 The World Conference on Distance Education, then-called Correspondence Education started in British Columbia in Canada in 1938. The 1995 World Conference was the first to be hosted by the United Kingdom Open University. Over a thousand delegates from 79 countries, a record number, converged on Birmingham last June. A gloriously sunny week was spent at the International Convention Centre. But how did they find someone to take on the overall planning for such a vast event? Well, the first thing to do is to get somebody to take a responsibility for it. And the easiest way to do that is to find somebody who's had a little bit too much to drink in a pub one night, about two years before you start these sort of conferences, and praise them and stroke them down a little bit and say, you're just the sort of person to run this conference. It's happened to me a couple of times in my life and you won't find me in a pub tonight. Well, we had about 500 contributions initially. Those were abstracts. And then those got down to, say, about 350 or so papers. And I think we've got 270 plus in the two conference books. So that process began. We got the abstracts about a year ago. We got the papers. I said they had to be in by December. Of course they weren't. And so we've been working on that. We started about 18 months ago. The next conference would be here in the UK and in Birmingham. And we started preparations about 18 months ago. It's got faster and faster as we've got closer and closer. And really the last month has been the most intensive period. What kind of things are you doing for the delegates? Well, we're trying to make it as interesting as we can for them as possible. We've obviously got a fantastic venue for the conference in the International Conference Centre. We're running trips to the Oxford Regional Centre to Walton Hall because many of the delegates will see the OU really as the mother of open universities and the opportunity to visit the central campus at Milton Keynes. We thought it was very important for them. One of the most exciting areas of the world in open and distance learning is the Far East and Australasia. In fact, Hong Kong reflects the Far East generally. It's a vibrant. It's an exciting. It's an aggressive. And if I may say, an always upwardly mobile society. It's also a society that is constantly shifting its economic base. That would mean people are retraining, re-skilling, re-educating, reorganising their lives to exploit newer opportunities. Given that they would see learning and investment in learning as a major consideration. For this reason, when a society itself is in such flux and mobility, learning has to be wrapped around their lifestyles, the lifestyles of an individual. And distance learning, open education with its flexibility, with its learner-centeredness is ideal. And one should not be surprised that distance education has become a very successful vehicle, both in terms of individual agenda and national agendas. Well, distance education in Australia is used at all levels, both at school level and technical and further education, higher education especially, and also in industrial training. And each state tends to do things a little differently, just about everything in Australia is sort of state-based. And there's such a diversity there that it's impossible to have one model, whereas in the Open University of the United Kingdom you tend to have a standard approach by one institution. In Australia you have a huge diversity of approaches. Europe is still wrestling with issues of technology and access. It's definitely on the agenda, but it's quite obvious that many countries in Europe do not have the equipment that is needed to sort of be part of the information highway. And that is the post-communist countries, as well as other countries in Europe. Where I come from in Norway, for example, we can't counter our students having a compute yet. Not all of them, very few actually. The old vision is that you need to reach out to those who don't have the opportunity. But I think that is changing, because people do have opportunities now. So we're moving into competitive society more and more. And I need this conference also to clear a new vision. Another region of the world for major development is Africa. It's important because the government itself has realised that we don't have resources to build more buildings and motor to accommodate all the needs in the country. And they've identified distance education as one way of meeting the needs of the country. It's the most cost-effective. The University of South Africa is the first in the world to go distant. Already 50 years ago in 1946. And of course other universities started later to follow this route of distance education. In the last 20 years I would say that distance education has expanded greatly in Kenya. We now not offer only distance education as part of a continuing education programme in some institutions, but also have our first external degree being offered by the University of Nairobi from the Kokuyo campus, from the College of Education and External Studies. Some of the programmes that we give are for example the Kenya Institute of Special Education offers a one-year distance education programme to all primary school teachers who would like to be aware of the special needs of children and how to cope with children who have special needs. And that would go from children with physical disabilities, behavioural problems to the gifted child. And this is a very popular programme and they are now developing a course that is three years, which will offer diploma in special education where the teacher can opt to specialise in the visually handicapped, the hearing impaired or the mentally retarded or the learning disabilities. There's a lot of support from Britain for these programmes. The ODA is supporting a number of universities in training writers also with computers, desktop publishing and library resources. And this has been very helpful. I myself have been involved in training the writers and in the last few months I've trained 55 writers for the first external B-Ed degree at the University of Cape Coast. Well the needs are for teacher-teachers actually because there is a dearth of teachers now, especially in primary education. We are trying both to upgrade