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

 The task 

The Minister of Education in your country has received your response to her (his) vision for distance education in your country. This response has provided a clearer sense of some of the contextual issues that will need to be taken into account in developing national policy frameworks for distance education. After consulting her (his) special advisers, she (he) has decided that - in order to demonstrate how seriously distance education is regarded by the Ministry - it is imperative to proceed immediately with a national process for establishing national policies on distance education. In view of your insightful response to the original memo, the Minister has decided to appoint you as the convener of a planning committee for this new process. This new brief is contained in a follow-up communiqué from the Minister. It is also accompanied by a letter of support from a donor agency, which was recently forwarded to the Minister's office.

 What you should read 

  There are no readings required for this activity. However, you may find it useful to get some guidance from the documents on planning we have placed on the CD. You can view a list of documents on planning here.

You might be particularly interested to look at A project planning summary template for project management, which will give you some ideas about a format to follow for this activity.

 What you need to do 

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

Click on this link to view the donor agency's letter. When you click on this link a new window of your web browser will again open. 

Did you know that an easy way to close an open Window in Windows is to Press the Alt and F4 buttons together. This makes it easy to close windows like the pop-up windows that opened when you clicked on the linked to the letters for this activity.

	Prepare your response to the Minister's communiqué. To assist you in completing this task, 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.
	Attach your response to an e-mail to your group of peers. 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 the submission you have prepared. 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: How similar are other people's submissions to your own? Where there are differences, why do you think this is the case? Is it because of the difference in context or are there elements of other people's responses that might be useful in your country? What do you think is missing from other people's submissions? 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 two with the group).

 Estimated time 

We expect that this activity should take between 6 to 8 hours. We suggest you think of spending your time as follows (but remember this is only a guide):

	Reading the Minister's communiqué and the letter from the donor agency thoroughly should take about 20 minutes.
	Preparing your response to the Minister's communiqué will take between 3 - 4 hours.
	Reading other people's responses and participating in ongoing discussions will last another 3 - 4 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 two. This will hopefully help to contextualize what you have done within the overall course.