Challenges In and To Education
Ma.Cristina D. Padolina
25 February 1998
Marking and celebrating the rites of passage is something we love to do. Thus, a few months ago the Chinese celebrated the entry of the year of the tiger; UP just launched the UP decade to last until 2008, its own centennial; our country is celebrating the centennial of our Republic, and with this program, UPOU is commemorating its 3rd founding anniversary. It is probably not just because we love to celebrate or that we need an excuse to party but putting marks in the passage of time is probably a mechanism among humans to help us cope with the inexorable, one-directional, drift of time.
And with the coming of a millenium there is palpable air of great anticipation among individuals and human organizations. We can expect spectacular celebrations to mark the arrival of the year 2000. Academic institutions and the field of education, in general, are not exempt from feeling the winds of change. Talks of paradigm shifts in education have been going on through the last decade of this millenium.
But the change being felt in the field of education is not without basis and is not mere reaction to the passing of a thousand years. There are forces which have been tapping on and ramming the gates of the educational establishment.
The inertia of tradition, values and infrastructure is strong in education and to overcome this is in itself a challenge in education. But the forces impinging on education are equally strong. Some of these forces are not new, but they have been building up over the years. It is perhaps the confluence of these factors that now causes breaks in the walls and shifting of foundations of the structure of education.
A force that has not abetted for many decades now is the explosion of information. In my field of chemistry, for example, Chemical abstracts in 1986 consisted of 237,223 entries; in 1997 there were 44,338 entries in January alone or a projected 530,056 entries for the year. It is said that the half-life of an engineer's knowledge today is five years. In computer science, it is certainly much shorter. The four or five years of undergraduate studies is not sufficient to master all the information in an area of study. Tony Bates in his book, Technology, Open Learning and Distance Education (1995), predicted that after formal schooling, individuals would need to be retrained at least five times during their working life. And this is probably true whether the individual is working for a promotion or just hanging on to a job.
But it is not just the volume of information which is critical but the value which has been accorded to information and knowledge. Peter Drucker, prominent futurist, economist and prolific writer, predicted three decades ago, in his book, The Age of Discontinuity (1968), that one of the critical forces that will mold and shape our future is knowledge. In his newer book, Managing the Future (1992), Drucker wrote that, "The world is becoming not labor intensive, not materials intensive, not energy intensive, but knowledge intensive." There was a time when men of knowledge were used by kings merely as court jesters. The pursuit of knowledge was then a luxury permitted of the wealthy and the privileged. But in this decade, information and knowledge have become powerful weapons that win wars not just in battlefields, as we saw in the Gulf War, but in boardrooms. As President Charles M. Vest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, "We are entering an era in which knowledge and the people skilled in its use are the coins of the realm. In such times, we will succeed by our wits rather than by our power and human resources."
The force of knowledge has also given rise to another force causing change in the education scene - the new world of work. James Martin in his book Cybercorp (1996) defined this new business revolution as "a corporation designed using the principles of cybernetics… designed for fast change, which can learn, evolve, and transform itself rapidly." Such an organization feeds on knowledge and "needs a knowledge infrastructure to capture and create knowledge, store it, improve it, clarify it, disseminate it to all employees, and put it to use." The workers, therefore, in a cybercorporation must be knowledge workers, required to be constantly learning, to be familiar with information sources, and to be capable of retooling and retraining. An institution to be competitive cannot afford to have its workers move comfortably on a plateau of knowledge; it must constantly challenge its workers to climb steep learning curves. Tony Bates in his book, Technology, Open Learning and Distance Education (1995), predicted that after formal schooling, individuals would need to be retrained at least five times during their working life. And this is probably true whether the individual is working for a promotion or just hanging on to a job.
The changing face of the workplace means also a changing profile of the student which an educational institution might expect. With workers needing constant retraining, knowledge seekers will no longer be confined to those twenty years or below. There is a new student group which consists of older individuals. Because they are more mature, they are expected to be more demanding; they would have a good idea of what kind of education they want. And because they are at that age where they would most likely have their own families, they would be looking for a way to retrain or go back to school without disrupting their family life. Another factor which contributes to a greater demand from adults for more education is longer life expectancy. This keeps individuals in the workplace longer.
