REVIEW OF LITERATURE
3.6 Administrative support
3.6.1 Regional centre support
The fact that DL is a decentralized and flexible model reverses the social dynamics by bringing the school to students instead of students to school (Sherry 1996). ZOU supported learners by establishing regional centres in ten provinces of Zimbabwe (P.5) to get the university near students. A DL delivery team requires well-trained material developers, teachers, site facilitators, and administrators (Sherry 1996). At ZOU, the principal administrator of the regional centre is the regional director. The director handles logistics, acquires equipment, and provides training and support.
Each programme has a regional programme coordinator who attends to students‘
academic needs, supports students through the difficulties of study (Tait and Mills 2001), and supervises tutors. Clerical staff process requests for equipment acquisition and repair, as well as reproduces and distributes course materials.
While in conventional education, teachers interact directly with students, prepare support materials and are autonomous in their classroom, in DL teachers‘
communication is mediated by technology and other partners like editors, designers, producers, technicians, media specialists, local tutors, and site facilitators who collaborate to produce and disseminate quality DL programmes. There is need to plan and coordinate staff and clearly define the role of the teacher (Lowe 2005).
The most important factor for successful DL is a caring, confident and experienced teacher who is at ease with the equipment, uses the media creatively and maintains a high level of interactivity with the students. The teacher is the common thread throughout the DL process. The teacher must be appropriately certified for the level, knowledgeable in the subject and trained in effective DL strategies. The teacher is responsible for the subject matter, preparing lesson plans and producing instructional modules, selecting support materials, delivering the instruction effectively, determining the degree of student interaction, and selecting the form of assessment (Sherry 1996). Teachers must be motivated to prepare adequately for classes. Part of the responsibility for motivation lies with the administration and its support of DL. Valentine (2002) cites Inman and Kerwin (1999:586) who argue that, due to the new role for teachers in DL, administrators must provide them with the time, the tools, and the training to meet their new responsibilities.
Sometimes learner support in DL is compromised by administrators‘ poor prioritization in provision of equipment and other requirements. Valentine (2002) cites Sherritt (1996:4) who found in higher education administration that,
For whatever reasons, higher education administrators and politicians understand the need for technology. But, lacking the heart for distance education, they cannot bring themselves to support it with adequate personnel, simple supplies, and a reasonable operating budget.
This attitude from administration trickles down to the teachers and students.
Administrators need to carefully weigh their goals and objectives when taking on DL programmes. Keegan (1995) indicates that the challenge could be in designing cost- effective and educationally-effective systems of technology that permit electronic teaching of students face-to-face at a distance (Valentine 2002).
Few teachers have sufficient training and experience to be effective distant teachers and use technology successfully in their classrooms. At ZOU, Izuagie (2001) found that most lecturers had a master‘s degree and used the conventional methods of teaching that trained them. Sherry (1996) indicates that proper training helps DL teachers to change their method of teaching and give more attention to advanced preparation, student interaction, visual materials, activities for independent study, and follow-up activities. She further cites Schlosser and Anderson (1993) who identify the skills which teachers must be trained in to assume the role of distance educators. These include: understanding the nature and philosophy of DL, identifying learner characteristics at distant sites, designing and developing interactive courseware to suit each new technology, adapting teaching strategies to deliver instruction at a distance, organizing instructional resources in a format suitable for independent study, training and practice in the use of telecommunication systems, becoming involved in organization, collaborative planning, and decision- making, evaluating student achievement, attitudes, and perceptions at distant sites and dealing with copyright issues .
At the Open University Hong-Kong (OUHK) tutors support learners through:
marking and commenting on students‘ assignments, providing telephone support and contact tutorials. To promote andragogical and constructivist learner independence and self-direction, students engage actively with the self-instructional course materials designed to promote interaction with inter alia: objectives, activities, in- text questions and feedback (Aylward 2001).
Learner support takes many forms. Lecturers may visit the distant site or students may visit the study centre. Audio and video teleconferences or interactive chats with tutors and colleagues are two real-time alternatives to site visits, office hours or telephone calls (Sherry 1996).
Sherry (1996) draws from Porter (1994), that interaction and support may also occur when students e-mail or fax questions to tutors or colleagues, or post them on electronic BBSs. Tutors and peers also respond at their convenience. Frequent teacher-student interaction enables the teachers to know the students better than if their only contact were via a televised image from a distant classroom. Students also need guidance in reaching their tutors, organising information, completing and submitting assignments (Sherry 1996). I explored support structures used by adults to interact with ZOU regional centres in order to cope with DL.