By Olugbemiro JEGEDE, CRIDAL, OUHK, Chief Rapporteur of the AAOU98
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Considering the different shades of opinions expressed at this conference and the diversity of views presented in the different sessions, it is a daunting task to present a final report of a two and a half-day conference. We are 300 participants from over 30 countries gave 115 papers, 5 plenary sessions, a keynote speech, three workshops, a focus group discussion and a luncheon session. How does one distill the essence as well as reflect the spirit of the debate? We present here a brief sum mary if only to serve our reflective thinking as we continue to practice distance education and to set the scene for future actions and further debates.
I would like to use this opportunity sincerely to thank all the members of the Organising Committee, especially the Academic Papers subcommittee, the Confer ence Rapporteur Committee, and the session rapporteurs for their tremendous support. Permit me also to thank the staff of CRIDAL who worked tirelessly to get the daily summaries ready each night.
Getting to the stage we are now at this conference, as all of you would appreciate, took several months of planning, sleepless nights for the Conference Organising Committee (and especially of our able Conference Secretary), mountains of faxes, letters and emails supported by the use of communications technology to bridge the distance between participants and the hosting institution. In some cases even the most basic low-tech media could not suffice, nor was it appropriate to use so called high-end technology to reach presenters and other participants. Who says even the distance educators and practitioners are not part of the marginalised and disadvantaged group in Asia!
The most difficult issue for the Academic Sub-committee of the Conference Organising Committee was how to cope with the flood of papers which came to us, and later the inevitable dilemma of deciding which to accept or reject. Even more, our splitting headache over the question of the language of the conference.
I am pleased to report that against all odds, AAOU/98 has, in all modesty, fulfilled its goals, charted a new course for members, and sent a powerful statement to the educational world that our field of open and distance education has come of age in Asia. We are ready to launch open and distance education to greater heights to serve as a beacon of excellence for others to follow. In doing so, this conference has clearly demonstrated through its theme and proceedings that our students, the Asian distance learner, is and should be the most important consideration in our pursuits in a region with almost a third of humanity. Let us take a snapshot of how the conference did this.
The Hon. Mrs. Anson Chan, Chief Secretary for Administration, Hong Kong SAR, kicked-started our debate on the theme of the conference by declaring most boldly that "There must be educational access for all, and for life." She also asserted that "Hong Kong will become a critical server for the distance learning network in the Asian region." The economic recovery will come from the springboard of education, technology and innovation.
Dr Joanne Capper of the World Bank, emphasised in her keynote address the focus that her organisation has placed on social needs in the current economic downturn. She revealed that the World Bank has trebled the amount of loans to the social sector to soften the blow of financial crises amongst the poor. Most of these loans are going to Asia. Dr. Capper's described some of the initiatives undertaken by her team to enhance the quality of these grants. Most important of all the current initiatives of the World Bank is its transformation into a knowledge bank. She stresses the importance of discovering the cost effectiveness of the marriage between education and technol ogy. She has issued an invitation to conference delegates who are interested in con tributing to these initiatives to work collaboratively with her team, to help to support her organisation's move towards becoming a clearinghouse of knowledge about open and distance education in the development process.
In a thought - provoking presentation, Professor Dato' Dhanarajan, President of the Vancouver based COL and former President of this University, passionately and con cisely described the various definitions given to Asia and categories of the Asian Learner who need to be reached by distance education. Professor Dhanarajan re minded everyone that education is a basic, fundamental right for all. He reviewed the terrain of past and current practices within in distance and open learning, and pointed out that in the past too much of higher education has been centred on the needs of staff and their institutions and not enough on the needs of the learners. He reminded us that the "promoters of open learning have constantly claimed that one good reason to establish 'open learning' infrastructure and build 'distance teaching' capacities is to take knowledge and training to those parts of our populations that are marginalised, isolated, underprivileged and unreachable by counterparts in traditional institutions.'
While commending the enormous effort the Asian Association of Open Universities has put into transforming the 'Asian continent from being the world's poorhouse to its powerhouse', he further challenged open and distance education providers to break out of their comfort zone and reach those areas which are traditionally not seen as within the scope of their constituencies and discussed some of the barriers that may be preventing their access. He emphasised that distance education has the features and the capacity to remove these barriers. It is the responsibility of every one of us to take up this challenge of providing access to education for all. What is needed, ac cording to Professor Dhanarajan, 'is a greater sensitivity to our potential learners, to make access to our courses less rigid. We need a greater knowledge of the learners' environment to reduce real and perceived barriers to the courses we design, and an appreciation of the challenges learners face as we help them be successful learners through imaginative design and presentation of materials'. Professor Dhanarajan had in no small measure set the moral context against which most subsequent discus sions took place.
