Correspondence Instruction and the Use of Self‐instructional Media in Schools

INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS based on the study of correspondence courses are being made in some English schools co-operating with the National Extension College at Cambridge. These experiments have much in common with work done in Swedish grammar schools and comprehensive schools since the beginning of the 1940's. Correspondence education enjoys much prestige in Sweden. The biggest school, Hermods, founded in 1898, is a non-profit-making foundation which is also an official examining body under the supervision of the National Board of Education. It annually enrols more than oo00,000ooo new students. The only other Swedish correspondence schools that are of any consequence are, apart from a small school belonging to the armed forces, owned by the trade unions and other organizations. They are all responsible institutions between which there is some co-operation. Only a small proportion of the work done by Swedish correspondence schools concerns the official school system, but nevertheless it is of some interest as it has opened new ways towards individualization and has proved very useful in several respects. Today we find two separate applications of correspondence course material in schools, namely supervised correspondence study and the use made of correspondence course units as self-instructional media without written work being submitted to the correspondence school. SUPERVISED CORRESPONDENCE STUDY

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