UWI/OAS-CICAD On-line Certificate in Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment

Lawrence D.
Carrington

By Pro Vice Chancellor Lawrence D. Carrington

Chair, Board of Non-Campus Countries and Distance Education, UWI

Remarks for launch of Certificate programme
Wednesday, 11 June, 2007

The University of the West Indies is very proud to launch this online programme in drug abuse prevention and treatment in collaboration with the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organisation of American States. It is appropriate that as a regional educational institution we should be joining forces with another regional agency with a wider reach than our own to address a problem of international proportions that has defied all conventional approaches to its control and elimination.

This is not our first joint engagement with the issue of drug abuse prevention and with the training of a wide range of personnel to work towards the alleviation of this scourge. Starting in January 1994, The University of the West Indies partnered with CICAD, the Addiction Research Foundation of Canada and the United Nations International Drug Control Programme to conduct the Caribbean Regional Certificate Programme in Addiction Studies. It started at the St. Augustine Campus and expanded to Mona and Cave Hill by 1995. By 1997, it was being offered in the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. For a period of nearly 10 years, the School of Continuing Studies, the Department of Sociology and Social Work and the Department of Community Health and Psychiatry of the Mona Campus worked together to offer that regional certificate programme.

Over those years, it provided several hundred persons in a wide variety of occupations with exposure to the issues of drug abuse prevention. At that time, our technology was relatively elementary and we depended on print and audio-teleconferencing to deliver our programmes. We must pay tribute to those who pioneered our work in the field during those years and at the risk of being incomplete in my details. I refer to Dr. Charles Thesiger, Dr. Lennox Bernard, Mrs. Carleen Boyce Reid and Professor Don Meeks from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health of Canada. Dr. Anna Chisman of CICAD was a principal personality even at that time and we salute her constancy and faith in our university. My predecessor at the School of Continuing Studies, Professor Rex Nettleford, was the University advocate for that programme and we must pay homage to them all.

The Open Campus initiative

Like most developing societies in our world, the Caribbean is characterised by unequal distribution of its resources, both material resources and human resources. We are also marked by significant disparities in access to education, training and professional formation. A public university such as ours therefore carries a special responsibility to engage in deliberate equalisation of access and opportunity as far as is possible within its academic remit. 

Motivated by this consideration, the University of the West Indies is creating an Open Campus as part of its strategic plan for the period 2007 to 2012. It intends to achieve this by a drastic reorganisation of its outreach sector and of the activities now undertaken by the School of Continuing Studies, the Tertiary Level Institutions Unit and the Distance Education Centre. The Open Campus will be UWI's mechanism for dramatically increasing access to tertiary education among underserved communities in all of our contributing countries. It will be the special campus for those whose lifestyles, work schedules or country of residence would normally keep them away from classrooms in campuses.

Our university also carries a second obligation. It is the obligation to be sensitive to the problems of our region particularly when our expertise or capacity to shape human resources can be applied to them.

A multi-dimensional response

The issue of addressing drug abuse prevention and treatment in our region is precisely the kind of challenge to which we must turn our attention. It is a problem that calls for multiple responses. The responses cannot be limited to attempts at interdiction; they must extend to the provision of training for the several categories of persons who must act to rehabilitate victims of the ravages of abuse, to guide the vulnerable away from contact with it and to foster within our societies the cultural strengths that would immunize more and more of our people against the lure of abuse. We recognise as well that the multiple responses oblige us to be strongly multi-disciplinary in our approaches. This is not a uni-dimensional problem. It is a complex matter and the knowledge and skills to address it do not lie in a single discipline.

For all these reasons, we are fortunate to be able to apply new online technologies to the delivery of the programme. The technologies available to us now can better support our desire for wide reach. Applying online technology increases the flexibility of the offer of our programme. It makes it more convenient for the many different categories of personnel to participate in the programme while continuing to fulfill their normal lives. It also makes it simpler for the teachers from several different disciplines to contribute comfortably to the delivery of the programme.

Of special importance too, the online design equalises access from different parts of our region to high quality instruction. It gives all the students access to similar quality instruction and to the knowledge of the best informed specialists in the region. For us, it is also a test - a test of the quality of the management systems and academic support arrangements that lie behind the screens of technology. It is a test that we must pass if we are to engender confidence in the wisdom of the university’s decision to develop an Open Campus based of the deployment of online technology within the battery of learning and teaching strategies of the institution. We are committed to its success.

A track record of collaboration

We have had repeated cordial working relationships with the Organisation of American States. Apart from our collaboration in earlier programmes on drug abuse prevention, you have supported our training programmes for the Just-in-Time Lecture project providing us with a mechanism for enhancing the realism of the virtual classroom space. Collaborating on this programme is a continuation of a friendship that we value and will continue to cultivate.

We are confident that what we do in this programme will feed the readiness of our university to offer degree programmes in the area of drug abuse prevention and treatment and to foster problem solving research in this field. We also look forward to being able to make a contribution to the way countries beyond our fifteen contributing countries address the issue of training and human resource development in this field. We know is also a very challenging area for them and we are willing to share our successes and to report our failures to the benefit of our collective success.