In her plenary address on the second day, Dr Robin Mason concluded with the state ment that when we choose to add technology to a course, we change the whole cli mate of the learning environment. Technology is a wild card that changes the whole atmosphere.
Dr. Mason supported these conclusions with clear statements about the advantages of print, why we might use other technologies, how to select appropriate technolo gies, and what technologies are available. Her typology of available technologies included multimedia teaching programs, human communications technologies, re source-based learning, and video-conferencing. Dr Mason concluded with a discus sion of a course on Distance Education she teaches at the Open University in the United Kingdom.
Attendees at Plenary III were entertained by a kaleidoscopic display of Kookaburra
calls, Chaos Theory, course design characteristics and the complexities of Chinese characters. David Murphy commenced with an interactive Powerpoint presentation. He argued that, like learners elsewhere, Asian learners reflected a diversity of needs, interests and contexts. He then deftly introduced the audience to some notions of Chaos (or Complexity) Theory. For David Murphy, the course design process can be understood best by applying Chaos Theory; both complex and fluid, and cannot be understood by simple, linear instructional design models. Coupled with the afore mentioned diversity of Asian learners, the course design and development tasks faced by Asian open universities and distance educators are ones which need to be compre hensively researched and theorized in order to form sound policies and good prac tices.
KS Yuen recounted how Hong Kong Open Learning Institute (HKOLI) and now the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) have dealt with the complexities of dis tance education in the context of Hong Kong. He argued that local research into the characteristics of Hong Kong learners provided an important basis on which to build the HKOLI's early offerings on the adaptation and redevelopment of imported courses.
He then described the evolution of the institution's practices, through the establish ment of OUHK, in the context of the changing needs and demands in Hong Kong SAR. KS Yuen discussed the challenges being faced by OUHK's decision to provide courses, in Chinese, both in Hong Kong and, more importantly, in Mainland China. He is an interesting example of how an important Asian open university is facing the complexities of the future.
David Kember gave some insightful explanations to address the paradox between the "rote learning" prevalent among Asian student, their high achievement levels. He identified three major misconceptions in the understanding of this. First, where students have appeared to be rote learning material it has not in fact been a surface approach, but an integration of memorising and understanding. Dr Kember suggested some ways in which courses can be structured to enhance deep-learning
Second, it is commonly believed that many Asian students prefer to be passive re ceivers of information. Dr Kember and his colleagues have shown through research on teaching and that students received support from their students for their initia tives.
A third conception of Chinese students is that they are very competitive and have high achievement motivation. Dr Kember's work found widespread evidence of students forming groups to work together of their own volition. Some do this to share, and hence minimise, their workloads primarily as a response to the surface level nature of the course requirements. Dr Kember concluded his presentation by reinforcing his idea that many of the current conceptions about Chinese learners are in fact symptoms of the nature of the course requirements rather than a function of the students themselves.
Professor Cheng emphasized the inevitable links between institutional collaboration and technology. He also highlighted the blurred distinction between conventional and distance education, brought about by technology. This raises the major issue of information technology literacy for all. He cautioned, however, that IT is neither a teacher nor a motivator, and it is still vital for the human educators to use it in the most effective ways. On the other hand, IT has changed the quality, quantity and sources of information, mode and speed of delivery, and particularly the connectivity between sites throughout the world.
So IT literacy means development of the skills and capacity to become part of a "vast community that requires no membership". The best learning still takes place where there is a good lecturer, irrespective of the machinery available. Prof Cheng believes that multi-media is important and exciting, but not necessarily appropriate for all courses. It is most appropriate where "connectivity" can enhance the quality of the learning.
Prof Cheng opined that with formal education moving more towards what distance education has been doing, boundaries between institutions are becoming blurred. Therefore, collaboration becomes a necessity . Furthermore, new kinds of competition have emerged. For example, there will be fewer but larger universities and "survival of the fittest" courses.
