Toward Open Learning In Developing Countries: Starting With Schools

Stephen Anzalone

Marshall McLuhan's notion of the 'global village' has been with us for decades. It offers us a useful metaphor for describing current trends in the organization of production, social life, communication, and education. The concept of a global village, however, represents a warmer and more benign expression of globalization than we have seen so far. A village is a social formation of modest scale. People in villages share interactions that are personal and proximate. Villages are largely undifferentiated in terms of space - there are no ghettos, no different neighborhoods for the rich and the poor. A village is a place where things are close, and distance is not a barrier to social interaction. Presumably, there is no such thing as distance education in the global village.

Regrettably, we seem to be headed toward global urban sprawl rather than the global village. The landscape appears bewildering and unbounded. There are rich and poor neighborhoods where the possibilities for social life and individual development are very different. Social interactions are largely impersonal and often contentious. Barriers toward education and lifelong learning are multifaceted, ubiquitous, and formidable. The information superhighway runs around the world but connects just a fraction of the world's population. Hundreds of millions of people could not read the information on their computer screens even if they owned them.

UNESCO's Learning Without Frontiers program provides a perspective of collaboration to respond to the educational challenges of the global village in its present manifestation of social inequity. One of the key features of this perspective is the development of more open environments for learning. There is a visionary quality to the idea of open learning environments - as referred to in the contributions by Visser and Jain elsewhere in this collection - as something qualitatively different from schools and training institutions as we now know them. And the spread of information and communication technology is helping many of us envision the practical potential and possibly inevitable proliferation of open learning environments to address all kinds of learning needs in all parts of the world.

Although the proliferation of opportunities for open learning will accelerate in the years ahead, they will not replace schools, particularly for children and adolescents and most certainly not in developing countries. The frontiers of the school wall provide security for the young and peace of mind for their parents. Schools provide important socialization functions. (Admittedly, not all of the socialization that goes on in schools is positive.) Developing countries have invested heavily in the universalization of primary schools, and there is good evidence that attending school has many social and private benefits - especially for girls. However imperfect schools are as environments for learning, they will be with us long into the future.

We believe that primary and secondary schools in developing countries can be assisted to provide more open learning environments. We believe that "openness" can be achieved in a kind of four-dimensional framework. These dimensions are not distinct categories, and development activities may be located in one or more dimensions at the same time. The four dimensions are as follows:

We discuss each of these dimensions below.

Opening The Environment To Improve Educational Quality

Visits to schools in developing countries show that learning environments are typically ones where teachers and students are locked into interactions that are not conducive to effective learning. The dynamics of the teaching-learning process are marked by strategies that view students as passive recipients of poorly organized and de-contextualized pieces of curricular information. Educational objectives, to the extent they are explicit, tend to call for getting students to memorize this information, and the road to memorization is having students pronounce correctly, repeat, or copy the information given. It is infrequent to find students being asked to interpret information, to think critically or creatively, to predict or elaborate, to solve a problem, or to engage in any number of activities to assist students in making meaning of the information before them. The orienting stimuli in the instructional process are usually boring and devoid of relevance to the lives of students. As a result, there is little engagement in the learning process. The quality of education, judged against almost any definition, is low.

One of the most successful approaches to improving educational quality in the face of conditions encountered in schools in developing countries is that of interactive radio instruction (IRI). IRI is a methodology that has evolved through twenty years of experience in more than a dozen countries. It differs significantly from other forms of radio instruction because (a) radio plays a primary rather than supplementary instructional role and (b) lessons are designed to follow proven principles of learning, are subjected to systematic formative evaluation, and are developed to engage learners in active learning. Interactive radio instruction audio programmes are delivered by radio or cassettes with accompanying printed materials. Interactive radio instruction has shown that it consistently and significantly influences learners' performance in a variety of educational subjects.

Interactive radio instruction was first developed in the early seventies by the Nicaraguan Radio Mathematics project. During the past twenty years, interactive radio instruction has been used to teach mathematics, language, science, health, environmental studies, civic education, child development, and adult basic education. Interactive radio lessons to teach English developed recently in the Republic of South Africa are now being broadcast nationally, and efforts are underway to use IRI to teach mathematics in that country. This experience is described in the paper by Gordon Naidoo in this collection. For a discussion of other IRI experience see Moulton (1994).

Opening The Environment To Improve Access/Equity

The second dimension in making learning more open has to do with access/equity. Too often, various factors impinge on a young person's chances to attend school. Especially affected are those who must work for a living, persons living in remote or underpopulated communities, girls, and various ethnic groups. It is often the case that distances to schools are too long, the school schedule is incompatible with work at home or a job, or other constraints make it difficult to attend regular school programs. Developing countries are showing greater interest in exploring distance education methods to reach these groups of learners. There are also instances where distance is not an issue and school facilities may be opened in such a way as to permit greater access/equity for those unable to attend regular school programs.

