2. OVERVIEW OF STATE OF DEVELOPMENT IN 1990
World
education was in a worse state in 1990 than we realised. While
the Jomtien report recognised that the 1980s had been a bad
decade for education, the time-lag in getting figures meant
that the scale of deprivation was not then clear. At that time
we thought that 130 million children were out of school; by
1995 the reported figure for 6 to 11 year olds had risen to
145 million (Colclough 1993: 1, UNESCO 1998: 18). We can also
now see that, in real terms, developing country expenditure
fell, in constant 1998 US$$, from $192.7 billion in 1980 to
$149.5 billion in 1985 and had only crept up to $194.0 billion
by 1990 (UNESCO 1998: 110, with figures deflated using US
CPI). The figures for sub-Saharan Africa, and for expenditure
per student or per head of population are worse than this.
There is a mood of optimism about the Jomtien documents that
sits oddly with the figures, at least as we now see
them.
In terms
of technology, the mood was of hope unfulfilled. Ministries of
education were using most of their budget and much of their
energy seeking to keep schools staffed and open, using
conventional approaches, with little time or money left over
to explore the new. In consequence, the record of using
distance education and communications technology to support
basic education was patchy. The Jomtien background document
said, 'It can be argued that the literacy and basic education
potential of the new communication technologies (and
educational innovations) has never been fully realized'
(Inter-Agency Commission 1990: 63).
With
hindsight, we can distinguish five kinds of initiative:
alternative secondary institutions, programmes for raising
school quality, adult education and extension, teacher
education and the work of open universities in relation to
basic education. Two more were coming over the horizon: the
use of computers in schools and the creation of two new
international agencies, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and
the Centre International Francophone de Formation à Distance
(CIFFAD). This is a wider set of categories than those used in
the Jomtien roundtable paper which concentrated on interactive
radio, radio for out-of-school learners, and inservice teacher
training (Nielsen 1990: 5-7).
We look at
each of these areas in turn.
2.1
ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS
Both
governments and NGOs have been attracted by the idea of using
technology to create an alternative to schooling usually to
reach remote children, who could not get to school. The Latin
American radio schools, stimulated by the Roman Catholic
church, the Mexican Telesecundaria, set up by government to
offer television-based secondary education, and the
correspondence study centres for junior secondary education of
the governments of Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe are all
variants of the model. (In the 1990s they were joined by the
open schools of India and Indonesia.)
Nielsen
(1990: 6-7) reported on this work, mainly in Latin America,
and distinguished between programmes leading to a
primary-school qualification and those that provided 'basic
education in the form of literacy and numeracy (often in
combination with training in livelihood skills and
consciousness raising activities).' He noticed that the
programmes were under-documented but suggested that there were
at least 15 programmes of the former type and more of the
latter. The radio schools combined a concern for basic
education with programmes of political and social
mobilisation. With hindsight it looks as if the radio schools
may in fact have played a more dominant role in the 1970s than
the 1980s. The effect of the depression in Latin America in
the 1980s seems to have been to leave campesino families with
too few resources even to meet the modest demands in finance
and time of the radio school system (cf. Kay 1989: 202;
Schmelkes 1994). Their work also tended to bring them into
conflict with both church and state authorities. The first
radio school Acción Cultural Popular of Colombia, which had
enrolments of over 150 000 in the 1970s, fell foul of both and
closed in 1989 (Gallego 1993, Fraser and Restrepo-Estrada
1998:159).
The work
of the radio schools was significant both socially and
methodologically. Their existence demonstrated that, within
some jurisdictions, it might be possible to create a parallel
system of education, reaching both children and adults, and
working where the state was unable or unwilling to do so. The
decline of the radio schools, and the fact that they have few
equivalents in other parts of the world, suggest that the
model is fragile and difficult to transplant. The methods they
used demonstrated the potential strength of radio, with its
relatively modest costs and its power for change when linked
with some kind of face-to-face study.
