1968
In 1968 I
made my first visit to South Africa. On
our way back to Australia from Europe we stopped at Durban for a day and were
given a tour of the city and then taken to a “Zulu village”. The village consisted of two or three kraals
and a few black people in tribal dress who wandered about, sat down and, when
asked to do so, did a tribal dance. The
guide – who was big, fat and white - told us not to be rude to the villagers as
“they had feelings too”.
1992
I returned
to South Africa for six weeks in August 1992 as part of a team put together by
Don Swift to launch SAIDE.
We stayed
at a hotel that was then called “the Braamfontein”. A young black security guard at the hotel
approached me and asked how he could find out what studies would further his
career. I obtained a telephone number of
an advisory body for him and advised him to phone them. When I asked him about it some weeks later he
said that he had not made the call because he needed to wait for payday and
then get time off to make the call. It
struck me that another, unstated reason was that the telephone was not a means
of communication with which he felt comfortable. Eventually he walked to the nominated
organisation to obtain his advice.
During this
visit I met a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Education and
Culture. He was in his early fifties,
white, distinguished looking and very cultured.
He told me that at the age of seventeen he had renounced apartheid and
convinced the rest of his family to do likewise. I looked out the window and saw several pigs
fly by.
In 1992 the
country was grappling with the constitutional arrangements that would follow
the first democratic elections. One of
the issues was the respective powers of provincial and national governments. I told this bureaucrat that the Australian
experience suggested that a federal system of government caused all sorts of
problems for education and training, especially for vocational education. He was very enthusiastic that an
international visitor supported his view that power should remain centralised
and asked me to meet with officers of the Departments of Education and Training
and Education and Culture to put this position to them, which I did. (I argued this case in other forums as
well. It is interesting to see how much
attention was paid to my powerful arguments against fragmenting the education
system).
It was
during this visit that I first met the magnificent Adrienne Bird (then of
NUMSA) who was working with the brilliant Australian larrikin Chris Lloyd to
develop policies and principles for a new approach to vocational education and
training. They were grappling with the
notion of a national framework that ensured recognised standards, portability
of qualifications, mobility of learners and workers, and terms and conditions
of employment that facilitated, recognised and rewarded the acquisition of
capabilities – regardless of how they were acquired. As was the case with Australia, the push for
reform in education and training came, not from the formal education sector,
but from unions and employers.
I met a lot
of taxi cab drivers on this visit. Most
of them supported apartheid and were very worried about the civil war that
would follow the elections.
Because our
work was concerned with distance education we visited the three publicly funded
national distance education providers – Unisa, Technikon SA and Technisa. Quite apart from anything else they gave me a
deep appreciation of South African trends in architecture and landscape design
– I still find the first sight of Unisa as one drives into Pretoria
breathtakingly menacing, Technikon SA’s buildings reflect awesome affluence,
and Technisa’s gardens could be entered in a competition. I also learned that:
- there
was a spectrum of reactions to new ideas (especially those from abroad):
- at one end of the continuum was the position that the ideas were not appropriate to the South African situation
- somewhere in the middle was agreement that the ideas were fine but asserting that they were already being practised – and being practised better than anywhere else –in institutions such as Unisa and Technikon SA
- at the other end was blind acceptance of anything that came from abroad;
- it was fine for Unisa lecturers to go home at 14h30 (or was it 13h30?) because the telephone system would divert students’ calls to one number after another until they were answered, presumably by a guard or a cleaner (for some reason this made me think of the young security guard at “the Braamfontein”);
- there was a requirement that Unisa senior managers be over seven foot tall;
- security
at the Unisa library was stricter than that at the Pentagon;
- Technikon SA needed no advice on changes to its operations as it had already worked out what competency based learning was all about;
- Technisa management and staff thought that I was an ANC spy. Indeed there was general concern amongst the major national providers of distance education that SAIDE was part of an ANC plot to do away with them.
Sam Isaacs
was assigned to me as my South African counterpart for the SAIDE launching
conference. He was then at Peninsular
Technikon and already well on his way to sainthood. More than anyone else at the time this
generous and compassionate man gave me an appreciation of what a tragic history
South Africa had to overcome.