All the factors I have mentioned give rise to a phenomenon that may have been a privilege or mere option to some people years ago but which now is considered a requirement not only to stay employed or to continue to be a productive citizen but to continue to have a fulfilled life. I refer to lifelong learning.
A further corollary to all these is that student numbers are increasing. We have to address no longer just the traditional student ages up to 21 or a bit more for those who take graduate education, but we have to be concerned as well with adult learners. And we have not even factored in the effect of simple increase in population. According to Sir John Daniels, the rise in population alone will require, globally, the putting up of one large university every week just to keep up with the present levels of availment. Add to this the demand for lifelong learning among adults and the demand from population groups previously marginalized due to poverty or geographic and cultural isolation and you have a mega-crisis facing education.
But it is not just number of learners which educational institutions have to worry about. There is also the question of the nature of the learner and the kind of education present-day learners need.
Those of us who have been teaching for over 20 years will tell you that students have changed. Some of us will say that Filipino students seem to be less inclined to read. But we should ask ourselves the question, "Do we in our teaching cultivate the habit of reading?" Most of our students do not have their own textbooks and the ratio of books in the library to number of students is embarrasingly low. Some of us will also say that Filipino learners with their exposure to comics and television will not learn well from text alone. Will they learn better from the tube? Dr. Natividad reports that his son when asked to evaluate a tele-lesson said that he does not like learning from the TV because the TV is meant for entertainment.
As agents of change, educational institutions must be cognizant of the change desired in their students or what they aim for them to become. We have to prepare our students to be productive citizens of this emerging global society. One of the skills frequently mentioned as vital is effective communication, preferably in more than one language. If you ask the businessmen in the Philippines, they would say that one of those languages should be English.
Since information and knowledge are the prime commodities in the global society, students must learn where and how to retrieve information and how to process data and information and transform these into knowledge. Students must also learn to decide what knowledge to absorb and what to ignore. They must learn how to gather data, to formulate hyphotheses, to test and refine them into theories or junk them altogether. They must be able to think critically, to analyze and synthesize. We certainly do not want to produce information junkies who just gather data, cruise the Internet for hours, and download reams of data. TS Eliot, made this point 60 years ago, long before the time of information highways, in his play The Rock:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge,
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Another important skill which citizens of our global village must have is the ability to learn independently. Individuals will increasingly be expected to take responsibility for and manage their own learning. They will increasingly need to learn outside the four walls of a classroom and learn less from traditional teachers but more from materials and other individuals. They may also do self-assessment, determining for themselves, based on their needs, and to their own satisfaction, if they learned enough and well. All these indicate that the learner will be expected to be highly motivated but more by an internal drive than by a teacher behind them swinging a stick or in front dangling a carrot.
A trait often mentioned as desirable in today's world and the future is the ability to work with a team. Increasingly, issues and concerns are becoming more complex requiring inputs from persons with varied expertise. Sometimes it is not even just a case of scientists from different fields needing to work together but scientists having to work with sociologists, anthropologists, artists, politicians, even. A team player is required not just in the hard court but in the work place where concerns are multidisciplinary and oftentimes multicultural in scope. Other personal traits which have been mentioned as desirable are principled or ethical, positive attitudes, keen sense of responsibility for self, nation, others and the world, and openmindedness in the face of differences in values, culture, opinion and, of course, color and creed.
Indeed there is so much being expected of present day educational institutions. Yet governments are not providing corresponding increases in funding. The pressure is for educational institutions to be more efficient. Diane Laurillard in her book Rethinking University Teaching (1993) writes that the "pressure is for financial input to go down and some measurable output to go up." And we must assume that output here should be measured not only in numbers but also in terms of quality of what use are thousands of holders of diplomas of only a handful would be able to hold jobs? (Data in Chemistry)
Another challenge that is coming from within the area of education is the progress in what we know about the learning process. Developments in the cognitive sciences which includes neurology, anthropology, linguistics, epistemology, have provided us with a better understanding about how humans process, store and retrieve information. One of the most talked about theories of learning today is the constructivist theory which proposes that the learners must be activity engaged in the construction of meaning or knowledge while bringing into the process their own purposes and ideas.
