Chat with Norman Pritchard

by yangliu

Norman Pritchard, who has just spent his 39th birthday (which is his 24th thirty-ninth birthday) with Beiwaionline team, is our foreign expert on audio and video learning materials. He is now coming to the end of his courseware: Learn From Movies, which is the elective course for the third year of our Diploma. He is also an expert in Distance Learning and Teaching. He has worked for many overseas distance institutions in his forty years as a teacher and writer, and from 1996 to 1999 he spent three years with China Central Television University, producing training courses for tutors and developing and recording the video programmes for our Distance BA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).

The other day, I had a very serious chat with him. Concerning the spread of online teaching in China, I asked him why he thought people choose Online Education compared to other learning systems, and how they benefit from it. He thought it carefully, and then he said:

Online teaching, which is a technological extension of Distance and Open Learning, is the way ahead for China and probably most other developing countries. Its major advantage is that it can grow exponentially while traditional methods for increasing educational access (building more schools or universities) can only grow in arithmetical progression. Since the major need in China at the moment is to increase the number of graduates over the next 5 years by about 20 million, clearly only an exponential growth rate can meet the bill. That's the economic argument. Another part of the argument is to do with the way we perceive education and training and life-long education in the modern world. Traditionally we took children and young people out of the 'real' world and put them into schools and universities where they were educated according to relatively strict procedures that often had little relevance to the real world. Since they were separated from that world, they learnt nothing of it - only academic things from academic people. The advantage of Online & Distance Learning is that it can suit the individual and can take place while the individual is still in the real world, thus allowing the learner to check what she is learning with reality, for example, the BA in TEFL is studied by practicing teachers, which means that anything she learns during the course can be put into practice straight away.

Mr. Pritchard points out that China currently has 77 million secondary students who become only 3 million university students at present. 3 million university students mean that fewer than a million a year graduate , so over the next 5 years China will only have about 4 million graduates - but China's economic growth requires 20 million technically-educated graduates in that period - ie 5 times the actual number. (These estimates were taken from a recent CNN report). Thus the conclusion is obvious - it's got to be online, because even if you built a new university every week for the next 5 years, you still wouldn't be able to produce 16 million extra graduates.

When I pointed out that most Chinese students still didn't have computers, he said that for the price of one new university the government could probably give away a free computer to the whole of this year's school leavers. And in any case, ordinary people are taking up computers with incredible speed. It will be a good investment for any family, because of the increased access to the job market that results from people upgrading their own qualifications and skills. And the job market for skilled personnel is expanding all the time - in a time of unprecedented economic growth, like now in China, there will be three jobs chasing every graduate and ten jobs chasing every technically-qualified one, so the message is clear to everybody - upgrade your skills in any way you can.
Mr. Pritchard continued with general principles before we could get to any specifics concerning online methodology. The first principle of our methodology, he said, is one of learner-centeredness. The traditional classroom is teacher-centered: and teacher-led with the students being force-fed (or spoon-fed) little bits of knowledge every hour. Because of this tradition, students often fail to understand the methodology of online learning. They think they've paid the tuition and expect the teacher to appear in front of them, teaching. But the whole point is that the learner is responsible for herself. The Online Learner must be self-motivated and independent. The buzzword is autonomous. Only the autonomy of the learner will enable us to face the challenges of this century. Dependence upon teacher or the government will not result in a strong China. The old communist slogan about 'out of our own strength' is truer than ever. But today it means out of our individual strength. This is the foundation of democracy, of course, but that kind of emphasis on individual responsibility runs contrary to the group mentality of Chinese culture and Chinese communism, so there are many changes taking place at both the practical level and also the ideological level. The student has to do the learning - we can't do it for her - what she buys from us are the materials and the system that will support her in her task.

Our 2nd principle is one of learner-friendly materials. We should provide materials that help the learner to go step-by-step through a discovery process, aided by all the audio and video magic that the Internet is capable of. We can provide the challenge of tasks and exercises with immediate feedback and comment, plus links to all sorts of other research areas if the learner requires them. The learner chooses how much to study and for how long. The learner chooses WHEN to study. The learner chooses WHICH BIT to study and the learner knows whether they have answered correctly or not. Our Beiwaionline has chat-lines, voice-to-voice tutorials, and in the future I'm sure face-to-face Q and A sessions. The Institute of Online Education could provide very good learning process monitoring by these methods.

As for the obstacles Online Education is facing, Mr. Pritchard thinks there is a whole culture of prejudice to be overcome. Start-up is always like that in this kind of business. One can't expect a profit in the first few years. If one wants a quick profit, one puts up a cheap building fast and sells it. If, on the other hand, he wants to invest in something with huge growth potential, he has to invest more long-term and take the corresponding risk. The pressure on any learning system is going to be enormous over the next ten years. As the technology gets better - especially with broadband - and as we develop better and better courseware, the audiences will grow.

He also frankly expressed his opinions towards the key problems of our Institute. He personally thinks that our technical inadequacies have to be overcome as quickly as possible. In particular our own quality control in terms of sound. We have to stop believing that we can produce transmission quality sound with Mickey Mouse equipment. We need professional studio equipment, and professionally-trained sound and video technicians. At the same time, we have to keep tighter control over the quality of our tutors. The best form of quality control is real incentives. Our tutors have to try and forget all their own years of being taught (often badly) and then their own years of teaching (usually talk n chalk) and try to catch up with what the rest of the world has been doing for years, that is, motivating and empowering the students so that they take control of their own learning process. A tutor is not a teacher or a lecturer - she is a manager, an enabler, a guide. It is important for our tutors to learn this.

Mr. Pritchard was enthusiastic and optimistic in his general impressions of BeiWaiOnline. "We have a terrific team of people, both on the management and on the production/teaching side. We are all working like mad, and experimenting all the time with this new medium. Things are not perfect now - they can't be - but we are getting better and better, and in the future we will look back with pride at this time of ground-breaking and innovation that we are all going through. The future is bright and exciting!"