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The Commonwealth Meeting of Specialists on Distance Teaching in Higher Education was called in January 1985 in Cambridge. The meeting had its origins in the work of the Commonwealth Standing Committee on Student Mobility which recommended that the Secretariat should expand its work in distance teaching; that recommendation was endorsed by Ministers of Education at their meeting in Cyprus in July 1984.
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Twenty years ago we could not have held this meeting. The oldest institutions of which participants had first-hand knowledge (the National Correspondence College in Zambia and the National Extension College in Britain) were only just beginning work. The Open University was an untried and unpopular idea.
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While we can frame deceptively simple questions, asking whether distance teaching makes economic and educational sense for higher education, it is much more difficult to find clear answers. One of the difficulties is simply that we are short of data. Many distance teaching institutions have been working for too short a time to yield good figures on their graduation rates and few cost studies have been published.
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Staff working in distance education often need training. This is partly because the techniques of teaching, administering or writing for distance education are different in kind from the work of teaching face-to-face. But the need for training is also a particular example of a more general need for staff development in higher education.
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Forty years after the building of the early computer ENIAC and twenty years after the first educational exchange by satellite, it was still unclear as we met how far the much heralded information revolution was solving or aggravating the problems of the south. One participant, from the south, warned us that if we stuck with the donkey cart we would have to put up with the manure. Others warned us as tellingly of the problems they faced in maintaining equipment for today's technologies.
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The long history of co-operation and exchange between Commonwealth universities formed the backdrop to our meeting. One of our intentions was to explore how far that tradition could be adapted to co-operation in distance education. We also had a specific concern with the mobility of students and wanted to see how distance teaching might increase, or make more readily and effectively available, opportunities for students to benefit from distant institutions.
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