Attracting Teacher College Tutors to Postgraduate Programmes Offered Through Open and Distance Learning

This study was set to investigate whether tutors in public Teacher Colleges are attracted to pursue postgraduate programmes offered through Open and Distance Learning specifically, at The Open University of Tanzania. The study also aimed at suggesting viable strategies that could attract more teacher college tutors in public teacher colleges to pursue post graduate programmes offered through ODL particularly, at OUT. The study was mainly qualitative in nature although some aspects of descriptive quantitative measures were employed. The data were collected through interviews and questionnaires. The findings revealed that the majority of teacher college tutors in public Teacher Colleges were not aware of the existence of OUT despite the university’s advertisements. The study found that there were a number of reasons that hindered the few teacher college tutors who were aware of the institution from pursuing postgraduate programmes offered through ODL especially at OUT. The reasons were categorized into those related to The Open University of Tanzania, college tutors’ employer and the tutors themselves. The study concluded that to a large extent OUT has played its role in advertising and publicizing the university through different media. However, it is evident through the study that much time was taken to complete postgraduate programmes studied by postgraduate students because of misplacement and loss of tests, assignments and examinations results, delay to give feed back for the marked tests, assignments and examinations, lack of study materials, and lack financial support from MoEVT. These reasons contributed in hindering tutors in public Teacher Colleges from pursuing postgraduate programmes at OUT. The researcher recommends that there is a need for OUT and MoEVT to address the challenges that distract teacher college tutors from pursuing post graduate programmes at OUT