From: J.B.Meadows@open.ac.uk
Subject: SUPPORT
Originator: bansup-m@udevdiv.unibase.sk.ca
Reply-To: <bansup-m@udevdiv.unibase.sk.ca>
Organization: Unibase Telecom Ltd.
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 11:20:39 GMT

It has taken me some time to get back from the Bangkok Conference but I
thought I would attempt to summarise the theme of the Student Support Services
Presentation and the follow up discussions which took place.

There was a historical look at traditional higher education and how mass
higher education had moved from the simple cottage industry approach to higher
education at the turn of this century, which has its origins in the Socratic
practices of teaching, towards an industrialised approach in which the
curriculum was specified and in which a whole variety of tutors were
programmed into "teaching" students through lectures for the most part rather
that one-to-one contact and small group tutorials.  In other words traditional
mass higher education was an industrialised form of teaching and learning.  

And mass traditional higher education, developing in industrialised countries
in the first half of this century, had adopted the principles of classical
management theory based upon the notions of organisations as machines which
could be divided on the basis of functional specialisations.  But such an
approach, focusing on teaching rather than learning, can so easily become
instruction and even indoctrination rather than education.  

While management theory in the first part of this century looked to the
analogy of the machine, in the second half of this century it has looked to
the analogy of the organism or the brain - the so called systems approach to
organisation and management.   One can see evidence of traditional mass higher
education endeavouring to move towards this approach.  This is the ethos of
the service industry as opposed to the manufacturing industry approach and has
as its focus the student rather than the curriculum. 

Distance education is also an industrialised form of teaching and learning -
but more obviously so in that in terms of course production it quite often
employs standard manufacturing industrial operations such as printing, mailing
etc.

Because of the absence of feedback from the students in many distance
education systems, it is even more easy for these systems to stay within a
model of manufacturing industry rather than to move towards a model of service
industry.  In other words it is easy to see the product of distance education
as course materials rather than successful students.

Distance education must develop itself along the service industry model.  And,
because of that, the student support services have to be developed from the
students' standpoint rather than the institutional standpoint.  This means
taking into account a number of factors.  For example there is no universally
agreed acceptable percentage for drop out.  In some cultures a very high
percentage of drop out is perfectly acceptable, in others it is not at all
acceptable.  Anyone designing a student support system has to do so in the
light of culturally acceptable levels of failure.

Indeed there is nothing all-embracing which can be said of student support
services.  They depend upon the market aimed at, the package which is
employed, the delivery system, the image of the organisation and the culture
in which it operates.  If you were to take the production system from the UKOU
and transfer it to another organisation in a different part of the world, it
would probably have a good chance of succeeding since there is a great deal
of generic similarity in course production sub-systems.  If, on the other
hand, you were to do the same with the student support system, you would
almost certainly meet with disaster since it is designed to operate within a
particular culture, through particular delivery systems and for a particular
market which is unique to the UK.  There was thus nothing that could be said
generically about student support systems other than the principles on which
they ought to be based and those principles were the principles of a service
industry, allowing them 

      i)    to be constructed in the context of the almost infinite needs of
            the clients/students 

      ii)   to be dependent on the educational ethos of the region and the
            institution

      iii)  to be dependent on the dispersal of the student body, elements of
            resource and the curriculum or product of the course production
            sub-system 

      iv)   to be dependent on the generic differences in the student body 
            which the system has to serve.

Discussion tended to focus on the different methods adopted in different
countries in order to fit the service industry model.  The philosophy of
higher education in some countries tended towards the view that students
should be taught and if they failed it was their own fault.  In other
countries the philosophy was much more focused on the notion that students
should have an opportunity of learning and, if they failed, it may well be
that the institution had failed rather than the students themselves.  Likewise
the problems of a concentrated as opposed to a widely distributed student
population demanded considerable differences in services to students as did
the market aimed at which might be quite broad or very narrow in terms of
ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, people in prisons etc.  

What we learned from the discussions was that distance education was being
employed for all sorts of students in all sorts of cultures and the student
support systems consequently varied immensely.
Newsgroups: alt.education.bangkok.student