The constructivist perspective combines the didactive perspective which views the teacher as a presentor of knowledge and the discovery approach where the teacher is a provider of experiences. This perspective therefore alters our view of teaching. As Diane Laurillard contends, the business of teaching is less about imparting knowledge than about mediating learning.
Another challenge being posed on educational institutions is the accreditation being asked by individuals for learning acquired in the workplace, from non-traditional sources or even through informal means. Thus, in 1996, President Ramos through the initiative of the Commission on Higher Education, issued Executive Order No. 330 adopting the expanded tertiary education equivalency and accreditation program as an integral part of our educational system. The aim is to provide certification towards the awarding of academic credits, academic degree even, of knowledge or expertise acquired through various avenues. The challenge to educational institutions is the development of assessment, accreditation, evaluation and monitoring and credit banking schemes which would give credibility to the process.
Perhaps the most potent force for change in education today is technology specifically the developments in information and communication technology where products are improving at a fast pace even as costs are going down. These developments have allowed for cheaper, faster and more effective communication and information processing. These developments pose a challenge to education but also propose means of coping with other challenges. Technology is a multi-edged sword that challenges its wielder.
I'd like to quote several persons who have spoken or written about the different facets of technology and the different challenges its brings about.
Edward R. Murrow said of the radio, although his statement can very well apply to other technologies, "This instrument can teach. It can illustrate, yes and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that learners are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box." One challenge of technology lies in the application of human creativity to transform the wires and lights into teaching and learning activities.
The second challenge involving use of technology was beautifully articulated by our Vice Chancellor for Student Support Services, Dr. Paz Eulalia L. Saplala. Writing about the learning needs of the information generation, she said, "Like the sirens with their enigmatic song in mythology, the technologies beckon, tempt, lure, because they are new and exciting, innovative and challenging….not to respond to the siren's song is to be out of step, bound in traditional (sometimes dull) learning models." Which technology to use is a critical decision an educational institution must make. The sirens sing of the strengths and advantages of the technology. But we must also listen to another voice intoning their weaknesses and drawbacks. So, too, must we listen to the sober voice explaining the requirements for their use. And we must look at the technology not in the milieu of the siren but in our own context as a teaching institution - our students, our teachers, our organizations, and yes, our finances.
But in a developing country like the Philippines there is yet another challenge which technology brings about. This is the possibility that technology will in fact create another gap between the haves and have-nots. President Fidel V. Ramos, in his keynote address during the SEAMEO INNOTECH Conference in November 1997 on the Learning Society of the Future, warned of the creation of an "information aristocracy" referring to those who have the means to navigate the information highways. So President Ramos said, "This, my friends, is the challenge faced today by the knowledge builders of tomorrow: to use what can divide us to unite us; to use technology and knowledge not to get ahead of the other fellow, not to help him move up and forward. We must, in other words, bring technology to bear on human learning in a way that will enrich our common experience as a human family."
Technology among other things has brought about another challenge, threat even, to traditional providers of education. With knowledge being considered as a very important and a very high-demand commodity, many entrepreneurs are eyeing the business of education. The real competitors of an educational institutions these days are not the other schools, colleges or universities but the entrepreneurs from outside the academe. President Barry Munitz of the California State University which has 23 campuses and a third of a million students speaks of a scenario, "Someday the heads of Union Pacific Railroad, Hewlett-Packard and the US West phone company are going to appear at a press conference announcing they're entering the higher education business. They'll be in the governor’s office bidding for a contract and the governor will call me up and say, "Where's your bid?"
We only hope although we better do more than just hope that management guru Peter Drucker is wrong this time when he said, "Universities won't survive."
With that pronouncement, it almost looks like there is, after all, only one challenge to educational institutions and that is to survive. In one sector of our world, the biosphere, survival of a species is sometimes contingent on change. Change is now called for in our universities. Drucker added this to his pronouncement, "The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom." And let me go on to his next statement. He said, "Distance learning is coming on fast."
Yes, I wish to submit that one way the universities will survive the onslaught of the challenges to education we mentioned earlier is to change its traditional ways foremost of which is the traditional way it delivers education. Open and distance education provides an answer to many of the challenges
There are two main reasons why open and distance learning can answer many of the challenges to education. First, is that it can cope with large numbers. There are eleven open universities and distance education institutions in the world today which enroll more than three million students among them. Just to give you a better idea of their size, try to compare that situation with that of the Philippines which has more than 1400 colleges and universities but which enroll only two million students among them. The size of these distance education institutions have earned them the tag of mega-universities from Sir John Daniel, the head of one of these universities. They have the potential to enroll and teach the large number of students expected due to the increased demand for knowledge workers and the desire of an increasing number to remain knowledgeable.