The SAIDE
launching conference opened up South African distance education to the world
and to the idea that an open and flexible approach to education and training
was essential if South Africa was to meet the internal and external challenges
of a post apartheid era. It was an
international affair but it also brought together a lot of South African
educational stakeholders who had not previously met or communicated with each
other. This lack of contact was not just
due to apartheid’s racial compartmentalisation, but also to the general tendency to put
everything and everybody into boxes of one sort or another – there were
nineteen departments of education at the time (now replaced by ten); educational “sectors” jealously guarded their
boundaries; public and private providers
of education and training kept their distance but this did not stop them from
saying very nasty things about each other;
and institutions were busy putting up walls around their respective
empires.
At the
conference:
- John Gultig made a devastating attack on Unisa;
- David Adler told the first of many jokes to be attributed to his long-suffering son;
- Franklin Sonn displayed consummate political skills;
- Don Swift showed just what a lovely, enthusiastic person he was;
- the principal of Technikon SA made a very long speech about his understanding of competency based learning;
- big men in grey suits and white shoes gathered in corners, spoke quietly amongst themselves, smiled and winked at each other;
- Jenny Glennie attended the conference in her capacity as an officer of SACHED, smiled cheerily at everyone and wondered what the hell she was letting herself in for.
All in all,
and with the exception of Technikon SA’s principal and the taxi cab drivers,
there was general acknowledgment that education and training needed to change
dramatically if it was going to meet, not just the challenges of an
increasingly volatile and competitive international environment, but those of a
country emerging from four hundred years of general oppression and forty years
of very specific injustices against a majority of the population.
1993
In 1993 I came back for three weeks.
“The Braamfontein” was now called “the Parktonian”.
Attie Buitendacht was the new principal at Technikon SA and
he had introduced planning and recruiting processes for the institution aimed
at operating in the circumstances that would emerge after the first democratic
elections to be held in May 1994.
Technikon SA put forward a proposal to mount engineering programs to be
provided at a distance with local support provided by other face to face
technikons. The other technikons were
very suspicious of Technikon SA’s motives and sceptical about whether it was
possible to offer engineering at a distance.
Adrienne Bird was continuing to work on the principles of a
national qualifications framework with people like Sam Isaacs.
1994 to 1998
The long distance commuter
From June 1994 to July 1998 I made about twenty visits to
South Africa that added up to a total of two years in the country.
A paradise on earth
The elections had just taken place at the start of this
series of visits and all was well with the world. There was only one taxi cab driver left who
supported apartheid and he was thinking of leaving the country. Everyone supported democracy, redress,
transparency, open learning and well functioning distance education (as opposed
to badly functioning correspondence education).
Fundamental pedagogy was a thing of the past. The Broederbond had never
existed.
I’m from the government – I’m here to help you
There was much government activity during these four
years. Government developed the
altruistic RDP which was replaced by the hard-nosed GEAR.
Many new education and training policies, laws and
regulations were developed, and most of these made reference to issues such as
open learning, flexible delivery, distance education and technology enhanced
learning. Amongst others, they included: the South African Government’s 1995 White
Paper on Education and Training[1]; the South African Department of Education’s policies and resources to
support quality assurance in distance education[2] and technology enhanced learning[3]: the
South African Government’s third White Paper on Higher Education; the National Committee on Further Education
(NCFE) report in August 1997, the Department of Education’s Green Paper on
Further Education & Training[4] in April 1998 and the Further Education
Bill[5] that has recently been released for
comment.
At
the time of writing the South African Government is in the process of
implementing its National Qualifications Framework (NQF) legislation and
policies through its agent, the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA)
led by its Executive Officer, my original South African guide, Sam Isaacs.
The
Department of Labour has developed a Green Paper[6] and Bill[7] on Skills Development, a process that is
being guided by Adrienne Bird who had previously helped guide the
conceptualisation of the NQF.
The
National Department of Education is overseeing the development of Further
Education policies and legislation that will provide broad frameworks for this
sector. However, the provincial
governments will govern and administer further education through their Members
of Executive Council (MEC’s) responsible for education. It has also been mooted that there may be
provincial boards of FET, but the present Bill is silent on this. The Gauteng Department of Education has developed
a College Education and Training Bill[8].
