Leadership for 21st Century Learning

Global Perspectives from International Experts

Colin Latchem, Donald E. Hanna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780749432041
• eBook ISBN: 9781135376819
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The challenge of managing education effectively is formidable. Written by two education managers, this text explores the issues associated with good leadership in educational and training institutions. It is based on their own work and on a series of detailed interviews with eminent leaders.

Chapter 1

Open and flexible learning: an environmental scan

Colin Latchem and Donald E Hanna

Introduction

Distance education has always been quick to exploit new delivery systems and service providers. As correspondence education, pioneered in the United Kingdom in the 1840s by Sir Isaac Pitman to teach office workers his new Stenographic Soundhand system, it capitalized on the improved surface mail (Rumble, 1997). Throughout the 20th century, as external studies or distance education, it extended its basic print/correspondence methodology by incorporating radio, television, audio conferencing, videoconferencing (particularly in the United States), the computer and the Internet/Web. Today’s open and flexible learning (commonly known as ‘distributed learning’ in North America) uses a mixture of presentational and constructivist (guided inquiry, collaborative learning and mentoring) pedagogies and enables learners and teachers to interact synchronously or asynchronously across classrooms, workplaces and other settings, increasingly, but not exclusively, by means of information and communications technology (Dede, 2000).

Educationally, open and flexible learning is adopted in pursuit of access, equity and lifelong learning and to provide learning environments wherein learners can create their own understanding and teachers play a guiding rather than a dominant role. Strategically, it is used in response to changing student demographics, the shifting balance of power caused by information and communications technology and learners’ access to alternative sources of knowledge, reduced public funding, globalization and commercial imperatives. In developing countries, it is used to help overcome the critical problems of numbers, resources and quality in providing primary and secondary schooling, ‘second chance’ adult learning, teacher training, and support for social and economic development (Perraton, 2000). Seventy-six developing countries – 34 in Africa, 2 in the Middle East, 19 in Asia, 3 in Oceania, 6 in the Caribbean, and 12 in Latin America – have adopted distance and open learning (Hawkridge, 1999), sometimes with the support of such agencies as UNESCO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, International Development Bank, World Bank, Africa Development Bank, Asia Development Bank, Consortium Francophone de Formation à Distance and the Commonwealth of Learning.

This chapter provides an environmental scan of what governmental, institutional and community leaders have achieved in open and flexible learning and the challenges that lie ahead.

Open schooling

Open schooling provides for isolated primary-age pupils in small, remote populations, children unable to attend school because of illness, disability, or migratory lifestyle, indigenous students in traditional communities, and secondary-age pupils in small country schools or ‘second chance’ adult learners unable to access particular courses by conventional means. It reduces teacher recruitment, travel and accommodation costs, eliminates or defers the need for attendance at boarding school, and transforms isolated and disadvantaged schools from ‘small’ to ‘large’ in terms of students enrolled and from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ in terms of curriculum and teacher expertise.

When first introduced into countries such as Australia and New Zealand, open schooling was restricted to correspondence, talkback radio and on-site teaching by parents or peripatetic teachers. Many countries have used schools broadcasting modelled on the BBC approach and interactive radio instruction first developed in Nicaragua. Today, open learning networks such as the Australian Distance Education Centres and Schools of the Air, New Zealand Correspondence School, US Star Schools, Contact North/Contact Nord in northern Ontario, Open School of British Columbia, and Chilean Schools Learning Network use the latest information and communications technologies and ‘virtual’ online high schools have been developed in the United States.

