Recent Projects and Current Professional Interests

Notes:
Designing effective learning systems
Much of my training and experience is in the area of instructional systems design, which might be called "educational engineering" in less technical terms. Now I am applying this approach to the challenges of redesigning education and training to promote high-quality learning for all South Africans (and, more broadly, people all over Africa).
One of the more interesting projects I have carried out recently in this arena involves the SCANS/2000 Program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. SCANS (the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) assists educators and employers to prepare students, workers and firms for the challenges of the 21st century. It serves as a catalyst for three types of activities: achieving basic academic and job outcomes at all levels of education; assessing such outcomes at school and in the workplace; and using them to hire, train and promote employees. The programme's chairperson, Dr Arnold Packer, recently worked with me in South Africa to explore the potential of a new instructional methodology, using electronic case studies on CD-ROMs, to combine the teaching of academic and job-related skills. We co-authored an article in Business Day (a national daily newspaper) comparing related challenges and experience in South Africa and the United States.
 
Support to NGOs
I have recently been working with both international and South African non-governmental organizations. Internationally, I have carried out a survey of the current state of play in South African curriculum reform and teacher training for an international education NGO exploring its potential of making a contribution to educational transformation in this country. I am currently working with them to locate possible partners in South Africa with whom they could collaborate. I also have provided support over the past months to the United Negro College Fund, the largest education charity in the United States, as it investigates its potential contribution to South African higher education, particularly in the areas of student financial aid and donor-funded development projects.
 
In February, 1998, I gave a guest presentation to alumni of the Community Leader Development Programme of USSALEP (the United States - South Africa Leadership Development Programme) on the subject "Educating Souht Africans for 21st Century Communities." Although I did not prepare a written speech for this session, you can download a PowerPoint presentation of my notes. Please note that this is a very large file - 2.6 MB.
 
Technology and education
The power of computers in general, and the Internet in particular, to link learners to the world is just beginning to be felt in North America. I am exploring opportunities to bring this power to South Africa, both through governmental sponsorship and the private sector. My page about computers and education explores this interest in more detail.
 
That said, infrastructural limitations mean that for now, at least, computer technology is far beyond the reach of most schools in this country. A presentation that I gave at the Future World Conference in Cape Town in December, 1997, explores this challenge and suggests strategies for addressing it. The South African Broadcasting Corporation aired a television program in it's One Step Beyond series on 15 March 1998 that included parts of an interview with me during that conference on the topic of educational technology and educational reform.

One of the powerful, cost-effective technology that I cited in both the presentation and the television interview at Future World is instructional radio, particularly a form of radio education known as "interactive radio instruction." My first assignment in Africa was to lead a USAID-funded project to develop daily, half-hour radio lessons to teach English to children in rural primary schools. Those lessons achieved results comparable to improvements seen with computer-assisted learning at that time (the early 1980's), but at a cost of only one dollar per pupil per year. Two Southern African countries currently broadcast radio lessons based on the Kenya model: Lesotho, on a national basis, and South Africa, to approximately 100,000 children. The South African lessons have been developed and broadcast through an NGO: the Open Learning Systems Education Trust, OLSET. OLSET's web site provides more information on this affordable educational technology.
 
Impact of foreign aid on African educational development
I began work with the Africa Bureau of USAID in November, 1996, helping to document the impact of foreign assistance on educational development in Africa. We prepared a written document that tells this story in non-technical language and in the voices of African professionals themselves. I wrote the sections on Swaziland and South Africa, two countries where I have worked, and supervised planning for a videotape presentation of the complete package of six country studies.
 
You will find my two drafts on basic education reform in Swaziland and South Africa below. These preliminary versions contain more direct quotations from African participants than the versions incorporated into the final report. Note that these are not formal evaluations or research studies. The intent simply was to focus on positive achievements from the perspective of those responsible for the accomplishments.
The published version of the basic education book is available in PDF format from the Africa Bureau Information Center (ABIC). Note: this is a very large file (3929K). Please send e-mail to [email protected] to have a copy mailed to you if your Internet connection is slow or unreliable.
In June, 1997, I began a three-month follow-up project sponsored directly by USAID/South Africa, examining the effect of U.S. assistance on further and higher education in South Africa. The result was eleven case histories of individual programmes plus a separate paper analysing overall impact and lessons learned. The final version of this overview is available here. Again, it is not a formal evaluation or research study, but the story of how USAID has assisted the transformation of post-secondary education as told in the words of those South Africans responsible for such achievements.

View this paper on-line. (This version does not include endnotes.)
Download a copy of this paper (145K) in MS Word 7 (Office 95) format (with endnotes).

Effective development projects
My 1997 consultancy in Washington required me to manage a variety of projects, including a development of a strategic framework for USAID's support to basic education in Africa, education sector assessments in Zimbabwe and Senegal, studies of challenges facing girls' education in Ghana and Morocco, the potential of using qualitative research methodology to help classroom teachers, using database and Internet technology to improve access to data on African educational development, strategies for effective collaboration among development partners, and support to a network of educational researchers in West Africa.
 
Strategic planning workshops
I am very interested in techniques such as future search and open space conference to help groups develop a united vision of where they wish to go (their goals or mission statement) and how they can get there (their action plan). I have been using these approaches in a variety of setting, from government agencies to non-governmental organizations, with sometimes remarkable results.
 

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This page was last modified on April 10, 1998.