Africa by
1990 had experimented with out-of-school education mainly for
the growing number of primary-school leavers who could not get
into secondary schools. Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe ran study
centres that widened access to junior secondary education,
using some radio, but relying predominantly on correspondence
lessons. They were not particularly efficient (offering what
was seen as a worse method of teaching, run with minimal
resources, for the children who had performed worse at the end
of primary education) but, with modest costs per student, were
able to offer some educational opportunities to children who
might otherwise have had none. By 1990 study centres in Malawi
were attracting more students than the regular secondary
schools: enrolments were around 28 000 in Malawi, 11 000 in
Zambia and 31 000 in Zimbabwe (cf. Perraton 2000: 41-5). Again
the model looks fragile: all three systems were to come under
strong pressure in the 1990s to move from being an alternative
kind of school towards being a regular secondary
school.
2.2
RAISING SCHOOL QUALITY
Up to 1990
the most ambitious attempt to use technology to raise the
quality of basic education and widen access was the television
project in Côte d'Ivoire. The programme was launched in 1971,
with the intention of reaching 21 000 1st grade children in
the first year and with the other 5 grades added every year.
By 1975 it was reaching 235 000 children but, while long-term
forecasts suggested that eventual costs per student would fall
to a level lower than those of the conventional system, the
actual costs falling on the government reached a level that it
could not sustain. The programme also failed to attract the
support of teachers, parents and politicians that might have
acted as a counterbalance to its unhappy economics. In 1981
the government of Côte d'Ivoire closed it down. Its shadow
fell upon subsequent proposals to use technologies, or
distance education, within schools. The funding agencies that
had financed the early stages of the project now showed the
deepest scepticism. A review of World Bank experience in 1987
referred to the 'apparently disastrous Ivory Coast educational
television experiment. Although evaluation studies showed some
positive outcomes, the project has "sunk without trace" and
educators say that never was so much wasted, including Bank
funds, on such poor television broadcasts with so little
effect. This project coloured attitudes towards distance
education throughout the international aid and lending
community' (Hawkridge 1987: 2).
The
collapse of instructional television led to a new interest in
radio. Nielsen (1990: 2) notes that almost all countries were
already using radio to support primary schools but that there
was no comprehensive review of the field and that
documentation was sketchy. It still is. In contrast,
investment by the United States Agency for International
Development into Interactive Radio Instruction has led to
well-documented research on this particular variant. By 1990
it had been tried out in six locations in Latin America, two
in Africa and two in Asia. There was evidence of effectiveness
in terms of learning gains and it was hoped that, by
encouraging success among children, the projects would do
something to raise completion rates at primary level. The
costs were additional to the costs of regular schooling but
were then estimated at $0.25-$1.00 per student (roughly
equivalent to 1998 $0.35 to $1.30 if we assume the earlier
figures were at 1989 prices) (ibid: 5-9). More recent
information on costs is in chapter 5, below.
2.3
ADULT EDUCATION AND EXTENSION
We can
distinguish three main approaches to the use of information
and communication technology to adult education. One is to
press mass media into service in support of state literacy
campaigns. Short-term advances in literacy have been claimed
(e.g. in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Tanzania) but longer-term
maintenance of adult literacy has proved more difficult. As a
variant of this approach, Kenya used distance-teaching methods
to train literacy teachers. In 1990, as in 1999, powerful
national literacy campaigns were the exception rather than the
rule. For the most part their costs, in terms of adults made
literate, had been too high to be sustainable. Second, as we
have seen above, mass-communications methods have been used to
offer equivalence to schooling, both for adults and for
disadvantaged children. Third, extension agencies and
public-education programmes, especially in agriculture and
health, have used mass media to reach their scattered
audiences. By 1990 there was widespread international
experience of farm broadcasting and of health education
through mass media, often by public agencies and sometimes by
NGOs. Practical experience and theory together demonstrated
that the combination of broadcasting with group study could be
an effective way of providing nonformal education for adults.