Open schooling is also helping developing countries to overcome their acute difficulties in providing sufficient classrooms, teachers and teaching resources. The world’s largest open schooling system, India’s National Open School, offers bridging programmes and alternative secondary, senior-secondary courses for those who cannot attend schools and vocational programmes. In 1998–1999, the NOU had more than 500,000 students on its rolls and an annual enrolment of over 130,000, of which 35 per cent were female and 25 per cent from scheduled castes and tribes and handicapped groups. The Bangladesh Open School operates as an integral part of the Bangladesh Open University, providing school equivalency and non-formal education programmes. Indonesia’s Open School, SMP Terbuka, teaches 200,000 students through a mix of print, broadcasts and teachers’ aides and a network of study centres linked to junior secondary schools. Malawi’s College of Distance Education provides for 150,000 primary and secondary students through a network of 564 community-managed distance education centres and nighttime classes in secondary schools. Mexico uses radio and television to supplement the classroom teaching of 12–15-year-old pupils in telesecundaria, small rural and remote secondary schools with fewer than 100 pupils, and to meet the special needs of young working men and women wishing to complete middle school education.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child declares that every child has the right to education without discrimination and in 1990, the UN organizations, the World Bank and other bilateral and multilateral donor agencies committed themselves at the Jomtien conference to achieving universal elementary education. The developed nations have repeatedly fallen short on their pledges and this goal has been shifted to 2015, which on present projections, seems equally unachievable. Globally, more than 125 million children, predominately girls, are currently denied schooling. Without some means of dramatically increasing enrolments, this number is predicted to soar to 165 million by 2015. In India alone, 30 million 6–10-year olds and 33 million 11–14-year olds lack schooling. In many sub-Saharan and South Asian countries, children can only expect four to seven years of education compared with the 15 to 17 years taken for granted in wealthier nations. Only nine African countries have achieved secondary participation rates of 50 per cent. Most have failed even to achieve the 20 per cent considered essential for sociopolitical and economic development. As Director of UNESCO’s International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa, Fay Chung (1999) observes, it is small wonder that uneducated, unemployed youths and child soldiers are drawn into destroying their own countries in places like Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Mozambique.

Graca Machel (1999), South Africa’s former first lady and President of the Foundation for Community Development, stresses that this failure to provide universal education is not attributable to any lack of resources – an additional US$8 billion or four days’ global arms expenditure would fund basic education for all the world’s children – but to a lack of political will. Fay Chung (1999) emphasizes that such developments can only take root when governmental leadership, commitment, and resources combine with community and parental commitment, participation and responsibility. UNESCO’s Richard Siaciwena (1999) notes that while open schooling may be part of the answer, many administrators and teachers unfamiliar with the philosophies inherent in its operations resist it.

Non-formal adult and community education

Spronk (1999) describes non-formal adult and community education as the most elusive and ill-defined sector of open and flexible learning, and Dodds (1996) notes that work in this area is poorly and uncritically documented. However, Perraton (2000) suggests that the scale and achievements of non-formal education linked to applications of mass media may be more significant than the printed record suggests. In developed countries, the focus is typically on lifestyle or work enhancement for the already well educated. In developing countries, it is concerned with literacy and numeracy, primary healthcare, occupation skills, community or social development and political awareness among marginalized communities, refugees and nomads (Yates and Bradley, 2000).

Print is the traditional and most favoured medium for this work but has limited application in a world where almost one billion people, two-thirds of them female, are illiterate. Where affordable, audiovisual media are used to attract and teach adult learners lacking the necessary reading skills. Villages in developing countries may not have electricity or running water, but the chances are that they will have radio-cassette players, and so radio-led education is found to be very useful for such initiatives as the Escuelas Radiofónicas of Latin America and Canary Islands, and the Canadian, Ghanaian, Zambian and Indian ‘listen-act-discuss’ radio farm forums and audiocassettes are used extensively by such providers as Pakistan’s Allama Iqbal Open University and the Sudan Open Learning Organization. Television and videocassettes are used by Telecurso 2000 in Brazil, Centre de Service de Production Audiovisuelle in francophone Africa, and the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India. Indian adult educators have also shown how video cameras and videoconferencing can be used to enable non-literate rural people to express their needs and viewpoints to the outside world and support self-development and self-government in rural areas (Dighe and Reddy, 1996).

