A small guidance project that is instituted in a small domain and that is specifically designed to be tested in this domain, in order to detect and correct any problems with the project, before being expanded to a larger domain.
Published in Chapter:
Issues with Distance Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
Richard Millham (Catholic University of Ghana, Ghana)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 6
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-014-1.ch109
Abstract
What are some of the issues relevant to distance education in sub-Saharan Africa? Some of these issues relate to the ‘push’ factors of distance education in sub-Saharan Africa, which include overcrowded tertiary institutions, the need for training in a globalised high-technology world, and the problem of government funding. These ‘push’ factors seem to match the alleged advantages of distance education such as its nonrequirement of residential facilities and its ability to accommodate a flexible number of students at a low cost. It was hoped that new technology, such as computer-based training and the Internet, would provide a medium to which individualised and flexible learning materials could be supplied and which, through online interaction, a form of support for distance education learning could be provided. In this article, we focus on the particular distance education issues in sub-Saharan Africa, such as the lack of government funding and the lack of affordability by potential distance education students, as well as reasons why new technology, such as computerbased learning and online courses which are popular in the developed world, are impractical in developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa. A case study of a sub- Saharan country, Ghana, is provided to demonstrate why various distance education programmes have failed and why information and communications technology (ICT)-based training, despite its promising future, lacks the supporting infrastructure in Ghana that it requires in order to operate effectively.