Making ODL viable: A model of shared services in the Caribbean

Abstract

One method of meeting the increasing demand for tertiary education in the Caribbean region is through distance education, specifically open and distance learning (ODL). Distance education offers developing countries the opportunity to address the problems of educational funding, access and quality (Perraton, 2007). In order to take advantage of ODL, three tertiary institutions in Barbados have decided to implement a shared services model in order to enable effective service provisioning while at the same time: a) Optimizing efficiency and effectiveness b) Making more effective use of scarce technical resources c) Obtaining the benefits of scale and minimizing costs d) Allowing academic staff and the institutions to focus on core activities and core competencies This paper will describe the educational context for the implementation of this model, describe the challenges in the process of creating a shared services mechanism and will chronicle the lessons learned in the implementation of the shared ICT services for open and distance learning.