How the works of the Department of Education, the Department
of Labour, SAQA and provincial governments will complement or conflict with
each other remains to be seen.
New horses for new courses
As demonstrated above, the South African Government is
involved in dramatic changes in its expectations of providers of education and
training. In recent policy statements on
Higher and Further Education, it has indicated a shift towards triennial, zero
based funding linked to performance criteria that emphasise government
priorities. Providers will increasingly be
expected to:
- assume greater autonomy – and associated authority, responsibility and accountability – in developing and managing their programs;
- achieve quite new results based on quite new approaches and strategies;
- adopt, implement and demonstrate understanding
of the principles and quality assurance processes of:
- the NQF
- open and flexible learning;
- operate in an increasingly competitive environment in which they will need to prove themselves capable of meeting government objectives and generating additional income.
In order to meet these new demands providers will need to
develop new understandings, skills and attitudes within their communities,
structures and processes. So too will
government and other stakeholders and role players. They will need to develop, acquire and/or
have access to new categories and scales of resources, processes, systems and
infrastructures.
What does this mean for distance education empires?
Distance education providers have often claimed leadership
in adopting and developing the new approaches needed for meaningful open and
flexible learning. This is less the case
now than it may have been in the past as all providers experience pressures to
merge distance education, face to face and other learning strategies within
open and flexible learning approaches.
This is typical of the blurring between the traditional distinctions
between different “modes” of learning that has occurred all over the world as
providers have developed and implemented whatever combinations of strategies
and resources were appropriate to their circumstances and those of their
learners and other clients. This means
that both distance education and face to face providers will need to change
their approaches so that they bring flexible and open learning into the
mainstream of their programs. It also
means that, in so doing, they will use a mix of strategies and resources that
will blur – and, in the long term, possibly do away with – the traditional
distinctions between “modes” of learning.
All of the new approaches listed in sections above have
significant ramifications for the Technical College of South Africa (Technisa),
the Technikon of Southern Africa (Technikon SA) and the University of South
Africa (UNISA). This is particularly
true of expectations of, and encouragement for, all education and training
providers to use combinations of various flexible delivery strategies including
those associated with distance education.
The three institutions’ historical roles as the national technical
college, technikon and university providers of distance education (both as
developers of courses and courseware, and as enroller of learners) will now be
subject to review and to the vagaries of the market.
All providers of education and training have, to varying
degrees, attempted to anticipate and cope with the post 1994 context,
expectations and demands. Each of the
three distance education institutions set in train various processes to
convince their stakeholders that they were concerned to transform from the old
to the new.
The role of SAIDE
SAIDE has
played a significant role in bringing an open learning and distance education flavour to the language and policies of
governments and institutions. This began
in 1992 when there was a strong impression that the government in waiting saw
SAIDE as playing a major role in bringing open learning and distance education
into the transformation of education and training. SAIDE had the added advantage of dealing with
areas and language that many people felt uncertain about (distance education,
open learning, technology enhanced learning, resource based learning and so
on). Its reputation for access to
expertise in these areas was reinforced through its strong international links
with a network of distance education experts, a network that was facilitated by
the highly regarded and well qualified Don Swift. In its early days SAIDE established a
momentum that accelerated after the appointment of the tireless and highly
motivated Jenny Glennie. Over the years
it has drawn on and added to its overseas connections; and it has developed its own South African
networks as well as building up a strong core of expertise within its own
ranks.
SAIDE
managed an international commission’s review of South African distance
education in 1993/4 that had been commissioned by the ANC. It had a major influence on the references to
distance education and open learning in the government’s papers and bills on
higher and further education. It contributed
significantly to audits of teacher training, in particular on those sections
dealing with teacher training through distance education. The Technology Enhanced Learning
Investigation (TELI) came as a result of active promotion by SAIDE, which then
played a lead role in the investigation and in the development of strategies
that followed on from TELI.