them and to increase the number. And we have found out that the fastest way in which we can increase the number is by using distance education, especially because teachers can study while they are still working in schools. They are only in disruption and so on and so forth. You know we have a dual mode programme which means that we have the same course that is being run by the University of College of Education in Winnebar that is being done by the internal students is also being done by the external students by the distance education students. So we have a temporary problem of getting the lecturers to write the courses and we really want the lecturers to write the courses because they teach the internal courses. If you can imagine a situation whereby the lecturer has to write the distance education courses in addition to his full-time course albeit he is going to receive some pay. It is a very demanding job. So we are hoping in any case I am very sure and very positive because they are very determined and very sure that the programme will start in October. The World Conference provides a forum for meetings of regional and world networks. Eden is a name for the European Distance Education Network. We found just a fine acronym and it's a fairly recent organisation established in 1991 after the demolishing of the iron curtain and the communist systems. So we tried to establish a network that could incorporate distance educators in Western Europe and in Eastern and Central Europe. And when we did that we also saw that the situation in Western Europe was quite fragmented. There were different environments for distance education different types of institutions so we have tried to build a really a broad platform that could incorporate everybody who is interested in open and distance learning in the whole of Europe. The Commonwealth of Learning has been set up by 51 Heads of Governments of Commonwealth to bring the best in education opportunities of the Commonwealth to the Commonwealth. They saw distance education as an exciting vehicle to provide some answers to access or enhancing access and the mission itself then begins to unfold to provide individuals in the Commonwealth access to knowledge of the Commonwealth in whatever form that access is available. That should be the mission. I think the ICDE has lots of possibilities of going very far. First it will become much more of a political organisation than a professional organisation because institutions will have their own agendas and there will be an umbrella agenda for all the institutions and operators in distance education and training fields and it will mean to improve conditions for learning and training for all everywhere and lifelong. It is a huge task to provide all those people with the qualifications they need and for that we have to adopt new methods, new technologies but more than that an integrated approach to education and learning. That's what I believe it will happen in the next few years. I believe that cultural difference will be rather in a set than a drawback. I believe that people will take for granted now that we have to become multicultural and more open than we were before as well as in cultural habits as in languages or in modus operandi for doing business or for negotiating or whatever. Globalisation means all those things and you cannot hope for homogeneisation of cultures but rather to differentiation. One thing we hope is that we will have in the future more simplified technologies that can combine in some way all the multimedia discourses and a relatively inexpensive price. The women's network was established in 1982 to give a forum for all the women around the world in international distance ed to discuss common concerns, to have a safe place to talk to be heard because we know the research evidence says that in many forums women tend not to get listened to as clearly. So we have been very active since 1982 in developing their voices. It enabled a lot of women around the world to meet each other so I would say on the whole we had an excellent start and now we have to regroup and say where are we going into this new technological era and into very new environments for teaching and learning. There are a lot of assumptions made about how technology will increase access to people but of course we all know that in domestic technology as Jill Kirkup says men make a lot of the decisions and the issue is how does a woman get access to technology in her home and secondly does she really want to do that or does she really want to get away from the house and get some peace and quiet and meet her peers somewhere else. The second problem with technology is having it working as an environment that is appropriate for reflective, tentative kind of thinking we use the phrase of the electronic highway but I am hearing people now refer to it as the testosterone highway and I have experience of people who are living under cognitive steroids. They surf around on the internet and you know how athletes have steroids well I have coined the phrase cognitive steroid they think they are all powerful but in fact what they may be getting is bits and pieces of information and nothing really carefully structured as in a book. The third aspect that is concerned for us with technology and particularly for women is the whole issue of teaching models and learning strategies. A lot of us grew up in the delivery model of technology the professor knew everything and the technology was lecturing to deliver people like me and us saying delivery is okay but we have to get the students dialoguing so how do we use the new communications technologies to allow people to talk with each other not past each other. But what do conference participants gain from the event? One of the interesting things is that we get to meet other people from Africa and the developing world much more easily than we do across Africa because quite often people that we have been working with and organizing the programs for and developing programs for in Africa help us to get to the conference and when we are here we can share problems we can share ideas and we can try to give each other solutions to some of the common problems. I think the priorities are to find a system that is flexible enough to allow people to move between institutions, articulate