Distance education : an economic and educational assessment of its potential for Africa

Distance education includes the use of-correspondence courses, the work of open universities, and education in-school and out-of-school based on broadcasting by radio or television. It is defined as an educational process in which a significant proportion of the teaching is conducted by someone removed in space and/or time from the learner. Many distance-teaching projects combine a variety of media, link correspondence teaching with a limited amount of face-to-face work, and use modest media like radio and print. The particular advantages of distance education are that it can reach remote audiences, can provide education without taking people away from work and, by economizing on the use of speciali.st staffs can in some cases reduce unit costs. It has been used for teacher training, and for primary, secondary and tertiary education. Many African countries have been offering in-service training to teachers using correspondence courses; in both Tanzania and Zimbabwe this has been done on a large scale, training many thousands of teachers needed for programs of universal primary education. In primary education, the most important application of distance-teaching techniques has been in interactive radio, where radio is used for direct classroom teaching in a style which demands frequent active responses by the learners to the radio program. At both secondary and tertiary level. "equivalence" courses have been developed, offering an alternative route to formal qualifications for students outside school or college. Cost data are presented on all these applications. Teacher training projects with several thousand students have shown costs of between a quarter and a half of those for conventional face-to-face training; evidence on teachers' classroom performance suggests that the training is effective. Interactive radio is necessarily an add-on cost. Data from Nicaragua, Thailand and Kenya suggest that interactive radio compares favorably in cost and effectiveness with the provision of resources in the form of textbooks. At the secondary level costs per student for individuals working on their own, or in study centers with minimal supervision by an unqualified monitor, compare favorably with costs in conventional education. Data from Malawi showed that costs per successful student were lower than the cost per student in a boarding school, but higher than those for day schools. At tertiary level, open universities have shown economies, as compared with conventional education, once enrollments rose above a figure between 10,000 and 20,000. Distance teaching units, demanding a lower level of investment and attached to existing institutions, show economies with much lower enrollments and may do so with student numbers only in the hundreds. It is argued that distance education's potential to increase access to education and reduce costs justifies further investment along with other strategies for education in Africa. Unless it is to be the basis for a parallel but inferior system of education, planning for distance education needs to be integrated with educational planning more generally, complementing other investment strategies.