La place de l’autonomie de l’apprenant en formation ouverte et à distance dans le contexte de l’enseignement supérieur ouest-africain

The increasing difficulty of providing university education in developing West African countries due to lack of access and inadequate facilities, combined with the breakneck development of information and communication technologies (ICT), have given rise to hopes that open and distance learning (ODL) can provide a practical alternative to face-to-face classrooms (OECD, 2006). However, although the literature reports that ICT and the interactivity they provide can foster learning (Karsenti, 2006), the reality of current education systems forces us to admit that not only has the ODL revolution not been fully realized (OECD, 2006), it will happen only when, to cope with transactional distance, which is a major factor in ODL, learners will not be content with simply learning but will learn how to learn, and this will require autonomous skills. Nevertheless, despite decades of interest and research, real learner autonomy is still marginal, and philosophical debates have replaced the quest for practical solutions (Albero, 2003). It was therefore deemed relevant to explore how ODL educators use available solutions, said to foster learner autonomy, such as certain forms of tutoring and group work. The aim was to gain a deeper understanding of how these practices are applied and their role in the failure to develop autonomy. Following the works of Albero (2003), this study organizes the principles of autonomy within a conceptual framework: interrelations between action and development are described, evidencing the importance of providing support to learners. This topological dimension underscores how educational support must take into account the diverse areas where learners can exercise their autonomy, and a temporal dimension highlights the importance of the progressive reduction of support. This study was initiated in 2009 under the ODL program of the 2iE (International Institute for Water and the Environment) at Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. It is organized as three articles: the first seeks to identify the conditions for effective ODL as perceived by learners, and evokes the need for autonomous learning; the second attempts to understand, based on interviews with tutors, whether coaching practices conform to autonomous principles; and the third, based on the expressed intentions of the course designers, examines course compliance with autonomous principles. Given the geographic distance between learners and our aim to understand their perceptions of ODL, we adopted a mixed methods approach, using qualitative methods to better understand learners’ perceptions (Karsenti & Savoie-Zajc, 2004) and quantitative methods to account for their isolation. To grasp the educators’ perceptions, we opted to use qualitative description as a more appropriate way to comprehend the social issues involved (Karsenti & Savoie-Zajc, 2004). Of the 170 learners who were emailed a questionnaire, 62 responded. The results appear to confirm that learner autonomy is a condition for successful ODL. Nevertheless, requests by the learners for more support, despite ongoing efforts under the coaching system, efforts recognized by the learners themselves and confirmed by the ten tutors interviewed out of 40 approached at the 2iE, led us to reconsider: there may still be a place for heteronomous learning. The analysis suggested that learners’ dissatisfaction could be explained by the failure to take into account diverse aspects liable to influence learning. In addition, referring to the interviews with the 11 course designers (out of a total of 30), it appeared that, although they were well aware of the need to adapt the courses to the realities of ODL, neither site-specific contents nor flexible structures were included in the course design. The study concludes on the urgent need to cast off traditional face-to-face learning modes and to hire professional educators trained in learner empowerment. And the question arises: will autonomy ever be defined in the literature as a praxis, i.e. a goal in itself, or will it remain a poiesis, whereby autonomy aims for production and loses its purpose once the objective has been obtained?

Keyphrases: Learner autonomy, ODL, Transactional distance, Learner isolation, Group work, Tutoring, Problem situation, ODL course content, ODL course structure, Coaching activities, learning activities