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Even though the so-called legacy qualifications have been given a third life, there are still those who oppose the unit standard approach. Some academics actually vehemently oppose such standards. I am not one of them because I always saw a multitude of advantages for learners, learning institutions and the country in following a unit standards approach to learning. And now, at last, I came across a good scientific foundation for the merits of the system, which brings me to granularity.
The EDUCAUSE Instructional Management System uses the term “relative size of a resource” as their working definition of granularity. (McLoughlin in http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdie20, accessed on 2015/09/17.) The relative size of instructional resources ranges from low to high granularity as follows: curriculum, course, unit, topic, and lesson fragment. In learning, high granularity is a property of resources and learning methodologies as tasks need to be broken down into component parts. (Note: the author of my source refers to “strategies” rather than methodologies. I, however, do not agree that an approach to learning is a strategy for reasons that we might discuss some other time). High granularity enables learners to select and reconstruct the parts of learning that are meaningful to them and therefore are more efficient.
Unit standards are a good example of a learning approach with high granularity. Learning providers who follow a flexible approach to learning can offer unit standards in a multitude of ways, affording learners the opportunity to study only the unit standards that will provide them with the knowledge and skills that they need, articulate their learning to the demands of the workplace and time available, stop learning and continue at a later stage if their needs change and many more. A unit standards approach is especially well-suited to a country like South Africa with a rather large number of people who face challenges like unemployment, a poor learning foundation to build on, limited funds, etc.
It fascinates me how easily people can destroy good opportunities because they don’t really think about the consequences. Doing away with unit standards is an example of this. As a speaker at a workshop that I recently attended said: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
