Assuming that your e-mail has been working, you should have now had the opportunity to meet your peers, with whom you will work over the coming months (and each of whom you will hopefully meet in Maputo). We hope that you have found it easy to use e-mail to communicate with fellow learners in this way. If you have had any problems, though, please do feel free to contact your mentor at any time to discuss these. Your mentor will also telephone you periodically to confirm that everything is going well, as well as providing you a telephone number that you can use to contact her or him if necessary.

At this point, we would like to introduce some of the educational principles according to which we have designed this course:

	There are no 'right' answers to the activities you will do during this course, so there is no need to worry about 'getting it wrong'. In each activity, we are asking you to develop and share your own ideas about policy-making and distance education. We hope that, by sharing these ideas with your peers from around Southern Africa, you will find the course process more enriching.
	This course will depend, for its success, on all of you using e-mail to communicate with each other, to share  ideas, discuss issues, and agree or disagree with each other. Your contributions will make or break this course   for everyone, so we would like to encourage to use the e-mail as regularly as you can and to check your Inbox often so that you can see what other fellow learners are saying. Above all, please do not be scared to use the e-mail. The comments you make are intended for your peers only, and will not be circulated beyond this small group.
	Activities are supported by a range of readings, all available on this CD. Although we have included many   readings, we have not assumed that you will read through all of them while completing this course. Although    none is compulsory, a few are core readings that we think will be necessary to complete this course successfully. For the rest, we suggest that browse through the contents pages and select those that look most interesting.

If you have any concerns or questions about these points, please contact your mentor to share these.

If you are comfortable with the above, then please proceed to activity one.