week 7 task 3

http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol4.2/10_siaciwena.html

Journal of distance Education- University of Zambia

As this study is on the tutors and lecturers point of view, and less about the benefits to the students, it interesting to see how they feel and see how they feel it has its benefits and its negative aspects.

It is clear that the reasons for lecturers not having the same enthusiasm for distance learning as internal learning, is because they haven’t got enough teachers and so the distance learning creates more work and even more stress, than they originally signed up for. They need to maybe have more lecturers, to be able to become lecturers, so that they can ease the work load and distance learning does not become such a burden, and it becomes the advantage that t should be. Obviously this is easier said than done.

It is interesting that again in this study the issue of face to face contact or counseling as it is called in this study, is brought up again. But here the students believe that it is good and the lecturers believe it is not, though this may because the students have never known any better and so they think it is good, when in fact it could actually be considerably better!

Because this study was done in 1986 I thought it would be interesting to see how the University of Zambia was doing now, after all since 1986 they could have actually hired more staff and the work load may have been distributed more evenly and therefore tutors opinions today may be very different. http://www.unza.zm/index.php, as you can see it is defiantly still a factor of the university and one of the selling points to it. Has anybody found any recent studies on whether the system has actually improved?