 My name is Som Naidu and today we have the pleasure of talking with Caroline Selig from New Zealand and Caroline. Welcome to the programme and thank you for speaking with Commonwealth Learning. Can we start by just asking you to talk about yourself and a little bit about your background in the organisation that you come from? I'm Caroline Selig. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. We're a specialist single mode open distance learning provider and train about 30,000 kiwis every year in a range of programmes from certificates through to degrees specifically focused on vocational applied learning. Can you reflect a little bit from your background on the contribution of DE methods to education and development? Distance education really completely changed the paradigm of education I believe and it took education and learning from it has to be at this time in this place right back to the learner. So really it was at the very forefront of learner centricity when teaching and learning could be provided straight to a student whatever time that was and whatever place that was and it broke that you've got to be in a school hall or a lecture theatre at three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon so it broke that. So I think all other education modes now follow that learner centric philosophy that was initially introduced through DE and DE really enabled the massification of education, the ability to produce learning at scale, at quality and cost effectively meant that large number of learners, often those who were hard to reach, were able to receive quality education so it's had a tremendous input right across the world. You talk about quality and let's talk about quality and let's talk about quality in the vocational education sector. From your background, let's talk about where are the impacts of DE methods. I'm using the term selectively not talking about distance education generally but distance education methods or distance learning methods and technologies in the vocational education sector. Where is it making the most impacts? For my area in skills development the most impact I would say is in lifelong learning. There are so many people who are currently employed who need to upskill or develop new skills who for them it would be completely impossible to go to a conventional or face to face provider. They're often struggling with families and jobs and all sorts of stresses and issues and what they want is a really convenient flexible way to learn and open distance learning has provided that for them. So how do you blend them? How do you approach it? Give me some examples of how do you approach that kind of need, that kind of provision let's say. I think the beauty of open distance learning and the open polytechnic runs a very pure classic open distance learning value chain and the beauty of that is that it can disaggregate that value chain and then it can recombine those constituents to make quite customized blends and they can be contextualized to whatever specific learner or collaborative partnership or network or quality assurance regime but what it means is with each different program area or with each different context we are able to provide the learner some quite unique offerings so with them if we were delivering electrical engineering or pharmacy technician training or small business management each one of those might be designed in a completely different way with completely different partners so we can choose what media, what mode we're offering that in, we can choose whether we want to blend and have a partner who can do some face to face approaches. It could be online, it could be paper, it could be radio, it could have different modes of support but to get back to your first point what's the contribution of distance education, you start at what's best for the learner and then design the whole ODL model around that. It seems like a very complex operation and different organizations approach it differently. What kinds of resources do you bring to bear on the development of such a learning experience let me call it that? You start at that analysis arm and you say what are the best programs, what are the best pedagogical methods for this, how do we design it so that it can pathway from other study and then can steer case into further study afterwards if you need it, how can you make sure that industry and regulations, standards and desires are all adhered to and then you get into that design area, you look at the academic development, we've got an academic quality arm and then into the whole design of courseware whether that's a learning online or paper or a mixture or a collaborative approach and for that we invest very heavily in real quality instructional design, subject matter experts, editors, media production because that's where we can really see the quality. Where are the challenges, that's interesting, that's exactly what I wanted to get into from your experience. What are the challenges, what are the difficulties that you're still struggling with? I think one of the difficulties that all open distance learning providers struggle with is outcomes and effectiveness and I guess as a result of the global economic crisis or downturn there's a lot more focus on not just increasing access but increasing effectiveness, increasing value for money, increasing outputs and there's a lot of focus now by governments and funding agencies across the world on how many of your students are dropping out, how many are completing, how many are retaining, how many are progressing to higher levels and the challenge for open distance learners is learning providers is to really engage with our students to ensure that they're with us and they're progressing and that right back to the beginning actually that they're actually on the right course, they're actually studying the right programs, they've got the skills to be able to succeed in a distance mode so I think that's the real challenge for us at the moment. In New Zealand we have a national qualifications framework which is designed by industry training organisations or ITOs as we call them in New Zealand and they set standards for an industry which we design all our programs to meet those industry standards so whether it's engineering or construction or legal executive or drain laying or plumbing there are set standards that are specified within the New Zealand qualification framework that we adhere to as we design the program so we ensure that the assessment is authentic and reliable and valid and sufficient to match the standards that have been predetermined by industry. I