South African College for Open Learning: A Model of an Inservice Distance Education Programme for Initial Teacher Education (CIE, 2002, 37 p.): 4. Data Collection and Analysis

South African College for Open Learning: A Model of an Inservice Distance Education Programme for Initial Teacher Education (CIE, 2002, 37 p.)

		(introduction...)
		Multi-Site Teacher Education Research Project (MUSTER)
		List of Acronyms
		Abstract
		1. Introduction
		2. Overview of Development of Teacher Education at SACOL
		3. Context in which the data was collected
		4. Data Collection and Analysis
		5. Overview of the College
		6. The Initial Teacher Education Curriculum and its Evaluation
		7. Students' Aspirations, Expectations and Preparedness
		8. Costs of the SACOL Programmes
		9. Key Issues from the SACOL Case Study
		10. Concluding Remarks
		References
		Appendix One: Student registration at SACOL for 1999 and 2000
		Appendix Two: Results for certificate courses
		Appendix Three: Results for diploma courses
		Appendix Four: Higher Diploma in Education
		Appendix Five: Further Diploma In Education
		Appendix Six: Categorisation of academic staff into faculties and departments
		Appendix Seven: Buildings and infrastructure at each campus
		Appendix Eight: Diploma In Education: Structure (10 Cotep Credit - 360 Saqa)

4. Data Collection and Analysis

In order to study the teacher education programme at SACOL, I collected data between March and July 2000. Data was collected from a number of sources.

· There were interviews with the Vice-Rector (Durban) and Senior Heads of Department about the history, the organisation and the issues facing SACOL.
· There were interviews with Heads of Department of English, Mathematics and Science and lecturers involved in the certificate and diploma courses about the curriculum and delivery of the curriculum.
· There was an interview with the Head of Department, responsible for curriculum issues, regarding the organisation of the college curriculum.
· SACOL has an administrative database (SACOLMAN). It was used to generate statistics about students, and programmes. I accessed the database for enrolment and performance data. In using the statistics it was assumed that the data was entered correctly. There was no check of the entry of data or whether all the data had been captured correctly.
· There was an interview with staff in the Dispatch unit about the distribution of materials to students.
· There was an interview about data capture process.
· There was a review of various institutional reports.
· There was an analysis of study guides, materials, assignments and assessment tasks.
· >From the interviews with the academic staff a student questionnaire was generated and this was administered to a sample of students in the certificate and diploma courses. The questionnaire was administered to 209 second year certificate and diploma students (51 certificate and 158 diploma). The questionnaire items related to an evaluation of the programme. The information from the questionnaires was captured on the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) spreadsheet and analysed using frequency counts and cross-tabs.
· There were student interviews for their views of the teacher education programme.
· There was observation of contact session workshops.
· There was an interview with the librarian.
³ I would like to thank the staff of SACOL for the assistance they offered in the data collection process.