How will this affect learning in Asia? The Chinese culture views education as fo cused on "being" (something social) rather than just cognitive "knowing"? He of fered some suggestions which include revisiting the teachers' role as the main pur veyor of knowledge to students, and re-addressed the attitude towards collaboration between higher education institutions, including open universities.
1. The Asian learners' access to open and distance education
A major focus of this session was the promotion of access to distance education to various student groups. Discussion included needs of the disadvantaged, while an other was cultural bias of teaching, learning and assessment methods. Equity issues and multiculturalism also featured here.
2. The Asian students' experience of learning
This was clearly the most favoured by way of paper and poster presentations. The focus was on various aspects of students' experiences with distance education. This included students' attitudes to the use of assignment deadlines as a pacing mecha nism. The problems of higher education from the perspective of part-time students, and the differences in the ways Asian and distance learners approach learning.
Other topics included the relationships between characteristics of culture and learn ing styles and students' expectations and preferences for tutorials. Factors affecting students' success and failure, human resource development, and descriptions and definitions of student support services were also discussed, Asian women's experi ences of learning through open and distance education were also discussed. Several thought-provoking questions: is there a paradigm shift in distance education? can distance education be absolutely student-centred? are distance learners twice ostra cised?
3. Developing course materials for the Asian open and distance learner
Designing course materials using multimedia was discussed and led on to the use of materials from other cultures. How to improve the teaching of minority lan guages at a distance and problem-based learning in distance education were hotly debated. The use of Western models for developing course materials for Asian learners was questioned.
4. Technology support for the Asian learner
The presenters shared their experiences in bringing on line courses: challenges they faced during the transition and preparation periods, cost that one has to consider at the beginning period, types of network in transmitting the course and students' evaluation. How to design web-based instruction in local languages and how make web-based distance learning support system were also thrashed out. The feasibility of using a range of communications technologies such as satellite, video conferencing, were examined and ideas exchanged.
5. Institutional collaboration in meeting the needs of the Asian open and dis tance learner
The importance of inter-institutional collaboration to develop high quality course materials to meet students' diverse needs and to allow distance education to be more accessible to students in a cost-effective manner. A strategic alliance model for col laboration was proposed while the sharing of excellent course materials among AAOU members was suggested.
The creation of a number of special sessions to meet the needs of Chinese speaking delegates seemed to have paid handsome dividends. Presentations and discussions at these sessions indicate that there is a second revolution on the horizon in China, this time it is in distance and open education particularly interesting issues such as:
It would appear that AAOU99 which is scheduled for Beijing in 1999 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Central China Radio & TV University has already begun.
As it is common with most conferences, and AAOU98 being no exception, it is often the face-to-face human networking for collaboration and cooperation in professional and academic pursuits, the opportunity to see and touch and hear those one has read in the journals and books and on the web, and for many to put faces to the email accounts and URLs they have communicated with that chart the future course of personal and institutional development. The AAOU98's deliberate design to create such opportunities through winning and dinning, countless trips to the Peak, Night markets and Ocean park, the dancing and wriggling to great music on a leisurely cruise on the sea seemed to have paid off as found out using the new model of research methodology called Chaos in Distance Education by Murphy and co. Talk ing about dinning and winning, how can ever forget the our drinking from the foun tain of open and distance education knowledge of Otto Peters in such an appropriate time and place to aid the ingestion and digestion of Asian delicacies of dim sum.
The Conference has been an excellent forum for sharing experiences, knowledge and expertise as well as for setting an agenda for subsequent issues and charting the future focus of open and distance education in Asia.
The debate has largely been on the most effective way for reaching out to the larger section of Asia who still require education and how distance and open education providers could best position themselves to doing this at the onset of the third millen nium.
The questions and challenges remain.
However, I would like to end with a story about a personal experience. When I was a teenager, my curiousity led me to break the age-long African tradition of children only being seen and not to be heard. I asked my father on one of our trips to a neigh bouring township, to describe for me what a mirage is. And he said, son, a mirage is that glittering, elusive future travellers and their drivers alike continually chase with out ever reaching it. Ladies and gentlemen, open and distance education has come of age in Asia, it glittered at the beginning but is now booming. It is not elusive to many that have benefited from the visionary and missionary efforts of AAOU. While we go back to the future, let us not allow education to remain a mirage for the teeming millions of unmet demands in Asia who hunger for education.
Until Beijing AAOU99, let me wish you a safe and wonderful trip back home, and God be with you till we meet again.