Unfortunately, such applications are all too often restricted by a lack of funds, technology access and technical skills, but one way of bringing telephony and computer-based services into disadvantaged communities is to create public-access centres, variously called telecentres, telecottages, infocentros, espaces numérisés, telestugen, phone shops, cabinas públicas and so on. Many international development agencies are now supporting the establishment of such centres in countries ranging from Ecuadorian Amazonia to Bhutan, and from rural Ireland to the Australian outback, providing previously undreamed-off opportunities for info-exchange tailored to local requirements, teleeducation, teletraining, telemedicine, teletrading, telecommerce, and telework (Latchem and Walker, 2001).

The 1990 ‘Education for All’ UNESCO Jomtien conference declared that such basic learning needs demanded an ‘expanded vision’ surpassing present resource levels, institutional structures, curricula and conventional delivery systems. Initiatives such as UNESCO’s ‘Learning Without Frontiers’ and by agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union and the Commonwealth of Learning are encouraging the collaborative development of ‘open learning communities’. However, as Dodds (1996) observes, open learning is rarely applied to this sector in a sustained, systematic, and concerted way. It is often accorded low status and low priority and is typically reliant upon non-government agencies and small groups of devotees. There are serious gaps in provision and most programmes are under-resourced, vulnerable beyond the pilot phase and questionable in long-term impact. Yates (2000) suggests that open and distance education appear to hold great promise in training the thousands of basic education teachers, literacy workers and support cadres needed to provide both adult basic education and open schooling. But the harnessing of open non-formal learning for national regeneration demands political commitment to meeting the needs of the poor and oppressed, partnerships between governments and public and private providers, and far greater recognition of local values, knowledge systems, experiences and resources that can be drawn upon within the communities.

Vocational education and training

Changes in the world of work are impacting dramatically on vocational education and training. And in a world where it is predicted that future employees will need higher levels of skill than those they replace, re-training at least five times during their working lives, and for nearly half the new jobs created, the equivalent of 17 years’ full-time education, such change is only likely to increase. Many governments now argue that vocational education and training benefits not only the state, but also the employer and the individual, and so an increasing share of the costs has to be borne by the latter two. The colleges are required to compete in the open market and operate on a ‘user pays’ basis. A recent Australian National Training Authority report concluded that the employers felt that this more competitive and rigorous market had improved the employers-providers relationship and the providers’ performance, while the training providers felt that this approach and a national quality assurance framework had been incentives for change and service improvement (Rowe, 1999).

Faced with the need for economy in upgrading the knowledge and skills of large numbers of employees, sometimes over great distances and with high employee turnover, and to ensure uniformity of content and delivery, many providers are adopting online or some mix of Web-based and instructor-led training strategies.

Such is the demand for vocational educational and training that in Europe, 70 per cent of the open learning market is estimated to be in this sector, which has become a key industry in its own right, attracting many new private providers. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that there are about 4,000 private providers as against about 350 colleges (Calder and McCollum, 1998). Major organizations such as the Ford Motor Company, J C Penney, British Aerospace, Qantas and South Africa Telkom have also developed corporate training networks to meet their internal needs. New alliances are being forged. For example, in the United Kingdom, the government has established a new public–private partnership – the University for Industry (http://www.ufiltd.co.uk), to deliver flexible training programmes to boost the competitiveness of business and industry and the performance and employability of individuals through a national Learndirect network linked to 250 Learning Centres and smaller Access Centres in workplaces and educational and community settings (http://www.learndirect.com.uk/).

Horsfield (1999) notes that corporate training programmes are primarily concerned with developing specific operational, supervisory, management and leadership skills matched to organizational strategic priorities and to national or international benchmarks. Rowntree (1992) observes that such programmes may be ‘distant’, catering for employees who are off-site, and ‘flexible’, accommodating those for example, on shiftwork, but not ‘open’, being closely tailored to company objectives, proprietary content, specific personnel development requirements or technical infrastructure.

The shift from ‘supply-driven’ to ‘demand-driven’ challenges the values and practices of the traditional providers, the colleges. The sector has had to become more entrepreneurial, accustomed to new world-of-work quality standards and prepared to cater to a wider student cohort. Many businesses and industries have decided to work only with those institutions that offer quality, flexibility and value for money. Some colleges have ‘re-branded’ themselves as businesses, drawing their governing bodies largely from industry, and mandating their CEOs to increase productivity and the national and international customer base.

