Facilitative Legislative Framework and Institutional Practices
Institutional regulations and practices
Under current legislation, HEIs have pedagogic autonomy and can adopt DL methodology should they so wish, and this autonomy needs to be continued. It is not for legislation to impose on HEIs a direction on pedagogic approaches, either in terms of DL or F2F instruction. However, the definition of when a programme becomes a fully DL programme or a blended programme needs to be clarified, especially if funding and other administrative procedures have to be adjusted, for example to quantify contact hours or decide on the quality assurance guidelines to follow.
One issue for institutions to consider relates to distance teaching, which differs from face to face instruction in several respects. For example, compared with FTF teaching, more DL teachers are part-time, they need to work in teams, and their contact hours are difficult to define.
DL teachers often complain that their work does not receive due acknowledgement in the universities and in tenure processes. They have to put in extra amount of time in developing and implementing DL, such as for content creation, tutoring and supervision but there is no financial incentive to those who want to teach DL courses. Institutional regulations need to be modified to take account of this extra workload and the additional duties should be considered by tenure committees. Arrangements could be made, for example, to offer compensation through reduced contact-hour requirements. For example, teaching career at UAb should be "normalised" to give UAb's faculty the same opportunities to demonstrate their excellence that the colleagues from other universities have. However, we do not believe that a separate career for distance education teachers should be established because this would create the risk of professional differentiation, which would be harmful for DL.
Another issue needing attention by DL institutions relates to the intellectual property rights. Materials and resources developed by the staff should be published under some form of copyright licences (e.g. Creative Commons Licence) in order to foster wide sharing and use among all stakeholders (public in general, students and other higher education institutions). Such policy would create incentives and legitimise payments to staff for the development of digital resources.
One of the difficulties DL providers face relates to the application of enrolment limits at the level of institutions. Distance learning institutions draw their students from three sources: young candidates coming from secondary schools; candidates older than 23 years; transfer or change from course to course. Current regulations impose an enrolment limit for each of these paths. HEIs contend that they cannot freely re-assign vacancies from one path to another to meet their changing demand conditions. Relaxing these rigid constraints would promote greater enrolment.
Another constraint on enrolments is that the vacancy limits do not distinguish between resident and non-resident candidates and there is no set of vacancies for the latter. HEIs would like the flexibility to enrol foreign or non-resident students without including these in the quotas for national/resident students.
One specific need of distance learning concerns more flexible approach to assessment of student eligibility for programmes. DL can attract a number of adults with some previous professional experience and knowledge. To facilitate their decision to enter a DL programme, arrangements should be available to assess prior experience and learning and to take account of them in determining admission eligibility. Programmes of this type allow greater flexibility to the institutions in selecting their students. Establishment of APEL (Accreditation of Prior Experience and Learning) programmes could be organised through independent agencies.
Conclusion
The international experience with Distance Learning shows two dominant trends. First, from the paper-based classical pedagogy, DL has moved to virtual and interactive teaching and learning processes which represent a dramatic shift form the dimension of "space" in distance learning to the dimension of "time". Second, the use of the blended models by traditional HEIs, which uses the new DL pedagogy in support of classical face to face instruction has spread rapidly and represents the wave of the future.
Compared to other advanced nations of Europe, Portugal started late in developing Distance Learning. Its adoption of fully virtual pedagogy is very recent. As it stands now, DL accounts for around 3% of all higher education enrolment. More than 90% of this comes from UAb, which now has fully on-line programmes and courses. The two international trends noted above are now catching on in Portugal and more HEIs are beginning to offer selected DL courses and planning to use DL methodology more extensively in blended models.
The DL sector in Portugal is small relative to its population compared with other advanced nations of Europe. The sector is not contributing its share to the national higher education system up to its potential.
There are persuasive reasons for the sector to be expanded, not least to help broaden the base of participation in the higher education system. Given is relatively lower per student cost, its suitability for meeting emerging lifelong learning needs, and the large pool of adults who could potentially benefit from DL, the sector needs to be expanded significantly. To reach the standards of other advanced European benchmarks, the sector's size would need to be expanded several-fold.
Regardless of the precise targets, the sector does need to be expanded significantly. Extensive investment would be needed, on a scale matched by the scale increase in student population. A four-fold increase in enrolments is likely to come at close to four-fold increase in current resources for the sector. In other words, scale economies and existing slack in the system is unlikely to change this equation substantially. The current division between public and private sector, though moving in the direction of a larger contribution from the latter, cannot be expected to change dramatically in the light of the experience from other countries. However, the scope of private sector's contribution, would need thorough examination.