South Africa: Distance higher education policies for access, social equity, quality, and social and economic responsiveness in a context of the diversity of provision

Abstract

The principal concern of this paper is the implication of the increasing diversity of higher education provision in South Africa for equity of access and opportunity for historically disadvantaged social groups, high‐quality provision, and social and economic responsiveness in distance higher education. This diversity is signalled by a variety of modes of delivery and learning/teaching methods, and the use of various terms to depict these. The article addresses this concern through an engagement with critical distance higher education policy issues, such as institutional differentiation and roles, the institutional location of distance education provision, the development of expertise and resources, the financing of distance provision and its quality assurance, and the monitoring and evaluation of the performance of distance education providers. In the course of this engagement the article also addresses a number of key themes that recur across the various policy documents produced during the past decade of democracy in South Africa.1

Notes

1. This paper is written on behalf of the Council on Higher Education (CHE) and draws on an extensive investigation into distance education in South African higher education undertaken recently by the CHE in response to a request by the Minister of Education for advice on selected aspects of distance higher education policy and practice. A comprehensive research report on this investigation titled Enhancing the contribution of distance higher education in South Africa, can be retrieved from http://www.che.ac.za. My thanks to Chantal Dwyer for her research assistance.

2. See DoE (1996, 1997); MoE (2001).

3. Defining open and distance learning can be retrieved from http://www.col.org/resources/

4. Ibid.

5. Full‐time equivalent (FTE) student enrolments are calculated by (a) assigning to each course a fraction representing the weighting it has in the curriculum of a qualification, and (b) multiplying the head‐count enrolment of that course by this fraction.

6. All statistics are for 2001, the most recent year for which audited and reliable figures are available.

7. For the purposes of this paper, the term face‐to‐face and not contact is used to distinguish between the types of institutions. The reason for this is that many institutions use the term contact to denote the fact that although their delivery of programmes makes use of distance methods, they make contact with their students by various means, such as telephone and e‐mail.

8. It is clear that much private distance provision is offered in partnership with public institutions and is thus accounted for in the analysis of private provision. A recent Human Sciences Research Council’s HRD Review (2003) analysed information from the Department of Education of 86 registered private providers in 2001, and concluded that there were only some 30,000 head‐count enrolments for “own certificates” (HSRC, 2003, p. 421) in both distance and face‐to‐face provision. It can thus be safely concluded that distance education in the private higher education sector is currently of limited significance.

9. Education statistics in South Africa at a glance in 2001 (DoE, 2003) points out that the ratio of FTE students to head‐count enrolments in “contact’” institutions was 8:10 compared with 4.4:10 for distance education.

10. The figure has its genesis in ideas advanced during the CHE investigation by Professor Anthony Melck, of the University of Pretoria.

11. Currently, government funding of FTE distance students is 50% of that for FTE face‐to‐face students.