Distance Education

ISSN: 0158-7919 (Print) 1475-0198 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdie20

Reflection on the “new dynamics” of distance

education: an interview with Sir John Daniel

Colin Latchem

To cite this article: Colin Latchem (2012) Reflection on the “new dynamics” of distance
education: an interview with Sir John Daniel, Distance Education, 33:3, 421-428, DOI:
10.1080/01587919.2012.723161

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Distance Education
Vol. 33, No. 3, November 2012, 421–428

REFLECTION
Reflection on the “new dynamics” of distance education: an
interview with Sir John Daniel
Colin Latchem*

The author speaks with Sir John Daniel (outgoing President and CEO of the
Commonwealth of Learning).

Introduction
Sir John Daniel’s term as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Common-
wealth of Learning (COL) ended on May 31, 2012. His successor is Professor Asha
Kanwar, the former Vice-President.
Readers of Distance Education will know of Sir John’s work at the Télé-université
(Directeur des Études, 1973–1977), Athabasca University (Vice-President for Learning
Services, 1978–1980), Concordia University (Vice-Rector, Academic, 1980–1984),
Laurentian University (President, 1984–1990), the UK Open University (Vice-Chancel-
lor, 1990–2001), and UNESCO (Assistant Director-General for Education, 2001–2004).
Among Sir John’s 300+ publications are his books Mega-universities and
Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (1996) and Mega-
schools, Technology and Teachers: Achieving Education for All (2010). He was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to higher education in 1994 and holds
31 honorary doctorates from universities in 17 countries. On the eve of his depar-
ture from COL, Sir John was interviewed by Colin Latchem.

Interview
You have been President of the Commonwealth of Learning for 8 years and prior
to that you were Assistant Director-General for Education with UNESCO. Where
do you see the greatest needs for open and distance learning (ODL) in the develop-
ing world and how, and how well, do you feel these needs are being met?
Today the greatest needs for ODL in formal education are at the secondary level
and there is a huge opportunity to expand its use in the very diverse field of nonfor-
mal education. More ODL in higher education is still required, although earlier pre-
dictions of an additional 80 million students in higher education by 2025 are being
revised downwards with China slowing enrolment growth as a matter of policy and
India struggling to cope with demand. However, the expansion of ODL at this level
is well launched. The number of open universities continues to grow and nearly all
traditional universities seem to be adding ODL options. Although many universities
are making a mess of such dual-mode initiatives, this is not for want of information
and research evidence on how to do it properly. Many universities seem to be
engaging with ODL in order to be fashionable rather than because of any real

*E-mail: clatchem@iinet.net.au

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422 C. Latchem

conviction. At first the holdouts tried to scorn ODL as substandard, but with presti-
gious universities (some of which lost big money in abortive e-learning ventures a
decade ago) trying again, this stance is now less frequent. With the squeeze on
higher education financing there is an opportunity to use ODL to make institutions
more cost-effective. However, if they want to go this route, universities will need to
face up to the need to make significant changes to corporate organization and aca-
demic roles in order to offer ODL successfully.
Nevertheless, the most crying need for ODL in formal education is to expand
secondary schooling. During my time at UNESCO from 2001 to 2004, I had the
task of leading the global campaign for Universal Primary Education (UPE) by pro-
viding some coordination to the efforts of ministries of education, the World Bank,
UNICEF, and national development agencies. Although there are still important
pockets of children without any opportunity for quality primary schooling in coun-
tries like India, Nigeria, and Pakistan, very significant progress has been made.
Some developing countries achieved in a decade an expansion of schooling that
had taken today’s rich countries close to a century in earlier times.
Oddly, however, governments and development agencies were largely unpre-
pared for the success of their campaign for UPE. In my book Mega-schools, Tech-
nology and Teachers: Achieving Education for All (Daniel, 2010) I quoted a 2006
estimate that there were 400 million children between the ages of 12 and 17 who
were not receiving secondary schooling (Binder, 2006). I doubt that the figure has
dropped much since then. These needs are so huge that all possible means must be
deployed to meet them. ODL is one of those means and it has the major advantage
that it can be deployed at scale at low cost. India’s National Institute for Open
Schooling, with over 1 million pupils, is an example.
However, when proposing the expansion of ODL for secondary schooling you
meet the traditional skepticism of development agencies to technology-based learn-
ing and the habitual resistance of education ministries to anything other than the
classroom model. I remember visiting the World Bank some years ago to urge them
to promote open schooling and was told that they could not support any approach
that was not backed up by significant research and evaluation. There has indeed
been vastly less research on ODL at school level than in higher education, so this
is an important area for ODL researchers looking to break new ground. COL made
a modest start by commissioning a substantial comparative study of the Indian and
Namibian open schools on various dimensions (Rumble & Koul, 2007).

