Evaluation Perspectives: Interrogating Open and Distance Education Provision at an Australian Regional University (original) (raw)

Central Queensland University (CQU) encapsulates many of the recent changes to Australian universities. These changes include the imperative to diversify funding sources, the expansion of international education, the blurring of modes of study and the proliferation of online and other technologically based teaching and learning. This paper canvasses several of the issues framing current and potential strategies for evaluating the effectiveness of Central Queensland University's open and distance education provision. These issues include the institution's ongoing search for its identity; historically grounded practices and assumptions around open and distance education; changing demographics; expectations of contemporary university students and teachers; and evident tensions around the commercialization of some elements of the University's operations. The associated strategies are designed to respond to these issues at the same time as promoting diversity, equity and sustainability in the institution's open and distance education offerings. In combination, these issues and strategies derive from implicit-and too often unexamined-assumptions about which kinds of evaluation are viewed as 'legitimate' and about who gets to make those judgments. The paper concludes by considering some of the key implications of current evaluation practices and the conceptual framework for understanding what is seen as 'legitimate' evaluation (and by whom) in contemporary Australian universities' open and distance education offerings, and the potential role of evidence-based practice in reinvigorating that debate. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CQU CQU is an Australian multi-campus regional university with an increasing focus on internationalizing its student population. Founded in 1967, it became a university in its own right in 1991 (Cryle,1992). Currently CQU has thirteen (13) campuses including five in regional Queensland, four in major Australian metropolitan centres and four campuses in other countries. In 2003 at CQU, 7 261 students (34%) were designated as 'distance education' or 'external students', while 1187 students (5.5%) were designated as "multimodal" or "internal and external" students (Luck, Jones, McConachie & Danaher, 2004, p. 5). The remaining 12 903 students (60.5%) were deemed to be 'face-to-face' or 'internal' students. Total student numbers more than tripled between 1990 and 2003, rising from 6000 to 21000 approximately. This increase was accompanied by an increasing diversity of the student profile. Up until the early 1990s, CQU's student population was approximately 50% internal and 50% external enrolments, and the majority of students were Australian. With the creation of the international campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast during the 1990s, international students now form nearly 40% of CQU's student population and they originate from 121 countries (UniNews Weekly, 9 January 2004; cited in Luck et al., 2004, pp. 4-5). Moreover, the proportion of school leavers and mature age students has shifted dramatically, so that in 2003 only one-fifth of new students are recent school leavers (p. 5).