The Management of Distance Learning Systems, Greville Rumble, Paris: UNESCO, 1992, 108 pages. |
VOL. 8, No. 2, 80-82
The forty-third under the "fundamentals of educational planning" series put out by UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning, this booklet is written primarily for educational planners and administrators interested in distance education.
Its author, Greville Rumble, is one of the most prolific and best known writers in distance education and a good choice as a contributor to the series. Although he has had some line management responsibilities, most recently as Regional Director of the East Anglian Region of the Open University of the United Kingdom, most of his experience has been in planning and institutional research, and this is reflected in the presentation and content of the book.
It is no mean task to cover all aspects of the management of distance learning systems in 85 pages of text, and Mr. Rumble has done a creditable job in the circumstances. The ground covered is familiar to practitioners in the field and much of the writing is descriptive - the scope of distance education around the world, the varieties of institution, media and instructional strategy, and the fundamental requirements of any such system. This makes for rather dry reading.
Nevertheless, the author does make a real attempt to present the issues and choices facing anyone embarking on the establishment or development of a distance learning system. He distinguishes among three major models that he calls, respectively, institution-centred, person- centred, and group-or community-centred. The former, best suited to large student numbers and characterized by dedicated open universities, has traditionally been behaviouristic in outlook and is less easily combined with the other two than they are with each other. Each model is depicted graphically by a "rich picture" that may be helpful to some readers in distinguishing among the alternatives.
Perhaps Rumble's most important point, one repeated throughout the text, is the importance of anticipating from the outset the size and scope of the distance learning operation contemplated, so that its parameters are well suited to the intended outcomes. For example, a pilot project with a strong orientation to the individual student and highly interactive technological support may be very successful on a small scale but quite an inappropriate indicator of how the institution would perform if its student numbers grew to the scale of a large open university.
Rumble sees the key management issue for an established distance teaching institution to be the need to resolve the inevitable tensions between production/distribution requirements on the one hand and the provision of high quality student services on the other. This is fairly well presented in the concluding chapter that, in presenting a concise overview of the booklet's central arguments, might have been more effectively located at the beginning of the text.
The book is written in a very matter-of-fact way and should thus not be recommended to anyone not already interested in distance education. Its format of offering a single paragraph to so many aspects of institutional management is too superficial to entice interest in the neophyte or to offer new insights to experienced managers in the field. It does provide, however, a fairly comprehensive overview of the variables that should be considered in building distance learning systems and reflects the key issues well. Rumble's emphasis on strategic planning and on some of the tensions experienced in management provide an important antidote to the tendency for so many recent converts to distance learning to view it as an inexpensive and efficient panacea for all the ills facing our traditional educational systems. His background in institutional research also allows him to provide extensive and useful checklists of factors to consider and questions to ask, a perspective that should serve "users" of the book very well.
A small booklet such as this cannot begin to provide in-depth assessments of the key management issues, but it might have benefited from less of a tendency to ensure that all bases were covered and the inclusion of more anecdotal and case study material, which would add to its interest level. Given the almost inevitable oversights (for example, copyright issues are not even mentioned in the discussion about in-house versus external course development), this reviewer would have preferred a more thorough discussion of what Rumble believes to be the key issues facing a manager in distance education at the expense of some of the writing on organizational and budgeting parameters.
On balance, however, Rumble's booklet has achieved its fundamental objectives of ensuring that educational planners and administrators take into consideration a broad range of issues and requirements before they get too directly involved in the design and development of distance learning systems. Our institutions would be well served if more planners and managers would heed its central lessons.