Much of the focus in the literature and practice of ODL concerns the higher educa-
tion sector. Is it not time to move on beyond this and consider the other needs and
possibilities?

COL will retain a program in higher education because there is still lots of work to
do, not least to help institutions to achieve success in dual-mode provision, by
embedding a quality assurance culture through our Review and Improvement
(COL-RIM) model. This is an inexpensive approach to quality assurance that,
somewhat to my surprise, has been hailed as an important development by agencies
in rich countries that operate sophisticated external quality reviews.
However, as I noted earlier, I still think that the most important work is now in
secondary schooling and nonformal education. It can best be encouraged by
example. My colleague Frances Ferreira is doing an amazing job in spreading the
 Distance Education 423

idea and the practice of open schooling. Countries in the global south like to learn
from each other rather than take formulae from the north. Thanks to strong leader-
ship by India, the Commonwealth Open School Association (COMOSA) is proving
to be a great source of mutual assistance and I am amazed at the number of open
schools now being established, even in countries with small populations like the
Pacific Islands. The ability to reach children scattered across many atolls and
islands compensates for the lack of opportunities to achieve economies of scale.
Regarding nonformal education, COL is fortunate that it is not a funding
agency. This means that we have to work with the grassroots to implement their
ideas for rural development and better health, rather than coming with prescriptions
of our own. Both our Lifelong Learning for Farmers and Healthy Communities ini-
tiatives benefit greatly from this attitude.

Arguably, the sector receiving the least attention in ODL is nonformal education,
and in this regard, you’ve suggested that the focus should be on communities rather
than individuals. Can you expand on this point?

I would be the last person ever to downplay the importance of educating individuals.
I have never met anyone who complained that they had had too much education.
However, the aims of COL’s nonformal education initiatives are to make resource-
poor communities healthier and more prosperous. If they are to engage with the pro-
cess, the communities need to own the goal and participate in defining the means. This
has led us to place increasing importance on the development of social capital, which
means the networks of trust and mutual confidence that make it possible for groups to
strive for a collective purpose. Having fostered social capital we try to develop it into
social learning capital, which means that participants share what each is learning and
develop and embed that learning through discussions. This sounds rather abstract but,
to take the example of one manifestation of the Lifelong Learning for Farmers pro-
gram, 6,000 women in India who raise goats for a living receive several short voice
messages per day on their cell phones about how better to feed and look after their
goats. By getting together in groups periodically and discussing whether and how
these lessons are helpful, the impact of the program is strengthened and its relevance
is improved. Much the same applies to the use of community radio to broadcast health
messages developed by the communities themselves.

Going back to the issue of open schooling, in your latest book, Mega-schools,
Technology and Teachers, you write about the challenge of success and the chal-
lenge of failure in open schooling. You also suggest that teacher education needs a
radical rethinking to meet these challenges. Could you enlarge on these points?

The challenge in open schooling is the familiar bugbear of ODL. Governments hear
that this is a more cost-effective form of education—which is true when the system
is running and scale is achieved—but take this opportunity for economies to mean
that open schools can be started with minimal resources. The state open schools in
India are an object lesson in this regard. All Indian states are meant to create open
schools to complement the work of the National Institute for Open Schooling. Some
are taking the obligation seriously but in others the institution exists on paper only,
even though pupils are being enrolled. The claim that ODL is a low-quality form of
education then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
424 C. Latchem

Teacher education needs a radical rethink for two reasons. First, the dramatic
shortage of teachers—which is not just a problem for developing countries—means
that scale methods like ODL are the only way to ramp up supply. Second, many
teachers find their full-time training to be largely irrelevant once they start working
in schools. The answer is to swing the main investment in teacher training away
from long preservice programs towards regular, shorter in-service education—and to
focus this continuing professional development on the classroom reality. ODL can
do this very successfully as the TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa)
program is demonstrating. TESSA reaches over 300,000 teachers across Africa and,
through them, millions of their pupils.

What do you see as COL’s most outstanding initiatives and achievements during
your time as president?