As with
school broadcasting this work was under-documented. One
important review of world experience concluded in 1988 that
'most efforts to use communication technology do not do what
they are meant to' (Hornik 1988: ix). He went on, however, to
demonstrate that there was sufficient experience of running
mass-media public-education programmes for the world to know
how to do so successfully. There was, however, then - and now
- little political will to put the lessons into practice. The
1970s and 1980s had seen radio forums in India and Ghana,
intensive radio campaigns in Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia,
but by 1990 all were in retreat. The conclusion of the
MacBride Commission, ten years earlier, can stand as an
assessment of the position in 1990:
In
recent years the importance of communications for
development has been constantly stressed both at the
political and technical levels, in many United Nations
forums and above all in Unesco. … Nevertheless this
recognition has not been reflected in assistance to
communication projects. … Neither the legislators nor the
managers of development assistance have followed in the path
mapped out by the policy-makers. (MacBride et al. 1980: 221)
2.4
TEACHER EDUCATION
By 1990
distance education had been widely used for teacher education
where its strengths, in reaching remote students and allowing
them to work on the job, had attracted the support of
ministries of education. In Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe,
large projects had been set up to educate the increased number
of teachers required as each country announced a target of
universal primary education. There was gradually growing
experience of attempts to link learning at a distance with
guided supervision of classroom practice, the nub of
successful distance education for teachers. Nielsen notes that
the numerical imperative to recruit and provide some training
to trainee teachers had taken precedence over studies of
effectiveness, but identified 16, out of some 40 projects,
where there was some evidence of effectiveness. He found the
evidence on cost-effectiveness moderately encouraging, with
costs per student generally between one-eighth and two-thirds
of conventional alternatives but noted the shortage of studies
on the classroom effectiveness of trainees. There was some
evidence that student teachers trained at a distance gained
prestige within their communities and were more likely to stay
in their communities than those who went away to study
(Nielsen 1990: 10-11).
Distance
education for teacher training still faced problems of
acceptance and integration. While it had been used, in most
continents, as a way of providing either initial training or
upgrading, it was seldom integrated into the regular
structures for teacher education, curriculum development, and
teacher support. Much more often it had been adopted as an
apparent way of eliminating untrained teachers from the
system, to be abandoned once that job was done. Botswana,
Malawi and Swaziland, for example, had run projects of this
kind only to find that untrained teachers remained obstinately
in the system. Radical and imaginative programmes of teacher
support - like the establishment of District Education and
Training Centres (DIETs) in India - often explored other ways
of raising teacher quality but did not embrace distance
education which remained under a different jurisdiction.
2.5
OPEN UNIVERSITIES AND BASIC EDUCATION
Open
universities were playing two roles in relation to basic
education. First, their rapid growth had given distance
education a new legitimacy. Second, through outreach and
teacher education programmes they were directly affecting
basic education.
Distance
education, had been transformed between 1975 and 1990 by the
establishment of large open universities, especially in Asia.
China, India, Indonesia, Iran, the Republic of Korea,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey had all set up
national open universities by 1990; by this date most of these
institutions had more than 100 000 students with 400 000 at
the China Radio and TV University and 480 000 in the
correspondence departments of Indian universities. They joined
well-established open universities in the industrialised world
and gave a new impetus to basic, as to higher, education.
Allama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan, for example, was
running experimental projects of adult, nonformal education
(and was to be followed, in its concern for basic education,
by open universities in Bangladesh and India in the next
decade.) In Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka the open
universities had taken on major responsibilities for the
inservice training of teachers. China was using
distance-teaching methods for the initial training of a large
proportion of its teachers.
But the
major significance of the open universities was existential:
open and distance learning was no longer an educational
distraction, dominated by shabby institutions of no prestige
and within the private sector, but part of the mainstream of
world education.
2.6
COMPUTERS
Computers
were playing a minimal role in basic education in 1990. They
were, however, at the time on their way into the classroom,
with experimental projects completed or under way in countries
as varied as Britain, Fiji, India and Kenya. They were being
used within the curriculum, to support the teaching of
existing subject matter and to introduce computer studies of
various kinds as a new element in the curriculum. But, at this
stage, they were not being used, as they came to be a decade
later, as a means of communication or for access to data banks
of information.