in the past we had various rigid regulations and rules between institutions and we were trying to open this up between colleges, universities, private as well as the public institutions to make it possible for people to move in and out of the system it was very important for me to be here to meet people, to make new friendships and to see what is on offer and what it is that we can learn there is so much that we can learn especially because we have been cut off during the sanction period. Various parts of the world use the conference to promote themselves We modelled the CD on a postcard so it is possible to click on one of the states and then to open up the CD where we would have each of the universities represented they are listed around here and we provided enough copies so that each delegate was provided with one of the CDs in the actual conference satchel so it is a contribution to networking and distance education But why have a conference at all for people who specialise in distance? Why not do it by internet? When you are going through the internet you have to know to a certain extent what you are looking for here you can just meet somebody and think to yourself wow they are doing that are they we are trying to do that let's go and have a word of them and see what they have been doing so that we can listen to them and I am not anti-tacky and I am not a luddite and I use the internet quite extensively but there is nothing like I am a person there is nothing like meeting people and there is nothing like picking up just the sort of little bits and snippets of conversation over breakfast in the morning that will lead you onto something else and that is what it is all about really You make a whole network of friends, of colleagues people that you are in touch with for the next three or four years we have seen for ten years this week and we are immediately on to a new wavelength talking about how have you moved ahead on this or that or the other we found that there was an enormous amount of knowledge it doesn't matter the actual critical mass the number of students and so on it matters the intelligence how have you actually operated what are you doing for remote students how are you coping with particular needs in particular areas or particular types of the curriculum or new technology and this is the very first time that people have been able to come and say we want to spend a whole week learning also about how the University of the United Kingdom has gone on and we have been able to actually push the boat out and say well this is where we are at what do you think of that and so we have actually been more forthcoming perhaps this time and that is this motion horizontally Alongside the conference was the open learning exhibition over 2600 trainers and managers came from the Midlands to visit and we are pleased to be amazed at the diversity of initiatives the ingenuity, the innovation that is constantly coming up of open learning projects in England, in Ireland, Wales, Scotland beyond belief the number of things that they are doing libraries increasingly are involved in open learning and small medium sized enterprises are involved in open learning through our members very very successfully I think it is an absolutely critical issue that we are sharing with the rest of the conference that the new technology now could go into quite fundamentally different directions could be very divisive for the elite for the wealthy for the techno freaks and the well healed in various ways well supported and very little for the rest or with the principles that were the founding principles of the Open University and are shared by so many institutions and there could be something that we drive forward as a mass universal access issue and that is going to be very important how does the workstation of the future become something that can be there for individuals whether in their homes, in the community in their workplaces and genuinely accessible and so the superhighway has got to be everybody's highway In Eastern and Central Europe of course because of this transition they also need to use their system education Historically in Eastern and Central Europe they were having a lot of correspondence education almost 40% of all the students studied by correspondence but this compared to modern insights is very outdated very much outdated it was conceived in the 30s and has never changed so it has to be updated and make ready for the present demands of the present and changing society in that part of the world I work in distance education provisioning in South Africa work for an NGO and we're involved in radio learning and distance education in our situation is obviously going to be the key means of addressing the imbalances in our educational situation it's a great forum to meet different people from different countries involved in very similar sort of objectives as we are We chose radio because we think at first it offers maximum access to education access so far it's been a cliche in South Africa we think but given the remoteness of a number of communities and given just the huge distances that have to be covered we think that radio is one of the educational instructional materials into classrooms regardless of where they might be For the 1995 conference one of the abiding memories will be the sense of liberation in different parts of the world with distance education as a key instrument I'm extremely optimistic about South Africa I think South Africa is one of the miracles of the century and it's wonderful to see South Africa and I think throughout South Africa there's a great sense of well-being and optimism Oh I'm here because I have made a lot of contact I am networking and I am very sure that I've learned so many new things I mean I've heard about information superhighway after being away from England for one year you know I want to be familiar with a lot of the jargon I want to come back into mainstream I've updated myself on what is happening elsewhere and I feel very privileged to be a course, a conference that comprises over 1,000 people from 79 countries it's a big big thing for me and the amount of information I've gained from colleagues in other institutions I mean I've shared information and I've learnt a lot and I think it is just a great event