Seeking the barefoot technologist. A report of a workshop on distance teaching and rural development held by the International Extension College at Dartington Hall, Devon, England, 3-9 September 1977
Anonymous
IEC Broadsheets on Distance Learning, International Extension College 13: 53
1978
Document Number: 501081
This workshop was arranged to pool experience on distance teaching for rural development, examining regional and national experience, and then how that experience could be applied to new educational projects. This report is in four parts: first, an account is given of the issues seen as the basis for setting up the workshop, based largely on an IEC background paper prepared for the workshop, and on the opening session. It includes brief descriptions of the growing importance of distance teaching, its quality, range of uses, and examples such as farm forums, radio campaigns and radio schools. In discussion the emphasis shifted from concern with problems of making educational materials at a centre, to work in the field. Four important consequences of this shift concern: (1) evaluations: if a programme changes according to its participants' needs, it cannot be evaluated in terms of its original goals; (2) co-ordination: the more a programme is decentralized, the greater become the problems of co-ordination; (3) motivation: people's interest needs to be kept, and they need to progress through several short-term curricula so that their end knowledge is greater than the sum of the parts of the course; (4) scale: how to work with the trend towards decentralization, which was welcomed, and at the same time work effectively on a scale which grapples with the major educational problems of rural areas. The combination of mass media with face-to-face learning was seen as a major means of achieving the aims. Projects still at the planning stage were discussed, using current experience in Dominica, Jamaica, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania, to determine how new approaches to distance teaching and rural development could best be spread between the continents to those needing the knowledge.