A qualitative view of the roles and responsibilities of open distance students at a higher education institution

Abstract

South Africa requires an educated population to sustain her economic development. Higher education institutions are under pressure to produce graduates with skills and competencies to fulfil such an aspiration. Distance education is an essential avenue through which more South Africans can have the much needed education without necessarily displacing themselves. Distance education is facilitated and regulated by the White Paper on e-Education which is a generic policy document to serve the needs of the system-wide use of ICT integration at all levels of education. It falls short of conceptualising the implications of ICT in distance education particularly the North-West University's (NWU) Open Distance Learning (ODL) multi-mode of education content delivery. The conceptualisation shortfall facilitates a Western oriented understanding of knowledge while ODL students' traditional understanding of their roles and responsibilities are ignored. The concepts of roles and responsibilities are critically important for an effective functioning of ODL and they are essential to the attainment of students' education aspirations. At the NWU, approximately seventy per cent of ODL student are Africans whose worldviews do not harmonise with the vision of universities. The research question which underpinned this study was What are the experiences of the roles and responsibilities of open distance students at a higher education institution? I followed an interpretivist research paradigm, which would draw on a qualitative research approach. To explore the experiences of the ODL students' roles and responsibilities, I employed a systematic literature review to qualitatively scrutinise the appropriate literature and subsequently explore the ODL students' views. I purposively selected ODL students as research participants for focus-group interviews with ODL students. The collected data were coded, sorted and summarised as themes, using the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (a CAQDAS), ATLAS tiTM. The analyses comprised an integrated dataset of voices from systematically selected authors and ODL students in order to address the research question. Due attention was given to ethical considerations throughout the study. The findings revealed that ODL students have several ways in which they understand their roles and responsibilities which were shaped by their African worldview, Africanisation. The findings that emerged from the analyses of roles and responsibilities were task orientation; time management; personal growth; social roles; financial responsibilities; personal responsibilities; family responsibilities and social responsibilities. This is because existing literature on these two entities combined them as a single. The analyses indicated that the students were not able to clearly distinguish the entities of role and responsibilities. From the lens of an African perspective, the study identified eight matching conclusions, contributions and questions to be addressed during future research.