To read more about the purpose of this activity, click here.

 The task 

The Minister of Education in your country has just sent you a confidential memorandum outlining her (his) vision for distance education in your country. She (he) has urgently requested you to respond to this memo, and is particularly interested to know the following:

	What existing policies in your country will be affected by the Minister's proposals. How will they be affected?
	Is the vision the Minister has sketched out relevant? Why (or why not)?
	What resources would you have to mobilize to implement the vision? Think here of existing infrastructure, human capacity, and finances before answering. Is this realistic?
	Is the vision practical? Why (or why not)?
	Based on your responses, describe briefly how you would amend the vision.

 What you should read 

  There are no readings required for this activity.

 What you need to do 

Click on this link to view the Minister's internal memorandum. When you click on this link a new window of your web browser will open. In this way, you can keep the letter open, and refer to this activity page at the same time. 

Prepare your response to the Minister's memorandum. To assist you in answering the question, we have prepared an activity template in Microsoft Word that you can use to complete your answers. Once you have completed this document, save it in an appropriate location on your computer. 

You may find it useful to refer back to this document in later activities, so please ensure that you save it somewhere that you will easily be able to find it. 

It is probably advisable to create a new folder in which you store all documents you generate during this course. If you are unsure about how to do this, view these help files on using Windows. We have also included some help files on Word 97 and on Word 2000, which you might find useful. 

Attach your response to an e-mail to your group of peers (this is the same group you met in the previous activity). Click here to send an e-mail to the group with your response to this activity. Add any comments in the mail that you think are necessary to explain further why you have answered as you did. When you have completed your mail, send it to the group. 

At this time, you should start receiving the responses of other members of the group. When you look through these responses, you might like to consider the following questions: Do I agree/disagree with other people's responses? How relevant are other people's responses to my country? What do I think is missing from these responses? Your online mentor will also ask you further questions based on the inputs from the group. At any point, you can share any of your observations with the rest of the group, either by pressing the Reply button on the e-mail or by clicking on this link (Share further comments on activity one with the group). 

 Estimated time 

We expect that this activity should take between 2 to 4 hours. We suggest you think of spending your time as follows (but remember this is only a guide):

1. Reading the Minister's memorandum thoroughly should take about 15 minutes.
2. Preparing your response to the Minister's memorandum will take between 1 - 2 hours.
3. Reading other people's responses and participating in ongoing discussions will last another 1 - 2 hours in total.

 On completion  

  When you have worked through the steps above, you can proceed to the following activity. Before doing this, though, we suggest that you read a brief reflection on activity one. This will hopefully help to contextualize what you have just done within the overall course.

At any time, you can navigate directly to activities by clicking on one of the Course Activities options on the menu running down the left of this page. You can also find a full map of the course if you click on the 'Course' Option at the top of the page.