I was very fortunate in 2004 to inherit an effective and productive organization

from my predecessor, Gajaraj Dhanarajan, and since then COL has continued to
improve its performance on several dimensions: organization, stakeholder relations,
and programming.
In the years before my arrival, COL’s Board had found it difficult to get to
decide on an appropriate human resources policy and compensation framework for
COL and asked me to develop one in my first year. We took the Commonwealth
Secretariat’s recently revised processes as a starting point and developed a Human
Resources Framework and Compensation Plan that has stood the test of time—and
a 5-year evaluation. The associated Job Evaluation system has made compensation
fairer and the system is well accepted by staff. For the internationally recruited staff
the most significant change was the introduction, modeled on the Commonwealth
Secretariat’s charter, of a rotation policy that sets a limit of 9 years on the maxi-
mum time that an international staff member can remain at COL. Seven years later
I judge this to have been a positive innovation. There is a danger of loss of institu-
tional memory, but we compensate for this by excellent knowledge management.
Having a regular turnover of COL’s education specialists brings constant injections
of new energy and ideas and also allows us to reflect the changing priorities of the
program in our recruitment. As I hand over the leadership of COL to Professor
Asha Kanwar, I am proud to say that COL has never had such capable staff at all
levels.
As Vice-President, Professor Kanwar reformed COL’s stakeholder relations most
successfully through two innovations. First, we asked each Commonwealth minister
of education to identify a focal point for COL for their country. We stay closely in
touch with these focal points and try to make them see this role as an important ele-
ment of their professional identity. Second, we now produce an action plan for each
of the 54 Commonwealth countries for each triennial planning period. This is
updated regularly with the help of the focal points and, at the end of the triennium,
we produce 54 reports on what COL has done in each country. Taken together these
innovations have transformed COL’s relations with governments. Since I joined
COL, the number of governments making voluntary contributions to COL’s budget
has risen from the low 20s to over 40, which I regard as an important performance
indicator.
 Distance Education 425

As regards COL’s program, we have become steadily more systematic and evi-
dence based in our work. The overriding lesson that I have learned in over a decade
of work in international development at UNESCO and COL, is that successful, sus-
tainable, and indigenized development takes time. Most development agencies give
up on projects well before they bear fruit, but COL now takes the long view. For
example, we have been refining and improving our Lifelong Learning for Farmers
model for over 10 years, to the point where it is now cited an exemplar by the World
Bank. Similarly, the education ministers of the small states conceived the vision of
the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth a dozen years ago but
it is only in the last few years that it has begun to enter the educational bloodstream
of those 32 countries. Meanwhile, other initiatives for small states have been intro-
duced with fanfare only to disappear without trace after a few years.

Have there been any disappointments or setbacks in this work?

We have backed some horses that didn’t run. For example, a few years ago we saw
a role for COL in educating for better governance but in the end we couldn’t find a
niche between what the Commonwealth Secretariat does at the macro level, such as
training electoral officers, and what states do at the local level, like the Panchayats
in India. However, I am pleased to say that our self-financing program of eLearning
for International Organisations is increasingly being called on to develop e-learning
options to increase the reach of face-to-face governance programs developed by the
Commonwealth Secretariat and various UN agencies.

During your time at COL, have you noticed any major trends or changes in ODL
practices worldwide?

E-learning has come to play a larger role in ODL, which is good in principle because
use of the Internet can both reinforce the economies of scale that are a key feature of
distance education and also speed up feedback with a positive impact on student
retention. Sadly, however, many of the new practitioners seem to believe that ODL
began with e-learning and that the two are synonymous. Poor appreciation of history
is always regrettable but in this case it is also dangerous because, as Jon Baggaley
(2010) points out, much e-learning is developed and implemented in ignorance of all
the previous research on ODL. This is probably why, in his review of e-learning in
North America, Tony Bates (2011) finds that it is failing to achieve its promise.
Another trend—perhaps it is better to call it a fad for the time being—is the infat-
uation with mobile technology. I am proud to say that COL is making good use of
mobile technology in rural development, where it has huge comparative advantage
because of its ubiquity, but I see little as yet to convince me that mobile phones are
about to replace laptops and workstations as the main vehicle for the use of comput-
ers in formal education. I would say much the same about the social media.

A great deal of the literature of ODL focuses on ICT (information and communica-
tion technology). What other topics would you like to see being researched in the
field?

I’ve already cited Jon Baggaley’s and Tony Bates’ views that much of the current use
of Web technology disappoints because it ignores the previous research on ODL. It
426 C. Latchem

may not be glamorous, but I think researchers could find a valuable vein to mine by
translating the corpus of earlier research on ODL by traditional methods into propos-
als for using the Internet more cost-effectively. The fundamental problem is that insti-
tutions see the Web as a way of offering ODL without having to change the way the
institution is organized or the working habits of academics. I have argued in recent
speeches and articles that, unless public-sector institutions wise up in this respect, we
shall see the private for-profit sector taking over much of the teaching function of
universities in the years ahead (Daniel, Kanwar, & Uvalić-Trumbić, in press).

