Unisa online - Teaching whole people through distance education

Prof Peter Jarvis, Prof Catherine Odora Hoppers, Prof Tinyiko Maluleke & Prof Dele Braimoh

"Serious higher education practitioners and researchers will agree that one area that is lacking in open distance learning (ODL) is ODL research, particularly ODL in Africa." With these words, Prof Mandla Makhanya, Unisa's Pro-Vice-Chancellor, opened the ODL Occasional Lecture Series on 23 February 2009 in the Senate hall on the Muckleneuk campus. Prof Peter Jarvis, a renowned adult educator from the University of Surrey, began and ended his lecture with the assertion: "We don't teach subjects at all; we teach people." He said that teaching is a most moral vocation since lecturers are engaged with people. They are helping them to develop and are being developed by them. For Prof Jarvis, learning is "the combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person --- body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, meaning, beliefs and senses) --- experiences social situations, the content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person’s biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person."

"We're not just learning cognitively; we are learning emotively at the same time," he stated. "We do not learn from what the teacher says or writes but we learn from what we experience the teacher saying or the teacher writing, and the gap between what we say or write and how it is perceived could be a large one." In other words, the medium is not the whole of the message; it is only a part of it. The way that the message is perceived and received is also important.

Prof Jarvis feels that teachers in distance education find it all too easy to provide secondary experiences which focus on knowledge and skills, but which omit the other aspects of the person. This results in a disjunction, the distance between perception of reality and individual biography. "We're trying to get people to feel that they can ask questions to narrow that gap," he emphasised. "The kind of learning we are looking for is reciprocal,” affirmed Prof Catherine Odora Hoppers, SARChI Research Chair of Development, as the discussant.

Prof Jarvis also conducted an interactive open discussion seminar session with some of the members of the first set of Unisa's Young Academics Project and some of the beneficiaries of the Thuthuka Research Fellowship on the theme of "Life of academics in academia: a development paradigm", chaired by Prof Rita Maré, Vice-Principal: Academic and Research. He also held a short discussion forum with the members of the ODL Research Task Team, which Prof Dele Braimoh chairs, focusing on strategies for stimulating ODL research activities among scholars of a virtual learning institution.

According to Prof Braimoh, many scholars both from within and outside Unisa are expected to participate actively in the ODL Occasional Lecture Series, which is meant to showcase Unisa as a transformed African ODL institution in the service of humanity.

Prof Dele Braimoh and Prof Peter Jarvis, with two of the young academics, Ms Langutani Masehela and Ms Lize van Jaarsveldt at the seminar session