ACU EXECUTIVE HEADS CONFERENCE
CYPRUS 22-26 APRIL 2001
Session 7
Teaching and Research Partnerships
Workshop 2
Partnerships in distance learning: the genesis of the United States Open
University
Provocateur: Sir John Daniel
(Vice-Chancellor, Open University, UK; President, US Open University;
Assistant Director-General (designate) of UNESCO for Education)
Abstract
Thirty years of success have made the UK Open University (OU) the world’s leading large-scale provider of higher education at a distance. Other institutions have partnered with the OU in order to gain from its reputation and experience. Such partnerships are of four types. First, the OU has helped countries establish new open universities (e.g. Indira Gandhi National Open University, India; Arab Open University). Second, it has provided ready-made courses to other institutions (e.g. Open University of Hong Kong). Third, it has worked with local partners to provide whole programmes, studied for OUUK credit, in order to expand the capacity for higher education in a particular country quickly and inexpensively (e.g. Bulgaria, Hungary, India, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia). Fourth, conventional universities, especially in the USA, have linked with the OUUK to get the know-how to launch their own distance education programmes. Experience with this last type of partnership in the late 1990s convinced the OU to create a US Open University in order to operate effectively. The USOU was formally created in 1998 and began operations in 2000 using a blend of courses and programmes sourced from the OUUK and North American universities. Some interesting lessons have been learned.
Introduction
The title of this session is Partnerships in distance learning: the genesis of the United States Open University. First, I shall say a little about how the Open University comes to have activity in the United States. Second I shall comment on the creation of the United States Open University which is a new kind of partner for the UK Open University. Third I shall try to draw some lessons from various collaborative projects involving the Open University and United States universities and colleges. The first two were between The Open University of the UK and Florida State University and California State University respectively. Later partnerships involved the USOU with the American University in Washington DC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Maricopa College System.
Why is the Open University active in the United States?
No-one planned the global reach that the Open University has today. The international activities in the early days of the OU focused on consultancy support of the many new open universities that were created in various countries in the 1970s and 1980s. We are proud of the subsequent development of those institutions many of which are now ACU members.
However the OU’s international work today is different in scope, scale and style from those early initiatives. I illustrate this with a few figures. In the year 2000 final examination session Open University students wrote their examinations in 111 countries. In 2000 there are about 150,000 students taking OU degree-credit courses in the UK and about 30,000 students taking such courses outside the UK. We teach directly in the other countries of the European Union and through partnerships in 23 other jurisdictions. Governments in 19 of those jurisdictions are providing some financial support to the ventures. How did this happen?
When the Open University began operations in 1971 admission was limited to people over the age of 21 resident in the United Kingdom. However, OU students turned out to be mobile people so we agreed to provide a basic service if they moved overseas. In the early 1990s we decided to extend eligibility for admission for individuals to the whole of the European Union.
When the Berlin Wall was pulled down we were approached by groups in eastern and central Europe who had concluded that open university methods were the best answer to the challenge of education and training that they faced in adapting to a new world. So we developed partnerships in various countries and translated a range of courses into Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and Romanian. Today there are over 10,000 students taking those courses for OU credit. We also have significant partnerships in Hong Kong and Singapore, which account for another 10,000 students, and have developed links in various other countries through which students are enrolled and taught.
In recent years these trends have brought the Open University into the United States. For example, some students who first come to the OU in Europe through their multi-national employers are later posted to the USA. The US end of the company not only wants them to continue their studies, but also to enrol other US employees on these high-quality courses. Then various American universities expressed interest in working with us, which led to the partnerships that we are talking about today.
Profile of partnerships
I should stress that our first two partnerships, with the Florida State University and the California State University, predated the creation of USOU. Those partnerships were with the UKOU. From our perspective it was natural that the US universities most interested in working with us should be the public universities in states with rapidly growing populations.
Pierre Trudeau used to say, when he was Prime Minister of Canada, that working with the United States is like being in bed with an elephant. However tender and gentle the elephant you have to be alert in case it decides to turn over. These partnerships involved elephants. You only have to see FSU’s football stadium to know that it is an elephant; CSU with 350,000 students on 24 campuses is clearly an elephant; the OU, from the figures I’ve given, is also an elephant in its own environment.
However, while each of us saw the other partner as an elephant we probably saw ourselves more like a monkey trying to stay on the elephant’s back. The OU didn’t feel like an elephant in these partnerships because they involved small teams a long way from home. I suspect that FSU and CSU didn’t feel like elephants because their partnerships with the OU addressed new programmes that were not yet part of the institutional bloodstream. What were the programs?
At FSU the purpose of the partnership was to develop upper division programs in computer science, information studies, and liberal arts in order to offer community college students a convenient way of continuing to the baccalaureate. At CSU the purpose was to introduce a new model for conducting teacher training at scale in order to address the state’s dire shortage of qualified teachers.
What have we learned about partnerships?
What did we learn from those first partnerships about how to make effective a partnership between a campus university or system and the Open University? Put another way, how do you sleep comfortably with an elephant? You will not expect me to share all the delights of the conjugal bed but let me distil our experience of these collaborative ventures into some general and somewhat abstract principles.
They seem blindingly obvious once articulated. All I can say is that since we live in an era of partnerships, and since partnerships frequently go awry, they bear repeating. I hope I will also furnish some insights into the particular challenge of dealing with the Open University. To enable you to keep track I shall identify seven principles and two open questions.