just want to move the conversation a little bit further on in terms of where are the challenges in relation to the provision of education by distance learning methods, distance teaching methods in the vocational and professional education sector where the growth areas, where do you see your organisation going or the field going? It has to be technology. There are some incredibly exciting technological advances that are now happening and that's a challenge and an opportunity because it's this huge investment in researching the value of some of these technologies but the mobile internet devices, ebooks, social media, augmented reality it's all, there's huge potential and there's some huge learning opportunities within that technology it's finding the right ones and supporting the investment to introduce some of those so there's some exciting things coming through technology. Where is the need, where are the untapped potentials in vocational education or need or areas of need that you haven't been able to explore at the moment with distance learning methods that you would like to go into? I think the hard to reach students, the disadvantaged groups within the population, these are areas that distance education should be able to meet so much better than face-to-face conventional delivery. We need to work a lot harder on there. There's lots of opportunities that mean in order to meet them we need to collaborate with the right partners. And who are these partners? I mean are they community groups or organizations? I think open distance learning providers in the future will find themselves an absolute asset to the spread of education in the future because they can bring a real quality of consistent courseware which is highly valued by other organizations and partners they might be public or private sector, they might be schools, they might be other organizations, they might be workplace, they might be corporates but in partnership an ODL provider can provide quality courseware and the partner can give that really authentic work-based practical hands-on component and areas like assessment and support and facilitation and mentoring, those roles of the individual partners can be determined but together you can have an incredibly impressive delivery system. Caroline you were talking about agile methods, perhaps I could ask you to explain that a little bit more in terms of how you go about working with other people, if that's what you meant by agile methods. I was meaning something quite different but I'm here I'd be keen to talk to you about working with partners because many people and especially at a conference like this you get international delegates who are saying how on earth do you do a vocational practical subject area when you're a single mode open distance learning specialist and when they hear that we do things like drain laying and plumbing and electrical engineering they can't see how you can teach that effectively through a distance mode and probably we've had a lot of success in New Zealand working with some of the smaller regional partners so in areas like Taranaki or Timaru or Nelson and Malbra will provide the courseware and then work with the provider in the region to provide the hands-on practical component often organising the work-based training component and mentoring and facilitating the student as they go through the study and whilst there's always a number of students that they want to be individual and isolated and they don't need anybody else to help them there's also a large proportion of students that do gain a lot from linking face to face with other students and with mentors and tutors and it gives them the opportunity for that and also a lot of them can get the opportunity to engage in the sort of social or recreational area that a traditional pure ODL student doesn't get that opportunity so in areas like quantity surveying or construction management or architectural design we work with other providers we provide the theory they provide practical and support and the relationship works really well but not only that what's really important often to industry is that concept of consistency so we can ensure right from Northland down to Southland in New Zealand that these students are getting a consistent quality courseware across the country. I'm trying to probe into how your instructional designers put the two together so that they are not two separate parts. That's probably not the instructional designers that put that together that's our tutors and our deans and our faculty managers they'll design the whole delivery concept of what component of the value chain is done with which provider because we're working with industry training organisations who have very clear standards we know exactly what the standards we're teaching to and what we're assessing to so that takes some of that worry you might have out of the question but there is I mean it is a high or an intensive resource input to manage each relationship but if you're trying to achieve what's best from the learner I think if you can get an ODL provider and a face-to-face provider and together they both contribute their expertise and the areas that they excel at that's got to be better for the learner. And one of the things I'm thinking is that I think it assures for better assessment methods you know better consistency and rigor in assessment methods and monitoring and not allowing people to cheat and that sort of thing because there's local mentoring and local supervision is that the case? Absolutely I mean we're more and more we're designing both formative and summative assessments that are real-time assessments they're online so in a formative sense students can answer quizzes and multiple choices and get almost immediate feedback on how they're doing where they may not be achieving what they can do to achieve which areas they need to study up on. In a summative sense there is always everyone always asks us how can you verify that the person sitting the exam was actually the person that was meant to and if you're engaging with partners who have engaged with the students that makes that verification and invigilation much more sound. Yeah and there is a win-win situation for both I suppose the partners would see themselves as benefiting by engaging in this exercise isn't it with the organisation. Oh and they can focus on their teaching methodology not necessarily nothing to put materials together they know that they've got quality courseware they can focus on teaching that. Caroline thank you very much thank you very much for talking with the Commonwealth alone. Thank you.