APC P.16
2003/2004
ACADEMIC
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE OF THE UWIDEC
From its inception, the UWI’s attempts to bring programmes
within reach of people outside the three campus country capital cities inspired
various local initiatives to extend them still further. Several communities in Jamaica offered space
and some other facilities for the use of our teleconferencing system. The Tobago House of Assembly likewise agreed
to provide a basis for distance education operations, followed some years later
by the Nevis Island Administration.
More recently, bpTT in Trinidad has joined in with facilities in Mayaro.
Provision by the non-UWI side varied. Sometimes space and IT equipment was
provided; in other contexts, the UWI provided and paid for the IT facilities,
and any upgrades. Non-UWI staff engaged
in running the service were sometimes given an honorarium, sometimes paid a
regular wage. In some cases, UWI has
paid a rent for the actual space. These
payments by UWI must have started as off-budget, even if they have subsequently
been regularized — it is not known to this Office whether such regularization
has in fact occurred.
As this Office remarked in its first (1998) Strategic
Plan, “the University has not yet decided upon a formal policy for extra
locations that arguably are needed, as in say Belize or Turks and Caicos…. Its
position and practice has been that it will support locally financed initiatives.”
The absence of a policy continues. Our
reliance on what is offered rather than deciding what we should do has meant
that in the Turks and Caicos we have a site in an island where there are very
few students, while the demand for training is elsewhere; that we have
locations within Jamaica that are only a few miles apart, but none in Belize
outside Belize City.
We have presented ourselves as offering our normal fare at
these non-UWI sites, but this is evidently impossible. Sites that are part of the SCS are provided
with some sort of Library facilities; they have UWI staff who can deal with
student queries and have access to what ought to be authoritative answers. At non-UWI sites, none of this can be
guaranteed. We ought not to pretend that
students receive equal treatment from us at our own sites and at the various
non-UWI locations.
Nor is our own internal administration able to work in the
same way. While there have been many
cases of outstanding service from non-UWI persons and organizations, we have
also had a number of problems, some of which impact directly on students,
others on our own ability to manage ourselves.
Our first Strategic Plan also noted that “looking to the
medium term we will need to reconsider our priorities. The DEC's emphasis, in
distance education, is moving away from teleconferencing towards print, and now
more recently towards computers. Both these media give much greater freedom to
students to decide when and where to study. To the extent that they can become
central to distance education provision, and to the extent that major outreach
programmes can be offered in that modality, we ought not to need a plethora of
teleconferencing sites.” No evidence
before us now undermines that conclusion.
Consideration of the role of other providers suggests that
we have a choice between the sort of stance we have adopted so far — pretend
that we can offer the same services in circumstances that make it impossible —
and one that could be called the London model: hands off provision of the
basics (course material and rigorous examinations) for a modest fee to the
student, and a willingness to let others offer what they wish, for their own
profit, to facilitate students’ consumption of that package. This might better be called after our own
earlier Challenge model.
A precondition for adopting this more realistic stance is
that we can establish a baseline set of fees for the basics: provision of print
and digital self-instructional media; provision of examinations; provision of
the associated administrative services.
At that fee, we can offer our programmes to anyone anywhere.
We will then need to establish a further set of fees for
any elaboration of this minimum that we wish to provide at our own sites:
access to UWI computers; access to local tutoring; access to UWI-paid tutors by
e-mail etc.; access to local libraries and restricted information resources;
the provision of administrative services with respect to all this.
Students who wish to pay us for these extras will need to
live within reach of our sites. We
should not insist that all students in that area pay for the full package, but
we will of course need to police access to the larger package.
We should be prepared to work with any other individuals
or organizations that wish to provide similar elaborations of the minimum. We will need to make it very clear that
students have responsibilities to us for certain matters, and that we are not
endorsing any of these other providers of services.
We should invite individuals or organizations in the
vicinity of all our non-UWI sites to organize to provide such services. We should withdraw from all other
involvement in them as from a date to be decided, not later than the minimum
completion time for students currently attending such sites.
We should invite institutions throughout the region to
consider providing the kinds of extra support here envisaged, so that national
TLIs in particular can become more involved in the support of our programmes in
ways that will not incur any UWI supervision.
We should consider whether the demographics of particular
areas argue for the creation of new UWI sites in any locations where we are
unable to cater to local needs through collaboration with TLIs.
Office of the Board for NCC/DE