ABSTRACT
Is distance education any good? How can we ensure our project will achieve its aims? These are surely the first questions which come to mind for many people when introduced to the idea of promoting a basic education project using distance education. Many will be aware of the problems of varying levels of quality associated with many correspondence courses, or, more recently, with on-line courses. In previous chapters, we have seen examples of the different ways in which distance education can be used to promote basic education. While some projects are successful, others have more difficulties in achieving their aims. The evaluation findings from these projects contribute to the pool of knowledge upon which policy makers, planners and educationalists draw when designing and developing their own distance education systems for this type of education. Unfortunately it is often the case that there is inadequate information about what was actually achieved, the process by which it was achieved and which aspects worked well and why. The process of drawing upon the lessons of one’s own experience and the experience of others is what we term evaluation. While we use informal evaluation all the time in our decision making, the need for formal evaluation is often not recognised until rather late in the day. The reasons for this can range from lack of awareness of the benefits of systematic and rigorous data collection to a simple lack of concern about those benefits.
