Short Courses

Short courses³ of various kinds are a form of education and training delivery widely favoured by international organisations. Each year, thousands of short courses are provided by hundreds of different education service providers in dozens of developing countries. In view of the strong emphasis on development effectiveness across the international development community in recent years it is useful to consider a key issue: Are short courses effective?

In fact, it is not easy to reach any firm conclusions. For one thing, the quality of such activities as short courses and workshops varies widely. Furthermore, for a range of reasons they are hard to evaluate. Amongst the difficulties which need to be considered in attempting any wide evaluation are the following:

• Although the objectives of many short course programs are not clear, there often appear to be multiple objectives.
• Outputs are hard to measure.
• Evaluation techniques are often rather unsatisfactory, frequently consisting of the collection of 'happy sheets' from participants.
• Statistics, including costs, are generally not recorded well.
• There is rarely any attempt to monitor long-term impact.
• Institutions providing the courses do not always welcome evaluations of their programs.

However, despite these difficulties it is possible to identify at least four main areas in which the traditional approach to short courses has often had shortcomings: content, costs, and dissemination and sustainability.

Content

As a general rule, many of the international institutions providing short course have not been subject to market disciplines. Many short courses have been subsidised, either in full or in part, by donor governments or by international agencies. Content has therefore often been supply driven rather than demand responsive. As a result, the content of the material provided has often been inappropriate in various ways.

For one thing, many short courses contain too much material. The consequence is that participants suffer from information overload and have considerable difficulty in sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Faced with a large amount of information -- which is often provided in an unfamiliar language -- there is a risk that some participants become overwhelmed by the mass of material and gain little from the course. A second problem is that in some cases the content of courses is too general or contains too much material (often Western) of little relevance to the practical problems encountered in developing countries. Courses which draw heavily on material from OECD countries and which take for granted the existence of strong supporting institutions (such as strong legal and regulatory systems) are often of limited value to participants from developing countries. Indeed, it is often the case that the sharing of south-south experiences is of more value than drawing on case studies from OECD countries. Similarly, course materials which are too complicated or which assume a significant amount of prior knowledge of a subject may be unsuitable for use in many short courses.

Costs

Another significant shortcoming with the traditional approach is that measured in terms of costs per participant day, short courses are often expensive. Relatively high costs arise from factors such as the following:

• Air fares (often business class) for participants
• High hotel and per diem allowances for participants
• Fees and other costs involved in hiring guest lecturers
• Various other incidental costs which often add significantly to total costs.

Some of these costs are overheads. When they can be spread across courses which extend for several weeks or a month, average daily costs generally fall significantly. But when courses run for just three or four days, average daily costs can approach $1,000 per participant (up to $4,000 per participant for a four day course). By contrast, in Australia the cost to the official aid program of providing full support (including living costs) to the average student from a developing country undertaking graduate studies is around $20,000 for a full year.

To be sure, it is arguable difficult to compare the benefits from providing short-term training and long-term graduate study opportunities. In the case of the former, participants are often mid-career public servants who, as well as benefiting from training, develop useful contacts during a short course overseas. In the case of the latter, benefits flowing to the developing country that the students come from may only accrue over the long term. Whatever judgment is made about the relative benefits of short-term courses compared with long-term training, since short courses and workshops are often a relatively expensive activity there would be considerable advantages in ensuring that materials from the courses are shared as widely as possible. This, in turn, suggests that considerable attention is needed to the way that content from short courses is disseminated, and to ensuring that the content is sustainable.

Dissemination

The traditional approach to the provision of short courses concentrates on the immediate needs of the group participating in the course. In many cases, no special efforts to improve outreach are incorporated as part of course activities because the intention is to use the short courses themselves as the main delivery mechanism. However in other cases specific steps are sometimes taken to develop mechanisms for outreach, two of the most common being the preparation of comprehensive folders of course materials (sometimes printed in book form) for wider dissemination, and a training-the-trainers approach based on the presumption that participants in the initial course might themselves be able to draw course materials later to present similar courses after they return to their home countries.

In practice, the indications are that these two main outreach mechanisms -- the compilation of folders of course materials, and the training-of-trainers approach -- are rarely particularly effective. The logistics of distributing bulky folders and books to an uncertain audience in developing countries are quite difficult. Few international agencies are well-equipped to do the job with any particular degree of success. Rather, the folders and books tend to pile up in warehouses or are sent out largely at random to government agencies and educational institutions in developing countries on the off-chance that somebody will find the material useful. But in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region bulky materials in English tend to go unread so this approach is unlikely to find many readers. The first step to effective distribution of materials of this kind in many countries in the region is the preparation of high-quality translations. But this is rarely done, and even when translations are prepared, quality control is often poor. The consequence is that translated materials are often quite difficult to understand and are sometimes actually misleading.

The training-of-trainers approach rests on the presumptions that after returning to their home countries, course participants will be in a position to use the information that they have acquired to present similar courses, and that they will have the incentive to do so. However local conditions in developing countries often mean that these conditions are not met. Participants often return to onerous work schedules at home which allow little time to present courses, and in any case there is frequently no financial incentive for them to do so.