In recent presentations, you have expressed great interest in the OER (open educa-
tional resources) movement. But some may see this as yet another passing fad.
How would you respond to this?

Despite the impressive amount of activity and the thousands of sets of course mate-
rial now openly available—much of it from developing countries like India, Nigeria,
and South Africa—I do not think that the battle to get OER into the educational
mainstream is yet won. However, this is not because it is a passing fad, like some
previous educational technologies, but because we have yet to discover whether the
twenty-first century will favor a culture of sharing or see a fight to conserve the
notion of proprietary knowledge. The technology is definitely in favor of sharing, as
Larry Lessig has argued in his books Free Culture (2004) and Remix (2010). Never-
theless, those with a twentieth-century concept of intellectual property rights are
mounting a fierce rearguard against the OER movement in those U.S. states that are
trying to save millions of dollars by using OER textbooks. I am in the middle of this
battle at the moment as director of the COL-UNESCO project Fostering Governmen-
tal Support for OER Internationally. In that context I am encouraged by the number
of governments that support the idea that educational material developed with public
funds should be made freely available to the public for use and adaptation.

You have recently warned that not all governments and not all authorities are well
disposed towards ODL and that some are even withdrawing support. Why do you
think this is so, and what lessons can we take from this?

My experience at the UK Open University taught me that the last group to perceive
ODL positively are senior officials, since their views of education are strongly col-
ored by their personal experience of attending elite institutions many years earlier.
There is also, it must be said, a fear on the part of those who abhor the idea of pri-
vate or for-profit education, that ODL is a Trojan horse for such providers. But
ODL will prevail for two reasons. In the developing countries there is no viable
alternative for expanding education in priority areas with the resources available,
whereas in the rich countries students are voting with their feet and fingers for tech-
nology-mediated learning that gives them more control of their time, even if the
trade-off is to study in a more disciplined way.

You have referred to “the new dynamics” of distance education. How would you
define these?

I make a parallel with the new dynamics of higher education articulated at UNE-
SCO’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education. The Executive Secretary of
 Distance Education 427

that conference (Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić) and I detailed the new dynamics of

higher education and showed how most of them lead inevitably to a stronger
emphasis on ODL (Uvalić-Trumbić & Daniel, 2011). These new dynamics of ODL
are the driver of massification of higher education systems, which implies a diversi-
fication of providers, more private, for-profit provision, the steady growth of cross-
border education, more emphasis on quality assurance, a stronger role in teacher
education, and changes in the nature of academic work. As I noted earlier, too
many would-be dual-mode institutions rely on what Tony Bates (2000) calls the
“lone ranger” approach, by which each faculty member is enjoined to develop and
offer online versions of their courses alongside the classroom offerings. This does
not create courses of consistent quality and is not sustainable without radical
changes to the way that academics are rewarded for their work. We must recall
Ernie Boyer’s great book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate
(1990), and both increase the value placed on teaching and also encourage teachers
to work in teams in preparing courses. They should also take advantage of the
growing corpus of excellent open educational resources rather than reinventing
wheels by starting from scratch whenever they have to develop a new course.

Now you’re leaving COL to take on further challenges. What do you hope for in
this next stage of your life?

My main commitment will be as Education Master in the Beijing DeTao Masters

Academy. My task will be twofold: to share my experience of leading ODL institu-
tions with senior figures in Chinese higher education; and to find ways, using the
knowledge media, to share the expertise of the other masters, who are top profes-
sionals in a wide variety of fields, with a wider public. I shall also take part in a
number of advisory boards for conventional and ODL institutions. My pro bono
contribution will be to chair the International Board of the United World Colleges,
a network of 12 schools around the world that take some of the brightest all-roun-
ders from many nations to study for the International Baccalaureate and gain an
international outlook.
In all this I hope to continue writing and to remain plugged into the world of
ODL that has given me such a thrilling and satisfying career for 40 years.

Notes on contributor
Colin Latchem was formerly Head of the Teaching Learning Group at Curtin University,
Perth, Western Australia, and President of the Open and Distance Learning Association of
Australasia. Since retiring from this position, he has been a visiting professor/researcher at
Japan’s National Institute of Multimedia Education, the Korea National Open University, the
UK Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, and Turkey’s Anadolu
University.

References
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York, NY: Routledge.
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leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Bates, A. W. (2011). 2011 Outlook for online learning and distance education. Sudbury:
Contact North. Retrieved from http://search.contactnorth.ca/en/data/files/download/
Jan2011/2011%20Outlook.pdf
428 C. Latchem

Binder, M. (2006). The cost of providing universal secondary education in developing coun-
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