2.7 THE
SPECIALISED AGENCIES
Both the
Commonwealth of Learning and the Centre International
Francophone de Formation à Distance were set up in the late
1980s to promote educational cooperation in and through
distance education, within the Commonwealth and la
francophonie respectively. They were represented at Jomtien
but it was too soon for their work to have an impact on basic
education
In his
assessment Nielsen did, however, look at the potential for
international cooperation, arguing that 'compelling cases can
be made for cross-national transfers and cooperation' (Nielsen
1990: 17). Institutions were already sharing information,
mainly through journals, and there was a handful of examples
of the transfer of courses from one jurisdiction to another
and of cooperation in the development of course material. The
economic benefits of this kind of cooperation were
demonstrated by the example of Interactive Radio Instruction
where it was difficult to justify investment in course
production unless material could be reused repeatedly and used
across frontiers.
2.8
CONCLUSION
Many of
the institutions needed to apply technology to basic education
were already in place in 1990. Most countries had educational
broadcasting services. A growing number had either state or
NGO distance-education institutions that were working in basic
education, either by offering courses direct to adults and
children out of school or through teacher training. To
illustrate the diversity of approaches, table 2.1 identifies
some of the institutions that were already working in this
area in 1990 in subsaharan Africa and Latin America.
Development was geographically patchy, with more and more
varied activity in these subcontinents than in much of Asia or
the Arab region.
While
there have been dramatic changes in technology over the last
decade, which may bring significant changes to the practice of
higher education, many of the technologies that can benefit
basic education were already established by 1990. Radio and
television were widely used for education. Computers had
started to arrive in the classroom, although they were not yet
being used for communication - the big change of the 1990s.
Satellite links were in regular use and there had been
important demonstrations of satellite broadcasting in, for
example, the Indian SITE project. The use of technology to
raise quality in the classroom or widen access beyond it was
constrained more by cost and credibility than by institutional
or technological development.
There were
four obvious growth points for distance education and the new
communication technologies in 1990. First was teacher
education where projects
Table 2.1
Some distance-educationand technology projects in Africa and
Latin America (Not available)
all round
the world were helping to meet the demand for a better
educated workforce. Projects were attracting large numbers
and, by using methods that were an alternative to conventional
teaching, were demonstrating savings in terms of cost per
students.
Second,
there had been a number of attempts to change, strengthen and
even reform education through technology. This was the aim of
the Côte d'Ivoire television project and of the curriculum
projects using Interactive Radio Instruction. It lay behind
the early experiments with computers in the classroom. The
record was uncertain and marked by projects that came to an
early end. In most cases, the costs of using technology here
were additions to the cost of regular schooling and, for that
reason, difficult to sustain within tight budgets.
Third,
despite a mixed record of success and failure, the idea of
offering an alternative to schooling through technology
continued to influence educators in many parts of the world.
Latin American experience suggested that a model that rested
on a powerful NGO movement and used radio to reach rural
audiences was potent and effective so long as it was
politically sustainable. In South Asia, where enrolment ratios
lagged behind most of the world, there was a continuing
interest in a nonformal alternative to school which might meet
demands in remote areas at costs lower than those of schools.
The Mexican radioprimaria and Telesecundaria projects had
demonstrated that, in a large country with a shortage of rural
schools, broadcasting-based alternatives could be effective.
In subsaharan Africa, at junior secondary but not at primary
level, there was modest evidence of success for some students
in correspondence study centres. While some of these
programmes attracted adults - and in some cases were
originally designed mainly for an adult audience - most of
their students were in practice adolescents of secondary
school age. In the next decade it was to become steadily
clearer that these lessons were important for the expansion of
junior-secondary education even if, at primary level, there
was no substitute for school.
The fourth
growth point was at the open universities, in particular where
they were beginning to apply their methods to basic education
and to teacher training as well as to degree programmes.
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