Reviewing open learning in this sector, Calder and McCollum (1998) suggest that leaders and managers need to inculcate a new work-learning ethic, become more aware of what open learning can achieve, increase the employees’ sense of ownership in work-based learning, and address the lifelong learning needs of basic grade staff and the unemployed as well as the high- and middle-grade staff.

Universities

Dual-mode or extended traditional universities

Dual-mode universities extend their traditional role by providing their on-campus courses to a non-traditional constituency of off-campus, part-time, working adults. They had their origins in the correspondence course pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: such institutions as the University of South Africa, the University of Chicago and the US land-grant universities, the University of London, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia. The last two decades have seen exponential growth worldwide in university-level dual-mode provision.

Distance learning may start as a marginal activity in universities, embraced by a few but perceived by many as diverting scarce resources, lowering quality, diminishing status and threatening time-honoured roles and practices. But with the growing demand for access, convenience and flexibility and the increasing realization of the commercial potential of distance education, there is often commensurate growth in its influence and status, especially where there is institutional commitment to long-term change. The new forms of course development and delivery influence the curriculum, the new technologies permeate the offices and classrooms, and distinctions blur between the different on- and off-campus methodologies, types of student and funding bases and ultimately lead to a re-framing of missions and operations.

Some universities provide open learning through a non-profit arm. One of Australia’s leading distance-teaching universities, Deakin University, has over 40,000 enrolments in its corporate programmes, as opposed to 28,000 in its mainstream courses.

Single-mode open universities

The past 30 years have also seen the rise of a number of single-mode open universities, typically modelled upon the UK Open University. Some have enrolments exceeding 100,000 in their degree-level courses – the UK Open University, France’s Centre National d’Enseignement à Distance, Spain’s Universidad Nacional de Educación, Iran’s Payame Noor University, Turkey’s Anadolu University, The University of South Africa, India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University, Indonesia’s Universitas Terbuka, Thailand’s Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, China’s Radio and Television Universities and the Korea National Open University. Daniel (1996) observes that by increasing university capacity dramatically while lowering costs sharply, these ‘mega-universities’ represent a rare discontinuity in the evolution of higher education.

Other open universities include Canada’s Athabasca University, British Columbia’s Open University/Open College, Télé-université du Québec, the Empire State College and Thomas Edison State College in the United States, Venezuela’s Universida...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Open and flexible learning: an environmental scan
• Chapter 2 Changes, challenges and choices
• Chapter 3 Developing an entrepreneurial culture
• Chapter 4 Processes of organizational change
• Chapter 5 Leadership in open and flexible learning
• Chapter 6 The University of South Australia: providing leadership in flexible learning
• Chapter 7 The University of the South Pacific: leading change in a multinational, multimodal university
• Chapter 8 Alverno College: transforming the institution to an ability-based curriculum and flexible learning
• Chapter 9 Leading and managing innovation in UK university contexts
• Chapter 10 The University of Twente: leading and managing change via a Web-based course-management system
• Chapter 11 Washington State University: a US rural land-grant university responds to its changing environment
• Chapter 12 Western Governors University: a competency-based virtual university
• Chapter 13 The American Distance Education Consortium: from rural provision to virtual organization
• Chapter 14 The UK Open University: managing success and leading change in a mega-university
• Chapter 15 Indira Gandhi National Open University and the Distance Education Council: institution and system building in India
• Chapter 16 Athabasca University: change management in a non-traditional university setting
• Chapter 17 University of Wisconsin Extension: exercising leadership in complex organizations
• Chapter 18 Partnerships for change
• Chapter 19 Leading change in the expanded K-12 classroom
• Chapter 20 Leadership in institution building: the National Open School of India
• Chapter 21 Treading a fine line: consultancy in open and distance learning
• Chapter 22 The International Extension College: leadership beyond the mainstream
• Chapter 23 Jones International University: converging marketplace entrepreneurship and education
• Chapter 24 Lessons for the future
• References
• Author index
• Subject index