The second major reason is that open and distance learning has the flexibility which allows it to fit many a learner's needs or circumstances. It is in fact the philosophy of open learning to provide learners greater control over the learning process, thus allowing them to learn what they need or want to learn at the time, place and pace that suits them. Individuals previously unable to study because they are not able nor willing to leave their jobs for extended periods to attend classes are addressed by distance education. There are many schools and universities who offer classes in the evenings or on weekends but there are others who are too far from the campuses to be able to afford the cost and the time to travel to attend these classes. Distance education is most suitable for them.
One example which we can site is our Diploma/Master in Social Work. Many social workers in the field need and want to take graduate studies in social work. However, there are no universities outside Metro Manila that offer these programs. This is a very good example of a program which should be made available by distance education. Our Master in Public Management is another program very much needed by those in local government units and others holding public offices. We only have two learning centers for this program. Our students at the Diliman Learning Center come from all over Luzon and those at the Iloilo Learning Center come from Visayas and Mindanao. We have more than 100 students enrolled in our first semester of offering. This is already 50% of the total number of students enrolled in the residential masters program at the College of Public Administration, UP Diliman.
But to my mind the most important contribution of open and distance learning is the effect it has on the individual who undertakes it. It requires learners to take responsibility for their own learning. It fosters independent learning and mandates for students to be actively engaged in the learning process. Products of open and distance education are therefore better equipped for a world where lifelong learning is a must and no longer an option. As a matter of fact, this is a characteristic which employers find attractive among products of distance education institutions.
Now some people will take the view that Filipinos are by nature not independent learners and therefore open and distance learning is not suitable for them. On the other hand, I wish to argue that independence of mind is more an environmentally induced trait rather than being genetically transmitted. As parents or adults taking charge of the young, we tend to be overprotective of children and we do not encourage them to be on their own. It is time we do because independence of mind fosters creative thinking and autonomous behavior, characteristics that we said earlier are important for the global citizen.
It is for this reason that one of the objectives of the first undergraduate program of UPOU, the Associate in Arts program has as one of its objectives the development of self-motivated independent learning skills.
But teaching to foster independent and active learning is not easy. In our universities there are many subject matter experts but few who are also learning mediation experts. In distance education this problem is overcome by creating a course team led by the subject matter expert and an instructional designer (this is the learning mediation expert).
The instructional designer plays an invaluable role in helping subject matter experts organize and structure a course, set realistic learning objectives, identify the entry level of learners, determine realistic study goals, select appropriate learning activities, design student assessment procedures and most important of all, examine the congruence of all the components.
Another expert who may be brought in is the media specialist who assists in the selection of the appropriate media and technology and determines how to take full advantage of the features of the chosen media.
In our case, at UPOU, we have our OASIS (Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services) which organizes our course teams (we call them quality circles) which in addition to the subject matter expert, instructional designer, and media specialist, includes an editor for language and a reader which is another subject matter expert.
The teacher in distance education is therefore a team, nay, it can even be argued that actually the teacher is the instructional material developed jointly by the team. Indeed instructional packages can be so designed that they are self-learning, requiring little or no assistance from anyone. Bates (1995) has called these packages "stored teaching" or a "teacher in state of suspended animation". Using what is known about how learning takes place, instructional packages can be so designed to mediate learning, in other words to be teachers. And the duplication of these instructional packages would be like cloning a good teacher, thus producing as many teachers as there are students, if necessary.
ODE also has the potential of cultivating the other desirable characteristics of a global citizen, especially that of working with people with different cultural backgrounds. With current technology, in particular, the Internet and the World Wide Web, institutions can offer their courses beyond the perimeter of their physical campus. And, on the other hand, students can take course from institutions located overseas. For example, one of our research associates just finished a course on networked learning offered by the University of British Columbia. And we have three who are enrolled in a course administered by The University of Maryland and Oldenburg University with contributions of experts on distance education from four countries: Prof. Bjorn Holmberg (Sweden), Prof. Otto Peters (Germany), Dr. Gary Miller (USA) and Dr. Tony Bates (Canada). They hold class discussions in cyberspace with classmates located in different countries - Portugal, Australia, Peru, Latvia, Slovenia, Sweden, Estonia and many others.