At
different times SAIDE has facilitated the development of policies, strategies
and action plans for the transformation of institutions from the traditional
approaches of the past to new client oriented, flexible provision based on open
learning principles and making optimum use of distance education and technology
enhanced learning. This has taken the
form of intensive work with Technisa and Technikon SA and included, amongst
others, specific activities with the Gauteng Youth College, the Free State, the
University of the North, Vista University and Natal University. There has been direct involvement in Unisa’s
Transformation Forum and Council, and on the councils of the Johannesburg
College of Education and the Gauteng Youth College. And SAIDE has provided a leadership and
support role to NADEOSA.
In addition
SAIDE has involved itself in projects aimed at developing and providing
specific products and services. The most
recent of these is the development of “the Study of Education”.
When it
first started SAIDE was expected to have a close connection with
government. It certainly has provided
major inputs to government thinking on matters relating to open learning,
distance education and technology enhanced learning. At one time it was generally believed that
SAIDE would become a government agency, probably in the form of NOLA (National
Open Learning Agency). This did not
happen and SAIDE has had a more ad hoc relationship with government, mainly
with the national Department of Education and to a lesser extent with certain
provincial departments of education, especially in Gauteng. The warmth of the relationships has varied
and depends on how grudgingly or generously departmental bureaucrats, who are
subject to a whole host of internal and external pressures and power games,
have acknowledged SAIDE’s obviously impressive track record.
Partly
because NOLA did not eventuate and partly because the whole environment is
moving towards being market driven, SAIDE’s role has changed and continues to
change. Whilst it continues to make
major contributions to policy development and to work on projects and with institutions
as part of its general activities, there is an increasing involvement in
specifically targeted work based on specific contracts with international
funders and national clients. This
requires SAIDE to consider the balance it will strike between general work and
specific contracts. In particular it
will need to address to what extent commercial imperatives might undermine the
integrity of a mission that is stated very much in terms of the contributions
of open learning and distance education to national objectives of democracy,
equity, redress and economic success.
What about some real action?
Policies, Strategies and Change
As I
wandered about two patterns became apparent.
A lot of effort, emotion and talent was being expended on developing
many very sophisticated policies and strategies at government and institutional
levels. Useful action that actually
provided improved education and training for more people was often not linked
to these policies and strategies – other than reflecting their general
sentiments – but was instead due to the efforts of particular individuals.
Why was
this? Well, it has to do with a number
of things.
The approach to change
The actual
and apparent efforts to change education and training, at both systemic and
organisational levels, have largely been based on a top down approach beginning
with very grand public announcements that made heavy use of slogans. There has been extended and extensive use of
committees, sub-committees, working parties and task forces. When committees and working parties were
considered inappropriate, forums and commissions were set up instead. Whatever they were called, these bodies developed
visions, missions, strategic plans and action plans. These resulted – usually after considerable
periods of time - in substantial reports that contained decisions on:
- definitions of “transformation”, “education”, “learning”, “open learning”, “democracy”, “transparency”, and so on;
- a glossary of acronyms;
- the respective authorities of various existing and newly created bodies;
- the membership requirements, standing orders and agendas for these bodies;
- structures and reporting lines for the transformed system or organisation.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that until now this
has led to transformation of the products and services provided to learners and
other clients of South African education and training.
There is an alternative approach. This is not to announce change at all, and
not to get bogged down in transformation forums and the like. This does not mean that one loses sight of a
grand vision. One simply does not get
caught up in the never-ending game of announcing it, defending it, modifying it
and giving up on it. Secondly, one does
not start off by playing around with structures and reporting lines, a favourite
game for those concerned with power, self protection and protection of the
status quo. Instead, one supports key
initiatives, performed by identified change agents and leaders in innovation,
that will:
- require its participants to address important principles, in particular those concerned with quality products and services and client satisfaction;
- involve change to the ways in which things are done and people work with each other;
- attract attention and encourage imitation;
- lead on to other initiatives all of which chip away at the existing attitudes, systems and structures.
An example of this is the work done by the formidable
Veronica McKay and her ABET team at Unisa.
They have simply got on with doing the job in spite of Unisa’s repressive
environment (indeed, taking advantage of it) and are providing a highly
successful and popular program that displays many of the features associated
with quality open learning. In this case
it can hardly be said that Unisa has encouraged Veronica, the institution
simply has not been able to keep up with her.
