A. Background

1. Historical context of this plan
   1. The University belongs to the contributing countries that sit on Council. This Plan is at root an attempt to move towards a more equitable response on our part to all these countries. In all the aspects in which the UWI contributes to the world, we find that the Non-Campus Countries (NCCs) have not really received the level of service and degree of attention that they deserve. Our aim is to formulate a series of strategies whereby we can attempt to redress the balance. Since the University's contribution is multi-faceted, the issues we examine here and the strategies for addressing them are diverse and lacking in obvious unity: they are held together because they all flow from what a university is and does. One way to give some order to them is to see them as involving questions of student access to our courses, questions of how a distinctive university presence can be felt in the NCCs, questions of NCC involvement in our research and scholarly activity, and questions of NCC access to the technical services and expertise that we have. But these are themselves variegated and cross-cutting categories so that particular proposals will often relate to more than one issue. So much by way of apology for the amorphousness of these proposals. Let us begin by rehearsing the route that has got us to our present position.
   2. The UWI's 50 years have been remarkably complex. At the risk of gross oversimplification one can say that for its initial Mona-only incubation the University dealt reasonably fairly with the various territories that contributed to it in terms of on-campus student numbers. From the first it established an Extra-Mural Department which attempted coverage of the entire region. With the formation of two new campuses in the early '60s, it began a phase in which campus-country interests have grown more insistent. By 1969, Council was sufficiently concerned to institute an extensive appraisal of the needs of the Non-Campus Countries (NCCs).
   3. The Report of the 1970 Working Party offered a possible agenda for the University, but economic problems meant that full implementation was never attempted. It indicated interest in developing local institutions in affiliation with the UWI and in some cases a desire for the establishment of an additional campus. It envisaged the development of University Centres in the NCCs as focal points within a tertiary education complex.
   4. The Appraisal Report identified common needs that could be met fairly easily within existing resources. The main ones are mostly still with us:

      - Education, specifically curriculum development (esp. English as a foreign language), increasing ‘O’ level output, 6^th form work, teacher training (including training of all secondary school teachers), technical education;

      - Sub-professional training in agriculture, engineering, medicine;

      - Public Administration;

      - Business Administration and Management;

      - Social Work and Community Development;

      - Collaborating with governments on what is done through the SCS;

      - Providing students and staff to assist with professional extension work, e.g. food technology; agricultural census;

      - Circuits of specialist lecturers;

      - Providing a central documentation service.

      It also identified needs that require large changes (again mostly still to be heard):

      - Planning for tourism and Management training for this;

      - Hotel administration and management;

      - Forestry;

      - Fisheries;

      - Physical planning, land utilization, and conservation of natural resources;

      - Architecture;

      - Archaeology;

      - Research in water engineering.