ODE fosters the ability to work with others belonging to different organizations or culture not only among its students but also among its faculty and staff. In the UP Open University, we bring together faculty from all the units of the university and even from other universities here and abroad (DLSU, ADMU, UVic) to develop our programs and course materials. Then for our course delivery, we work with other higher education institutions, public and private, other government agencies like DECS, DOH, Civil Service Commission, and non-government institutions like the Bayanihan Foundation. We set-up and manage learning centers with them. It is in these learning centers where we have registration, tutorials and examinations. These alliances are mutually enriching for a variety of reasons for our faculty and staff and those in the other organizations.
Technology allows ODE institutions to meet their objectives. In UPOU we try to be very careful with the use of technology especially in the delivery of our courses. We may be urged to use the television as a medium but this means that our students would have to watch the TV at the designated broadcast hours or have the facility to tape the lessons. We are urged to deliver our courses online but do our teachers which are the majority of our students have access to computers, a telephone and an Internet service provider? Even among the students in our Diploma in Computer Science program, only 70% of our students have those requirements. Many urge us to put our courses on CD-ROM. This is not a problem for us; it is our students who would have the problem reading the CD-ROM.
Our courses are print-based to a large extent. Print is still the most flexible technology available, requiring almost nothing but eyesight to use - no cables, no power supply requirements except the energy required to flick the pages, it is switched on by simply lifting the cover, and very portable. I foresee print to be the mainstay technology for most of our courses for a long time still.
While distance education is here proposed as the answer to the many challenges bearing on education today, distance education itself brings with it other challenges. The biggest challenge facing DE is quality assurance. This is the question which is foremost in many people's minds.
The question of quality is answered by DEIs at two levels. One is the development of course materials and the other is the support given to students for their learning. The UPOU is able to tap faculty of all UP units for course development and this is a major reason for putting UPOU within the UP System rather than as a separate university. We then organize quality circles or course teams as we discussed earlier.
The success of the student and the quality of learning in distance education is also determined by the learning support provided to the student. In other countries, where telecommunications facility is advanced, students are able to call the faculty or tutors. In the UPOU, we provide monthly tutorials to our students utilizing in many cases, faculty of other colleges and universities as tutors. The tutors are also trained not only in how to manage tutorials which is not the same as giving lectures but also in the content of the course. The use of the Internet for student support holds a good potential and is more flexible in the sense that the tutorial does not require the students and the tutor to be directly connected i.e., engaged at the same time or in current lingo, in a synchronous mode. And of course the Internet can also be used by the learner to access information sources and data bases.
Producing quality instructional materials and providing effective and efficient student support services are two main activities of the UP Open University. These are two other ingredients for achieving quality in distance education: logistics and research. Logistics means getting those materials produced and distributed, getting student work corrected with adequate feedback and returned to students, proctoring examinations, and even just registering these students. I know our Cash Division's nightmare is keeping track of payments coming from PNB branches all over the country where our students pay their fees.
Research will allow us to evaluate and improve our materials and the services we provide students. We also need to do research on the efficiency of our procedures. This is the reason that one of the offices which we will soon organize is a research and evaluation office. In addition to doing research to improve our operations we also wish to contribute to the body of knowledge about open learning and distance education.
Last year when the Chancellors gave our annual reports to the Board of Regents, one of the Regents asked us what we considered as our biggest challenge. For UPOU, my answer was the challenge of coping with misconceptions about open and distance learning. There is the misconception that it is poor quality. But really there is an underlying misconception here also that residential education which is largely attendance in lectures and seminars is quality education. Admittedly there are excellent lecturers but even more in number are those who do not come to class prepared, those who just cannot organize for lecture what is very clear in their heads, or those who lecture from books which when may have been written in a very logical order but which is not necessarily the psychological order for learning and there are many other horror stories in classrooms about professors who terrorize their students.