This kind of openness will be especially important for countries hoping to expand the cycle of basic education to include junior secondary education. There is a number of examples of attempts to open up secondary education by establishing study centers or making alternative use of existing facilities (Murphy, 1995). A particularly interesting example is Indonesia's SMP Terbuka (Sadiman, Seligman, and Rahardjo, 1995). This model makes possible junior secondary education for students who would not otherwise take part because of geographic or socio-economic obstacles. Students are attached to study centers near their homes, which are linked to a nearby secondary school. Students engage in self­study and group learning, interact with teacher aides, and receive occasional face-to-face instruction from teachers at the nearby secondary school. There is flexibility built into scheduling to make it possible for young people who work to attend school. The SMP Terbuka model provides a good example of how greater access to education may be achieved by a strategy that opens the use of existing resources to new educational purposes.

Opening The Environment To Expand The Range Of Resources For Learning

There is much that schools in developing countries can do to open their windows to the world - to enrich the learning process by going beyond the resources for learning that are typically available in the classroom. We see striking examples of learners in schools throughout the world making use of the Internet and other electronic networks to connect to sources of information not available in the classroom or to work collaboratively in joint projects or information exchange with learners in other schools. Such activities are excellent routes to developing communication, information gathering, and problem solving skills and providing practice in dealing with multiple perspectives.

Computers and electronic connections from schools in developing countries to outside resources are likely to become more common in the future. Already some developing countries - Chile is a good example - are making good use of computers to enrich learning (Potashnik, 1996). For the near future, access to computers in schools will remain out of reach for many. But there are possibilities for opening and enriching the learning process through a wider range of learning resources that are available to schools in poor communities. Adoption of "best practices" for teaching and learning will make learning environments more receptive to strategies and resources that go beyond the lecture/recitation/seatwork paradigm that characterizes so much of traditional teaching in schools. The benefits of inquiry, discovery, and group projects need not involve electronic mediation or expensive resources - they can be achieved through thoughtful organization and resources that can be found in the community. Students in Costa Rica, for example, learned much about science, the environment, and the local economy by getting outside the classroom and tapping the knowledge of community members (Vargas, 1995). Similarly, in schools where reading materials are scarce, effective learning materials may be generated that draw upon the experience of students and their parents. "Experience stories" are part of best practice even in schools where reading materials are abundant. There are other examples of how learning can be assisted by making more deliberate and imaginative use of what is available. What is required, of course, is a greater openness to what constitutes learning and what constitutes resources that might assist learning.

Opening The Environment To Provide Stronger Learner Control And Linkages For Learning

An important dimension of openness in learning environments that is achievable by schools in developing countries right now has to do with affording learners stronger control and linkages for learning. What this involves is ensuring that students are provided the opportunities for learning in such a way that it will assist them to function as well as they can as lifelong learners when they leave school. Unfortunately, most schools in developing countries do not have this as a goal. Education is seen as years in school, with content broken up into bits to be hammered by teachers into students for demonstration on examinations.

As a result, students leave school having had few chances to develop a meta-cognitive awareness of how to direct their own learning as they approach the challenges of work and daily life. Few have had the opportunity of learning in group-supported rather than solitary endeavor. Few have had the opportunities to make even the most basic choices of what to learn or how to learn it. Most have memorized (and probably forgotten) facts about democracy; few have had the opportunity to practice it. Again, this kind of opening of the learning environment can occur through a commitment to best practice that can be found throughout the world. Colombia's Escuela Nueva (Torres, 1995) provides a good example of how schools may contribute to a greater participation of students in the management of the schools. Such opportunities to practice and observe democracy and engage in "real time" problem solving will strengthen the chances for students to become active and effective life-long learners.

Conclusion

Schools in developing countries will continue to be important places for the provision of education in the years ahead. With care and hard work, they might also become places where learning takes place more effectively and with greater regularity than at present. This will involve an opening of the learning environment found in schools. Such an opening can draw upon successful strategies that (a) "lift the roof" of the school to let enter high quality educational programs delivered through media, especially radio, (b) "open the doors" of existing facilities to make it possible for more to attend school, (c) "open the windows" of classrooms to the use of a wider range of educational resources, and (d) "knock down the barriers" in the classroom that prevent the development of learner control and linkages to learning skills. Classrooms that are open for learning will contribute to realizing a global village that can provide a decent home for all.

References

Moulton, J. (1994). Interactive radio instruction: Broadening the definition. Washington, DC. Education Development Center.

Murphy, P. (1995). The challenges of open secondary education: Demand and models. In S. Anzalone (Ed.). Multichannel learning: Connecting all to education. Washington, DC. Education Development Center.

Potashnik, M. (1996). Chile's learning network. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Education and Technology Series.

Sadiman, S., Seligman, D., & Rahardjo, R. (1995). SMP Terbuka: The Open Junior Secondary School: An Indonesian case study. Paris, France: UNESCO.

Torres, R. (1995). Alternatives in formal education: Colombia's Escuela Nueva programme. UNICEF. Non-formal approaches and universal primary education. New York, NY: UNICEF.

Vargas. G. (1995). Multichannel approaches in the multigrade classroom. In S. Anzalone (Ed.). Multichannel learning: Connecting all to education. Washington, DC. Education Development Center.

Top of document    ICDE Article Index  LWF Documents  LWF Activities LWF Links