Largely because of her unexpected success, it is now doing its best to
bring her under control.
Then there is Mercurial Mercorio. Getti Mercorio’s work with the Metal Industry Engineering Trades
Training Board has led to the development of a series of standards and
associated training courses and materials.
This is yet another example of industry getting on with the job, often
as a result of impatience at government’s long drawn out processes.
Misunderstanding change
Another problem is that well intentioned people latch onto
new ideas and set about implementing them without understanding what they
actually mean. So they reject
fundamental pedagogy and commit themselves to open learning, flexible learning,
learner centredness, quality instructional design, project teams and matrix
structures. Unfortunately when one looks
at their educational offerings - and the systems, structures and processes that
underpin them – they fall sadly short of the mark. Some examples come to mind.
The Gauteng Youth College was to provide new, flexible and
exciting alternatives to young people wanting a second attempt at
matriculation. In the event it has
become a fairly traditional college with only some minor variations. The personnel at the college and in the
provincial government bureaucracy simply did not come to grips with the
complexities of offering the intended program and used basically the same
approaches and methods as they had in the past.
Technikon SA committed itself to the use of project teams to
develop its courseware. This led to a
number of people from within and outside Technikon SA being formally involved
in a number of courseware development projects.
This was presented as effective use of teams. However, they usually involved people taking
turns to contribute their bits and pieces to the development in sequence, and
not operating as a team at all.
All over South Africa distance education providers have
committed themselves to quality instructional design that involves dramatic departure
from the dreadful learning materials of the past. Various references on instructional design
talk about the use of icons and the use of user friendly language and
illustrations. As a result we find far
too many examples of printed materials full of gratuitous, confusing and
unnecessary icons, and that bane of South African courseware, talking heads
with balloons full of text emerging from their mouths and brains.
And finally there is the belief that making technically
elegant use of technology equates to open learning. In fact many of the examples are really
hi-tech versions of the rote learning and memory based assessment tasks that
one associates with fundamental pedagogy.
Complicating change
Change can be complicated by involved processes to develop
plans and strategies, especially if there is a strong requirement or
inclination to consult through formal and representative structures such as
commissions and transformation forums.
It can also be a result of establishing cumbersome procedures and
structures to deliver change.
The problem is that change is often about sophisticated and
complex concepts and systemic change is about applying these in complicated
circumstances.
Controlling change
So, when is complexity unnecessary? One answer is when it is a result of wanting
to maintain central control of change with all sorts of safeguards against the
masses who cannot be trusted. Meaningful
change usually involves commitment by those closest to the action and this
requires at least an apparent delegation of authority to them. Change may need to be co-ordinated, but even
here those areas that require central involvement need to be carefully
identified and one must avoid simply using “co-ordination” as a euphemism for
“control”.
Over-simplifying change
There is a
tension that causes problems for implementing change associated with open and
flexible learning. On the one the hand
open learning requires that its practitioners be engaged in a continuing
process of making, and providing support for, intelligent decisions that take
account of varying needs, demands and circumstances. On the other hand there is the very human
need to have definitive answers to all problems based on sets of simple rules
to be followed rigidly, a need that was encouraged under apartheid and its
educational philosophies and practices.
When I have put forward my own point of view that open
learning is not about definitive answers but about asking the right questions I
have been greeted with blank stares.
There was similar incomprehension when TELI resulted in a decision
making framework rather than the decisions themselves.
Fear of change
Many people are afraid of change. This is not just due to the conservative
nature of humans. It is also because
change often throws one’s future in doubt and requires considerable
adjustment. This is especially so when
the change is announced from on high in slogan-riddled language that could mean
many things and, from an early stage, linked to changes in structures,
reporting lines and general balances of power.
The corruption of change
In order to
examine this issue, it is necessary to consider what apartheid was about. When I first arrived from Australia I saw it
as discrimination against many different groups of people. I gradually came to learn that it was in fact
discrimination in favour
of a select few. As Don Swift pointed
out to me, apartheid was one of the most successful efforts at affirmative
action. In turn this led to a culture of
privilege that saw work in education and training as serving the interests, not
of learners and other clients, but of particular people, their relatives and
their friends – a manifestation of this is the salary and pension deals that
senior managers stitched up between themselves and which remain to haunt the
institutions and their budgets to this day.
