Research On Distance Higher Education In Zimbabwe

With the development of the society and continuous innovation improvement of information and communication technology, distance higher education began to flourish and play an increasingly important role in the socio-economic development. The distance higher education students who master the self-learning ability made great contribution to the social and economic development, which attracted more and more people to join in the distance learning. Zimbabwe distance higher education has a long history with a slow development, but there was a great progress since the established of the new government in 1980 as well as the established of the Zimbabwe Open University, so that the distance higher education in Zimbabwe went into a new stage of development. This paper describes the historical development and the status quo of distance higher education in Zimbabwe, and a case study about Zimbabwe Open University, points out that the future prospects of distance higher education in Zimbabwe. Six parts is consisted in this paper, the introduction part outlines the background and explains the significance of the issues raised, the core definition, literatures review and the methods of study. The second part describes the three development stages of distance higher education in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe distance higher education has already appeared in the colonial period, but the development was slow, and the colonial apartheid education system limited the opportunity of most people to receive education. The new government adopted a strategy to comprehensively promote the education development in 1980, existing higher education institutions cannot meet the rapidly increasing demand of higher education, which provides an opportunity for the development of distance higher education. Since the new century, coupled with the rapid development of science and technology, distance higher education went into the rapid development stage. The third part analyzes the current status of the development of distance higher education in Zimbabwe, as a parallel educational system with the formal education system, the purpose of distance higher education is to provide distance education for those people who didn’t received education previously and those vulnerable groups. Distance higher education expanded student enrollment by expanding the source of students, and effectively improved the quality of education, reduced the cost of teaching with limited resources, promoted the all-round talents cultivation. The fourth part focuses on the Zimbabwe Open University. As the only distance education and open learning institution which providing degree education, ZOU using print media as the based distance learning mode, providing a wide range of academic subjects, with a sound management system and quality assurance mechanism. The scale of teaching is contusion expanding, effectively alleviated gender inequality within higher education, and gradually improved the quality of teaching, also has a huge potential and space for future development. Part fifth points out the current challenges faced by Zimbabwe distance higher education, including external funding shortage, inadequate infrastructure and the challenges of brain drain, the internal high-quality teaching force shortage problems, limitations of ICT and students dropout rate problem, under this kind of situation, the government should strengthen their intervention to Zimbabwe distance higher education, the distance higher education institutions should develop employee retention strategies, enhance the introduction and application of information and communication technologies and gradually improve their school business model. The sixth part is the conclusion part, summarizes the development of distance higher education in Zimbabwe, noting that under the impact of the current world’s most advanced distance learning mode, they should learn to improve their own teaching model on the basis of drawing and absorption, to achieve the sustainable development of its distance higher education.