Principles:
1) The first principle is that commitment from the top is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We would not have made progress if the institutional heads had not urged colleagues on, kept in touch with each other and occasionally banged heads together. Commitment, however, is not enough. Each of us had consciously to create the proper structures and incentives at the operational level. That is a slow process in a university.
2) Second, the most secure incentive for commitment from the top is the prospect of clear benefits to the institution if the venture succeeds. It is important that the perception of those benefits be widely shared in the institution. If it’s merely the vice-chancellor’s hobby horse it won’t work. It is also important that the benefits are seen to be reciprocal between the partners.
California State was able to articulate the benefits most clearly since teacher training was then a gut political issue in California and CSU was under pressure to deliver something new and significant. In FSU the benefit was clear at the top but the rest of the University needed persuading that distance learning was a valid part of their future. The OU was clear about the benefits it hoped for but we communicated them poorly.
We had two key aims and an additional hope. First, with distance learning becoming fashionable in the USA, we wanted to help the serious players deliver programs of quality.
Second, we wanted appropriate financial recompense for the transfer of know-how and intellectual property. In retrospect I see that we assumed too readily that our partners understood that imperative. Put another way, the benefits to the OU and the benefits to the partners in the USA were expressed in different terms – primarily political and academic benefits on the one hand and primarily financial benefits on the other - and this lead to misunderstandings. It took us time to realise that American public universities are more used to cashing checks than writing them - especially to another university. Lastly, we also hoped that we ourselves could use some of the courses developed through these partnerships in the UK and elsewhere, including, through USOU, other states of the Union.
3) Principle three is that it is best to begin by setting down the objectives and benefits of the venture in writing and translating them into written agreements between the institutions. This sounds elementary but is difficult to achieve because lengthy discussions are often necessary before the objectives and the nature of the collaboration become clear enough to be translated into written agreements. In the event we slid into beginning the work before roles and aims were clear. This meant that OU people felt they were sharing valuable know-how with only a vague promise of financial recompense. In that context it is very helpful if the project is under some real time pressure to deliver outcomes. This was clearly the case in California, but not in Florida.
4) Principle four is that it is vital to knock at the right door. The OU had been talking to various campuses of CSU for several years with no result because those bits couldn’t deliver a program into the system. It was only when the Chancellor drove the program from the System office that things started to happen. If you want to deliver an academic program you must deal with the operating hierarchy, not with ancillary units.
5) Principle five is that distance learning projects need project management. So do collaborative ventures. When you have both together then clear roles are vital. Project management and clear lines of authority are counter-cultural in campus universities so this was a difficulty. My colleagues would come back from trips to the States saying, ‘The problem is, no-one’s in charge over there’. Another comment often heard was ‘Their bureaucracy is even worse than ours!’
6) Principle six is that you need buy-in from academic staff, the commitment of individuals on both sides, and mutual institutional respect. The best way to deliver this was to have as many players as possible visit the Open University early in the project. Such visits remove doubt about the feasibility of distance learning, provide reassurance about the academic quality of what is proposed, and infect people with some of the idealism that permeates the OU as they begin to understand it.
A second important tactic is to hold intensive workshops for those involved on both sides at regular intervals. The greatest operational difference between distance teaching and classroom teaching is the teamwork that distance teaching involves. Conventional academics become very enthusiastic about this feature as they get used to it, but it takes a little time.
7) My seventh and final principle is that it is important to be as open an honest as possible with each other. This applies particularly if one partner is receiving external funds for the project.
Open questions
Those are seven principles that I think would be generally agreed. Two other issues are less clear cut and I simply list them as open questions.
1) The first concerns symbolism and publicity. Here we encounter a cultural difference. Americans like to announce an initiative with a splash and then do it, landing on the moon being a good example. The British like to achieve something before they publicise it. In this respect the FSU collaboration tended to follow the American model. A smart new joint FSU/OU centre, featuring the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack against mahogany panelling, was created in advance of clear definition of the project. Each approach has its pros and cons and choosing one or the other should be a joint decision.
2) The second open issue concerns the division between business and academic functions. Some of my OU academic colleagues say that misunderstandings about our expectation that the collaboration was both an academic partnership and a business deal could have been avoided if they had dealt with both aspects with their American faculty counterparts. However, OU management colleagues have unhappy experiences of having to unravel inappropriate business arrangements put in place by their academic colleagues in other jurisdictions.
Creating the United States Open University?
Our overall conclusion from all this was that if we were serious about working in the USA, even in partnership, we needed to be a US university with US staff and US accreditation. We decided that in the highly developed and sophisticated US higher education system we could make our most effective contribution through the establishment of an independent American university that shared the goals and values of the UK Open University. Three other factors reinforced this approach.
First, much as we liked our US partner universities, we did not wish to be entirely dependent on them for our presence in the USA. Second, the USA is a litigious place and we wanted to protect the UKOU from that. Third, many US corporations will only pay tuition fees for courses and institutions that are US accredited.
So the Open University set up the United States Open University as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation registered in Delaware and licensed as an institution of higher education in that state. It has a Board of Governance largely made up of distinguished Americans from various walks of life.
The USOU is now going through the American accreditation processes and hopes to gain accreditation later this year. Student recruitment will remain difficult until then. Meanwhile, the few hundred students already enrolled are studying a range of upper division and graduate courses adapted from the UKOU and the University of Maryland Baltimore County.