Abstract:

Long before learning became an academic/professional institution with formal structures, to learn was to participate in activities through which learners raised new problems, interrogated past practices and in that way they evaluated their performance in preparation for new tasks. The entrenchment of conventional university with the educator as sole owner of knowledge took away the power to interact and generate forms of new knowledge from the learners. The new need to democratise education through distance education demanded that educators abate the power they had monopolised. Devolving the production of knowledge-as-power in distance education called for reorientation of the learning processes. This paper explores the strategies that educators in Open Distance Learning curriculum design environments have adopted to be as close as possible to their students learning at a distance. The paper argues that one of the major strategies to achieve this has been to propagate the role of interactional activities in learning materials (modules) within Open and Distance Learning (ODL) environments. The paper uses some selected modules in the department of Communication Sciences to demonstrate the importance of interactional activities as the innovative philosophy promoting the idea of learner-centred-ness in the relationship between students and the learning materials. This paper therefore examines the extent to which the construction of activities sections in the learning materials discourage or encourage participative learning in Open Distance Learning (ODL). I will demonstrate further the specific nature of the appropriateness and impact of embedding activities in the learning materials in the context of the Tuition Policy of an Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) at Unisa.

Keywords:

learner-centred-ness, distance education, students, educators, learning communication.