   5. The years since the Appraisal Report have seen several other investigations that focussed on or gave considerable attention to the University's role in the NCCs. In general, all reported dissatisfaction with what was being done, and offered various remedies. Notable among these were the Challenge examination scheme that permitted students to take first year examinations in many courses purely off their own bat; the UWIDITE teleconferencing system that provided audio-conferencing support to various distance education programmes; and the creation, in the 1984 restructuring, of Offices of University Services responsible for NCCs, one of which was given its own Pro-Vice-Chancellor. But this last decision is itself instructive, since it was a concession to political pressure. We were equally slow to respond to initiatives from institutions in the NCCs that wished to teach part or all of some of our programmes, though again political pressures brought about some developments of this kind.
   6. With the accession of the present Vice-Chancellor, the University's orientation has significantly changed. From the start, Sir Alister McIntyre has conceived the UWI as the hub of a regional tertiary level network. He was instrumental in setting up ACTI, a forum for consultation and co-operation among the region's tertiary institutions. The Report on Governance made one of the strongest denunciations of our failure to give their due to the NCCs, and laid the foundations for the most recent restructuring and the creation, as one of the three central University organs, of this Board itself. The University's Plans have made much of the NCCs; the most recent Strategic Plan has incorporated the hubs and spokes notion ("UWI is prepared to operate as the hub of the regional tertiary education system" p. 33). In many ways, this present document is itself an attempt to follow through the implications of this metaphor.
   7. The years since the Appraisal Report have also seen great changes in the NCCs themselves. Economically most have flourished - all now enjoy a per capita GDP in excess of Jamaica's, and many are in advance of Trinidad on this measure. Tourism has boomed in all, offshore finance in several NCCs. But they still remain vulnerable, in particular in the OECS to the consequences of the changes in the EU banana regime. Educationally, the NCCs have built up their secondary and post-secondary sectors. The OECS countries have been collaborating on an extensive Reform of secondary education. Other universities and training institutions are making inroads into the region, offering distance education or easier access to programmes than the UWI. Several off-shore schools have been set up, some of which have become a significant factor in the local economy. These developments set the scene for the UWI's repositioning of itself in an environment it can no longer assume is simply its own.
   8. This plan was preceded by a set of discussion documents circulated to faculties and other units in the University, and a series of visits to the NCCs to sound out opinions of key stakeholders. The present document is intended to give the Board an idea of the major policy directions that have been identified so far, in the hope that it will endorse our continuing efforts to refine them and seek feasible means of operationalizing them.
2. Outreach in the UWI's Strategic Plan, 1997-2002
   1. The latest Strategic Plan seeks a significant increase in enrolments, appealing to regional manpower needs and international comparisons of tertiary enrolment rates, but it does not break this down between campus-country and NCC students. But it places emphasis on providing opportunities at the TLIs in the NCCs for students to have work credited in UWI programmes, to study for UWI qualifications, and to prepare better for such study. The Plan offers to provide technical assistance to TLIs, to transfer to them many of its sub-degree qualifications, to assist them in teaching part or all of selected UWI degrees, to provide examiners for TLI qualifications, and to make generous provision for giving credit to work done in TLI programmes. The Plan reports the aims and achievements of the recent CDB-funded thrust in distance education, and expects a considerable proportion of increased enrolment to come by this route. It also envisages a renewed effort by the School of Continuing Studies in adult and continuing education, the provision of access to University programmes, and in enhancing the quality of civil life.
   2. The longer-term future envisaged by the Plan, and one that is highly relevant to our particular interests, involves the divestment of level 1 teaching, and some of levels 2 and 3, to independent national colleges. Given its further commitments to an increase in postgraduate work, it would not be unreasonable to consider the ultimate goal to be that the campuses become purely research institutes plus graduate schools, with undergraduate teaching and continuing education at the same level the responsibility of national colleges, a regional ACTI-responsive Distance Education organization, and a regional umbrella accreditation mechanism. Changing circumstances tend to make such long-term visions soon appear quaint, but it is perhaps in order for us to remember that something like this is in embryo in our existing commitments and to begin to think through the medium-term implications of this scenario.
   3. The latest structure of the University includes the Board for NCC/DE, to which report three specific units: the Distance Education Centre (DEC), the School of Continuing Studies (SCS), and the Tertiary Level Institutions' Unit (TLIU). The DEC manages all the University's distance education and provides extensive services for most of it. It maintains a complex regional audio-conferencing network, an "intranet" linking almost 300 computers across the region, which has itself access to the wider Internet, and it will soon have associated with these systems a one-way videoconferencing capacity which the University is acquiring mainly for administrative purposes. The SCS is responsible for a wide range of non-degree programmes (access, professional upgrading, continuing education, public education); its senior staff in the NCCs also have wide responsibilities as in effect ambassadors for the University in their territory and as managers of all the facilities at the University Centres (all Centres have DEC facilities). The TLIU has a specific mandate to facilitate the development of national TLIs and in particular to help them and the University itself work towards the seamless integrated tertiary education system envisaged in the "hub and spokes" metaphor.
   4. The Board contains representatives of the three campus Principals and their Academic Boards, through whose presence the outreach activity that remains outside the DEC, SCS, and TLIU can be monitored and co-ordinated. This outreach activity includes the extensive work of units within the Schools of Education that relate directly with the region's Teachers' Colleges; the extension programmes of the School of Agriculture, both through a department and through the special CEPAT programme; the Fertility Management Programme in the Faculty of Medical Sciences; and other outreach and distance education work for which the other schools and faculties are responsible.
   5. For clarity, it may help to stipulate what certain expressions are taken to mean in this document. 'Access courses' refer to non-University courses that either provide prerequisites for entry to University programmes (e.g. courses accepted for matriculation purposes) or are intended to make work for or in such programmes more effective (e.g., computer literacy courses, remedial mathematics). 'Continuing education' refers to courses at any level that are intended to advance a person's understanding or skill in their area of endeavour. 'Outreach' is used to cover all kinds of training and educational activity provided by any part of the University beyond the campuses; it is not restricted to those activities pursued by the DEC, SCS, and TLIU. 'Professional upgrading' refers to courses that update or deepen a person's understanding or skill in their area of expertise. 'Public education' refers to activities intended to contribute to public discussion of issues or to enhance the quality of social life; it is not restricted to formal courses but may include conferences, media presentations, cultural activities, radio and television broadcasts, etc.

Go to Present situation and constraints

Addressing needs

Country and faculty breakdown of proposals

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Prepared June 4th, 1998.

URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/docs/spona.html

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