Regional Clearinghouse and Network for Media Training for Distance Education Recommended |
The Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre (AMIC), a non-profit organization, was formed in 1971 with the support of the Government of Singapore and Friedeich-Ebert-Stiftung, an independent foundation in the Federal Republic of Germany. It cooperates with governments and national bodies as well as international organizations like UNESCO, to provide mass communication documentation, research, training, publishing, and mass media project to members in the Asia-Pacific region.
AMIC began as a clearinghouse for information on mass communication in the Asia-Pacific region and as a link in an international chain of documentation centres that collect and disseminate information on mass media. Its documentation unit complies, annotates, abstracts and edits bibliographies on mass communication in Asia for dissemination around the world through its regular and periodic publications. To assist communicators, AMIC conducts regular workshops, seminars, conferences and training courses on mass communication and allied subjects in different countries. They focus mainly on development communication, current communication issues, and the new information technology and its relevance to the region.
In a recent seminar on Training-Needs in the Use of Media for Distance Education in Asia, held in Singapore from June 8-11, 1978, eminent distance educators and media professionals in Asia recommended the establishment of a regional clearinghouse for information on training resources in the use of media for distance education and a pan-Asian training network.
Participants felt that the clearinghouse and network would help alleviate some of the more urgent and pressing training needs in the region by facilitating exchanges of information and personnel. In a report adopted at the end of the seminar, organized by the AMIC with support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), twenty-two participants from ten Asian countries, and from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, stressed the importance of distance education training for administrators, educationists, and media professionals alike.
"The operation of the academic as well as administrative set up of a distance education system is very complex. Mediated instruction presupposed in a distance education system requires that the teacher work in a team to produce instructional material. This places the teacher in a new milieu. Similarly, media people who may have had media experiences elsewhere find production of instructional material a task that requires new aptitudes. Hence the need for training," the report said.
Three working groups constituted at the end of the seminar catalogued the training needs in the use of different media for distance education in the region but stressed the primacy of print media in their deliberations. They recommended that data be collected to quantify and prioritize the regional training needs for personnel involved in various aspects of management, administration and planning of distance education systems, as well as academics, course writers, media professionals, evaluators, and so forth.
Inaugurating the seminar, Mr. Sean Brady, Canadian High Commissioner to Singapore, emphasized the importance of efficient distance education training programs, since "the effectiveness of the learning depends on the clear understanding of the vicissitudes of the medium, whether the mode be print, audio or visual."
Mr. Brady said that, while the importance of education in national and individual development had long been recognized, "the corollary to make that education accessible was not." Distance education was an innovative way to expand the reach of education, he told the participants, adding that their deliberations "will set the course and determine the standards that will come to be applied in the next phase of the development of distance education."
In his welcoming remarks, AMIC Secretary-General Mr. Vijay Menon outlined the "staggering" dimensions of Asia's educational problems. "Three thousand million people, two-thirds of the world population, live in Asia," Mr. Menon said. "Nearly 700 million people were added to the Asian population in the last 15 years and it is estimate that 800 million more will have been added by the year 2000_.Despite a doubling of enrollment between 1960 and 1982, and an eightfold increase in public expenditure between 1970 and 1984, nearly 400 million in the age- group 5-24 in Asia remained outside the educational system."
Underscoring the importance of the seminar, Mr. Menon said, while Asian countries have turned to distance education in a big way - among the continents, Asia has the largest number of students enrolled in distance education systems - there is a severe shortage of trained personnel.
The nature of the training program was the theme of the keynote speech by Mr. Kevin Smith, President of the International Council for Distance Education. Training programs in the use of media for distance education should attempt not only to deliver the message but also to provide what Mr. Smith called a "massage," or human touch.
Distance education is a "major innovation for the majority of teachers and academics in several ways: in terms of lifestyle, in teaching methodology and in new areas of responsibility and accountability," he said. The "efficacy of any technological medium in providing the message and the massage" depends upon the users.
"Consequently, any training programme for staff and students ideally should provide opportunities for exposure to the media before new technologies become an integral part of the educational process," he asserted.
At the seminar, representatives from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Thailand outlined the training needs in the use of media for distance education in their countries. The seminar also discussed program planning and curriculum development and the use of print, audio, video, broadcasting and telecommunications for distance education.
Mr. G. Dhanarajan, of Disted Services Sdn Bhd in Malaysia, told the seminar that when conventional institutions turned to distance education "the traditional methods of planning and delivering our teaching suffered some severe shocks in the form of failures, drop outs and other innumerable teaching/learning difficulties_.These difficulties stem from the fact that delivering education to home based, part-time learners is a new teaching trick which has to be learned and needed to be planned." He asked distance educators to give thought to the educational purpose of a program and the selection, organization and evaluation of the learning experience while making curriculum planning decisions for distance education.
Janet Jenkins, of the International Extension College in the United Kingdom, also stressed the importance of course planning in staff development. "The teaching materials have to replace the teacher in more than subject-matter alone. The texts must be designed in such a way that they provide a substitute for dialogue_.This is not just a matter of writing style; materials have to be planned to stimulate the student to interact with the tutor, text and other media. That is, course units should be activity-centered and based on problem solving rather than passive reading, listening or viewing," she said.
The benefits of audio - "a highly used and undervalued media in distance education" - were underscored by Mr. Dan Power of the Open Learning Institute in Canada. He listed several pedagogical advantages of audio-casettes, which, he maintained, are cost-effective and offer "maximum learner control over the media."
In addition to observers from Hong Kong, Jordan, and Singapore, several leading distance education institutes in Asia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia participated in the seminar. The list of participants hailed from the following institutions:
Readers interested in upcoming AMIC-sponsored seminars and conferences or in becoming members should contact Vijay Menon, Secretary General, at the address below for more information.
For more information, please contact:
Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre 39 Newton Road Singapore 1130 Republic of Singapore Tel: 251-5106/7 Telex: RS55524 AMICSI Cable: AMICINFO