamental technological principles of economy of scale, division of labour and specialisation.
The essence of successful distance learning is to divide the education or training process into its constituent parts, specialise in doing each one of them as well as you possibly can, and then put it all back together again in a way that achieves economies of scale.
You can divide the process in various ways, but in the end it comes back to distinguishing three elements of the system. Think of it as a three-legged stool.
The first leg is materials. Whether the format is print, audio, video or the web, materials are at the heart of the process. The key point is that these are visible and public. You cannot always drop them on your toe but you can show them to others. Quality assurance assessors can make judgements about them much more readily than they can make judgements about classroom teaching.
The second element is student support. Materials are fine, but most students occasionally require someone to mediate between them and the materials if they are to learn effectively. But here again, this is a process that can be examined and assessed by looking at the way that tutors help the students by commenting on their assignments, either on paper or electronically. Distance education, since it operates at scale, must have systematic processes for student support and these can be reviewed externally.
The third leg of the stool is logistics. Successful distance education is in large part an organisational challenge: the right materials, the right processes and the right people all have to be in the right place at the right time. If they are not, then any external review process will know immediately, because the students will be up in arms.
That is a very simple view of quality assurance, but I hope it reinforces the more sophisticated approaches you will be discussing later today.
Distance Education is Revolutionary
My second use of the number three is to explain why distance education is revolutionary. Here I must tell the Honourable Minister because that his Deputy Minister has heard this from me very recently. He was with me at the 17th Conference of Commonwealth Ministers of Education in Kuala Lumpur where Ministers ratified COL’s new Plan for 2009-2012.
I explained to the Ministers that COL’s mission is to help Commonwealth governments take advantage of the revolution of educational technology. What is that revolution?
As educators we have a threefold challenge. First, we want to maximise access to education, training and learning opportunities. That challenge is even greater when the economy is bad because people seek more education and training to improve their value in the job market.
Second, we want to make the quality of learning as high as we can.
Third, we want to do this at the lowest possible cost so that our education budgets stretch as far as possible. That too is a special challenge right now.
Think of these three aims as vectors making up a triangle: Access, Quality, and Cost. This highlights the challenge, because with traditional teaching methods this is an iron triangle – it is inflexible. Whenever you concentrate on any one of your three aims: wider access, better quality or lower cost, you will slip backwards on the others.
Increase access by making classes bigger and parents will complain about quality.
Introduce more learning materials – which are usually in short supply – and costs will go up.
Cut the costs of the system and people will accuse you of limiting access and damaging quality.
The constraints of this iron triangle have handicapped education throughout history. They explain why so many people believe that you cannot have education of quality unless you make access to it exclusive. But we live in revolutionary times. Technology allows you to increase access, improve quality, and cut costs all at the same time.
Let me give the example of the UK Open University of which I was Vice-Chancellor from 1990 to 2001. At the time I left office to go to UNESCO the UKOU had 200,000 students. That is more than all the 155,000 students in all Sri Lankan universities that the Minister mentioned earlier as being so hard to manage.
But it is possible to have size, quality, low costs and efficient management. In the year that I left the Open University was it ranked number five out of 100 UK universities for the quality of its teaching programmes. Oxford University, where I did my undergraduate studies, was ranked number six. In the first year of my successor, Professor Brenda Gourley, it was ranked number 1 for student satisfaction after a massive national survey involving tens of thousands of students.
Furthermore, of course, the UKOU costs substantially less per student than Oxford and the other universities. Minister, you can have wide access, high quality and lower costs – all at the same time.
By technology, as I said just now, I mean the technological principles of economy of scale, specialisation, and division of labour, which are more fundamental than electronic devices with flashing lights, important though those are.
The DEMP: a Catalyst for Reform
COL’s role is to help you exploit this revolution. You are doing that brilliantly through the Distance Education Modernisation Programme (DEMP). Please don’t be modest about the quality that you can achieve. You should set your sights higher than the quality of conventional education, which as the Minister was lamenting just now, seems to be pretty low.
The genius of distance learning, as I have explained, is to allow you to achieve wider access, lower costs and higher quality all at the same time. I hope that one of the impacts of the DEMP will be to enable the Open University of Sri Lanka finally to expand to its potential. To the observation of the rest of the world it takes far fewer students than it could.
Indeed, I hope that the impact of the DEMP will be to enable Sri Lanka to rise to the challenge of reforming higher education. From my previous visits it seems to me that you are very good at analysing the problems of the higher education system – as the Minister just did – but much less good at doing anything about them. Maybe, just maybe, the DEMP will catalyse a process of real change.
Youth, Respect and Understanding
In closing I make a request to you. Four years ago, concerned that the world needed to develop civil paths to peace as well as military paths to peace, Commonwealth Heads of Government commissioned Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen to chair a commission on how to increase respect and understanding within and between nations. The report, Civil Paths to Peace, is very thoughtful and powerful.
The challenge now is to involve the people – particularly the young people of the Commonwealth – to get involved in propagating the messages. The Commonwealth Secretary-General has asked COL to take the lead in using the modern media to get young people to talk about respect and understanding in their countries and communities.
We would like to populate a website with short videos of the YouTube type, created by young people about how they deal with conflict in their communities, how they manage their multiple identities as individuals and so on.
Now that Sri Lanka has entered a period of reconciliation after your long civil war I imagine that young people here have a lot to say about the way to sustain the peace. Give us your ideas and share with us any promising networks. I suspect that once we get this going it will gather momentum on its own. The challenge is to get it started.
Conclusion
I shall stop there. Thank you for inviting me to this important launch. It is great to be back in Sri Lanka again and I congratulate you all on bringing the Distance Education Modernisation Programme to this new milestone.