At the moment, the UWI’s distance education programmes are very much "in-house". We may occasionally use material from elsewhere (and in one case have franchised a whole degree programme), but usually everything is home-grown. And that internal work is usually a matter of one individual working with assistance from the DEC, rather than a team of subject experts. Again, the organisation and administration of our DE programmes is wholly within the UWI. We may hire part-time staff to do it in some cases, but they are our staff.

Another important plank in the University’s strategy for improving access within the NCCs is to permit TLIs to teach part or all of some degree programmes. When this happens, almost everything is in the hands of the TLI, except for the final determination of exam results. The University provides various other registrarial services but these in many cases duplicate what is being done within the TLIs themselves.

One consequence of these different strategies is that in those countries where a TLI is teaching our courses it may well happen that the TLI provides for the teaching of a course (people to lecture and tutor, library resources, places for classes to happen, and so on) while down the road our Resident Tutor is doing precisely the same for the distance rendition of precisely the same course. (I idealise somewhat in saying "precisely", but the point is not really affected.)

Now it may well happen that in a particular location the same expertise is called upon in both these cases, but it may not turn out that way. And classroom space and other organisational matters are almost certainly going to run independently. On the face of it, this is not a recipe for efficiency.

One suggestion in the Plan was a gesture towards integration here. If the TLI is willing, why not let it take over the general running of those distance education courses that it is already handling for face-to-face teaching (and indeed of any others that it can adequately deal with)? It is a constant complaint that running distance education is interfering with the other and more central duties of our Resident Tutors. This would be one way to lessen the burden on them. Of course, we cannot imagine that a TLI would undertake these tasks for nothing. But by now, we must have some reasonable idea of the recurrent costs of providing the necessary services, so that the DEC could pay the TLIs a realistic figure for doing what the University is paying people to do at the University Centres. It is equally obvious that any such devolution of responsibilities would require close collaboration between the TLI and the University Centre (if for no other reason than that system-wide teleconferences would have to be held at the latter location), but surely that is to be welcomed rather than seen as a problem.

A second suggestion seems to me more important and moreover should encounter fewer obstacles to implementation. It is for the DEC to recover the initial notion that DE courses should be the result of team work at the academic level as well as in terms of pedagogy and presentation. We had hoped that cross-campus teams of subject specialists would together create the materials for a course. This should permit each campus to ensure that whatever perspectives it favours would get a hearing and, in those cases where local reference is prominent, that we recover some of the regional concern we should be displaying. Within this general re-orientation, the NCC TLIs can play an important part. There is no reason why the teams responsible for a particular course should be restricted to members of the UWI staff. We simply need expertise and a willingness to work to deadlines. Collaboration with staff in the TLIs could therefore range from their taking charge of the co-ordination of a specialist team to produce a course to the contribution of small but significant parts of the complete course material (local case studies, perhaps, or links to the World-Wide Web, or in-course tests).