There is also the misconception that the quality of education is measured by the quality of entering students. Thus open universities which have open admissions systems with some only requiring a birth certificate as proof of age, are necessarily of poor quality. But my argument is that while we, in open universities, throw our doors wide open for students to enter the doors leading to certification is of the same size.
But there is also a misconception among students that learning by distance education is easy. They learn quickly that they need to be very disciplined, very organized, very diligent and resourceful. This is the reason that drop-out rates are very high in the first term of a program. This is also the reason why counseling and student support are critical during this period.
Then there is the misconception also about how distance education ought to be done so that many who attempt it end up giving what are actually extension classes. We are seeking to remedy this by working with the Commission on Higher Education and I expect we shall be given the mandate to help correct this misconceptions with our designation by CHED as the National Center of Excellence for Distance Education and Open Learning. So this year, we start to fulfilling our role as leader by organizing the First National Conference on Open and Distance Learning in September of this year. We are also starting to reach out to other universities which offer or want to offer distance education programs. Just last week we conducted a two-day workshop for faculty and staff of the Central Luzon State University.
Sir John Daniels who heads the UK Open University challenges the misconceptions about quality education or what he calls the traditional measures of quality. These are age (older universities are better), about admission criteria, lots of personnel contact between students and teachers and plenty of resources. Sir John is proud to put up the UK Open University as an example of a university which has none of the four criteria yet has distinction in UK for its quality programs. The UKOU ranks number 10 among the 101 universities in Britain. And it is significant that in two subjects, Geology and Music, UKOU enrolls the most number of students compared to the other universities. This is significant because we could not traditionally think that these two subjects which require much practical work would be popular distance education subjects. But an even more startling result is that part-time students in Scottish Universities rated the UKOU high as "Friendly Atmosphere". Indeed the ratings of the UKOU as a higher education institution serves as encouragement to all of us.
At age three, the UP Open University has made great strides. We should judge our accomplishments by the objective set when the UPOU was established.
On the first objective which is to provide opportunities for alternative access to quality higher education by offering baccalaureate and post baccalaureate degree programs and non-formal courses by distance education. To date we are offering 13 degree programs: five post baccalaureate diploma programs, three ladderized diploma/masters programs, four masters program and one PhD program. In the second semester of this school year we had a total _____ students taking degree programs. They are distributed in twenty four learning centers all over the country.
In July we shall offer our first undergraduate program, the Associate in Arts which will lead to a full baccalaureate program in communication and the humanities. We also have non-degree courses: two on entrepreneurship. There are two others where the learning are already complete and are just awaiting the actual offering of the courses: Introduction to Environmental Education and Processing and Handling of Surimi and Surimi-Based Products.
The access UPOU provide is evident from the distribution of our learning centers and from the profile of our students. Practically all of our students have jobs. Either their employers would not allow them to take an extended leave of absence or they cannot afford to quit their jobs to study. And yet they need to take further studies in order to advance in their careers. And there are those who would not even accept a scholarship to undertake full time studies because it would mean being separated from their families. We have a student who is a prisoner. His sister attends the tutorials and tapes them for him to listen to. His sister says that his studies with UPOU is practically what keeps him sane inside the prison.
On objective 2: Develop a system of continuing education for sustaining professional growth and improving technical skills especially for those who cannot leave their jobs or homes for full time studies.
On objective 3: Contribute towards upgrading the quality of residential instruction in the university and the educational system of the country. When we first stated these objectives we received comments that we appear to be assuming that residential instruction in the university learn something to be desired. My response is that there is always room for improvement. Faculty members who have worked, trained in course writing and instructional design, have admitted that they have become better teachers in their residential classes. They are more conscious about learning objectives and how these can be attained and more careful in the construction of their examinations. Our contribution to the improvement of the educational system of the country lies in at least two areas. Many of our tutors are faculty members of other higher education institutions. Their involvement in our programs make them better teachers in their own classes because of the training they receive and the interaction with UP faculty. The other contribution lies in the instructional materials we prepare. Our aim is to make this available to all colleges and universities. In this way, we are in effect having our UP faculty teach in the other schools since we claim that these learning packages are teachers in suspended animation, activated as soon as learners use them. This in fact the motivation of the Metrobank Foundation in supporting the course development of our undergraduate program.