And this led to educational, moral and legal corruption.
So, when
confronted with the prospect of changes that could threaten their perceived
entitlements, those who practised such discrimination adopt various tactics to
defend their positions.
Technikon
SA committed itself to dramatic change in 1994.
It was going to move from a highly centralised correspondence school to
a democratic, transparent institution based on ILCDE (Integrated Learner
Centred Distance Education). Many
sophisticated and well presented statements of policy and intent were developed
and moves to implement change commenced, in particular those relating to
courseware development, decentralisation of learner support and financial
planning and management. Technisa
adopted similar policies and strategies and engaged in ongoing negotiations with
government on the role it would be play in the new further education
environment. Unisa took a lot longer to
acknowledge that it needed to change and for some time concentrated on
presenting what it was and had always been doing in a better light; but eventually it also set out about the
motions of transformation. And most
other providers of education and training developed their policies and
approaches to transformation.
The
response of those in all these organisations who did not want change ranged
from the obvious to the more subtle.
The obvious
responses included the suppression of critical comment such as the report by
Mike Brogden, a criminology expert from Northern Ireland, which alleged gross
corruption, mismanagement, academic inferiority and educational weakness in
Technikon SA’s police studies program.
There were death threats – usually by phone and usually anonymous - made
to staff who were seen as promoting unpopular changes or challenging vested interests
such as preferred supplier status. And
there were the efforts to get rid of the trouble makers – in Technikon SA there
was the unrelenting hounding out of the institution of the dynamic and
charismatic Danie Kok who had become a focus for – almost a symbol of – the
transformation of Technikon SA; in Unisa
Sam van der Berg, who had blown the whistle on educationally inadequate
offerings, was the target of similar attention.
The more
subtle approach was to adopt the slogans of change and to set up long drawn out
processes based on numerous committees, working parties, conferences and
workshops that, over the years, essentially repeated the same commitments to
the same principles (although sometimes using new slogans). There were grounds for suspecting that there
were those in the institutions who were happy to keep these activities on the
boil in lieu of any real action and to provide a cover for continuing
established self-serving practices and privileges and/or establishing new
privileges. Of course, at certain points
decisions were made to implement some of the policies and principles. Then there would often be persons who
regretfully advised that, although they would dearly love to carry out these
decisions, they could not do so because the administrative processes, or the
computer system, or the laws of the land, or the skills of staff, or the
curvature of the earth and the pull of the moon, simply did not permit it.
and finally, in conclusion …
This article has spent a fair bit of space on the barriers
to the changes that are needed. Whilst
these cannot be ignored, they are certainly not insurmountable. A lot of very talented and dedicated people
who care about the future have worked to identify the issues, develop the
principles and prepare for action. There
are some wonderful people in South Africa determined to make things work and I
wish them well.
[1]
Department of Education , White
Paper on Education and Training (Republic of South Africa, Government
Gazette Vol. 357, No. 16312 15 March, 1995)
[2]
Department of Education, A Distance
Education Quality Standards Framework for South Africa, (Distance
Education, Media & Technological Services Directorate, September to December
1996)
[3]
Ministerial Committee for Development
Work on the Role of Technology that will support and enhance Learning, Technology
Enhanced Learning Investigation in South Africa, (Department of Education,
31 July 1996).
[4]
South African Department of Education,
Green Paper on Further Education & Training: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century
through Education, Training & Work, (Pretoria, April 1998)
[5]
Republic of South Africa, Further
Education & Training Bill, (as introduced in the National Assembly by
the Minister of Education, 1998)
[6]
South African Department of Labour, Green
Paper on Skills Development Strategy for Economic & Employment Growth in
South Africa, (Pretoria, March, 1997)
[7]
South African Department of Labour, Skills
Development Bill, 1997, (Notice 1296 of 1997, Vol. 386 No. 18244, Pretoria,
2 September 1997)
[8]
Gauteng Provincial Legislature, College
Education & Training Bill, 1998
