Address given at the University of Alberta, Edmonton,
Alberta
5 January 2000
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
See also: http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/
Abstract
Virtual universities have a short but checkered history. What are virtual universities anyway and what are they trying to achieve? How will the missions and methods of virtual universities impact on the mission and methods of the University of Alberta and what should the U of A do about it? How are students changing and how are their expectations changing? The Open University is unique in being a distance teaching research university. How do these two features of the OU, research and distance teaching, interact with and impinge on one another? A Distance Education Task Force has proposed the creation of a Centre for Distance and Distributed Learning at the University of Alberta. This Centre would provide on-going funding for faculties wishing to develop alternatives to large-enrollment courses, and specialized graduate level and professional development initiatives. What prognosis does a friendly outsider make of the Task Force's proposal for a more centralized approach?
Introduction
It is a pleasure to be here at the University of Alberta for my first speaking engagement of the new millennium. I spent three very happy years living in Edmonton – St Albert to be precise – some twenty years ago and its nice to be back. I am impressed by the assiduity that you Albertans show in turning up to this kind of event so early in a New Year. I suspect it would be very difficult to attract an audience anywhere in Europe for this talk at this time – and in Scotland, of course, where they take New Year and Hogmanay very seriously indeed, they only returned to work today.
You’ve asked me to talk about the implications of virtual universities for the University of Alberta. Where you stand on such a topic depends, as usual, on where you sit. Let me begin, therefore, by telling you where I am coming from. Who I am to talk about virtual universities?
I am a cocktail of three experiences lived simultaneously: as university president, as perpetual student, and as scholar-practitioner. I have spent the last 16 years heading universities in Canada, the UK and now the US - and I had ten years as vice-president in three other Canadian universities – including Athabasca University here in Alberta - before that.
I have also been formally enrolled as a student somewhere for most of my career. Since arriving at the Open University in 1990 for example, I have completed a Diploma in Theology and a Master’s degree in Educational Technology, both from Canadian universities. Last year I did a new 8 credit, 36-week web-based Open University course entitled You, Your Computer and the Net. One of the many nice things about distance learning is that you can study with your own university without having faculty colleagues freak out when you show up in class. However, I did feel somewhat exposed because I knew that some staff were following my progress on the student record system. Fortunately I completed the course and received the letter telling me I had passed just before Christmas.
I’m glad I took that particular course for three reasons. First, more than 10,000 students will take the course in 2000. That would have been a record even by Open University standards if our new first level Social Science course had not attracted 12,000 students this year. The second reason I’m pleased I took the course is that is that it gave me first hand experience of web-based learning – in real time, so to speak. Finally, of course, I acquired some useful skills by taking the course. Being able to put together a web page keeps me a step ahead of some of my senior OU colleagues.
I should add that my reasons for being a perpetual student are pragmatic rather than noble. I simply found that the first course I took part-time as an adult, not long after I had completed my full-time education with a doctorate, had a greater impact on my career than anything I had done before.
Lastly, under the heading of where am I coming from, I have tried to be a publishing scholar throughout my career. The Master’s thesis that I completed four years ago gave me a new lease of life as a scholar and led to a book entitled Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education which has done well here in North America. I found that surprising, because on my definition of a mega-university there aren’t any in North America. But lots of colleagues here say they have found it very helpful, which is encouraging given my assignment of speaking to you today. So that’s who I am and here’s what I’m going to talk about.
Virtual universities have a short but checkered history. I shall ask what are virtual universities anyway and what are they trying to achieve? How will the missions and methods of virtual universities impact on the mission and methods of the University of Alberta and what should the U of A do about it? How are students changing and how are their expectations changing? The Open University is unique in being a distance teaching research university. How do these two features of the OU, research and distance teaching, interact with and impinge on one another?
A Distance Education Task Force has proposed the creation of a Centre for Distance and Distributed Learning at the University of Alberta. This Centre would provide on-going funding for faculties wishing to develop alternatives to large-enrollment courses, and specialized graduate level and professional development initiatives. What prognosis does a friendly outsider make of the Task Force's proposal for a more centralized approach?
What is a virtual university?
First then, what is a virtual university? I confess right away that I don’t like the term. I especially don’t like it applied to my present institution, because the Open University, with its 160,000 degree credit students in the UK, Europe and many other countries, is a very real university. It is a buzzing vibrant community that generates a higher level of interaction between people than any of the eight other institutions I’ve worked in.
So I don’t like the term and anyway, it seems to be somewhat jinxed. What began as the Western Virtual University a few years ago, a project serving the sixteen US states to the south of us, quickly became the Western Governors University and is still slow to take off. Then California, which thought itself too big and important to join in this project with the other western states, set up its own California Virtual University. But that folded a year ago because the two big state university systems that were funding it, the California State University system and the University of California, decided that it wasn’t adding value.
If the successful distance teaching universities like the Open University don’t like the term and the institutions that do use it tend to have a short half-life, what is a virtual university? If in doubt turn to the scholars. Canadian academics are world leaders in the analysis, both positive and negative, of this phenomenon. In his forthcoming book chapter The Virtual University and the Professoriate Michael Skolnik of OISE quotes this description of a virtual university:
“Educators and policy leaders are envisioning new approaches to instruction based on communications and computer technology using learning-on-demand and learner-centred instruction. An immense opportunity exists for institutions to establish new forms of electronic-based collaboration – from the student level to the institutional level – that can bring about major improvements in both access and learning while meeting legitimate public and institutional concerns about cost and quality. There is also the opportunity for new levels of multi-institutional, multistate and multinational collaboration to provide postsecondary education and training through existing and emerging global networks… This enriched educational environment envisioned by many academic leaders is captured in the phrase the virtual university.”
You won’t be surprised to learn that Skolnik took that quotation from a group of enthusiasts, an Educom/IBM Roundtable. Let’s deconstruct it for a moment. Clearly the key element of the virtual university is the combination of communications and computer technology. Unsurprisingly, these enthusiasts hope that this technological combination – let’s call it e-learning - will lead them to the holy grail of education, learner-centred education. They also hope that it will enhance access while lowering costs and improving quality. Actually they don’t quite say that, because it might be too much of a hostage to fortune. Their euphemism is ‘meeting legitimate public and institutional concerns about cost and quality’ but I take that to mean cutting costs and raising quality. Finally, this roundtable of enthusiasts see lots of opportunities for collaboration in all directions.
Because the virtual university is still a very new enterprise much of the discussion about it has to take place in the absence of much evidence from students themselves. I suppose that my own institution, the Open University, with 60,000 students online from home and a long tradition of surveying students for their experience and attitudes, must know more about the world of e-learning than just about anyone. Yet I would treat our own evidence as still very tentative. What one can affirm, not very helpfully, is that student attitudes to the e-world vary enormously.
In the absence of any real evidence the pessimists can construct scenarios just as readily as the optimists. Just as the optimists tend to talk not about the actual technology of the virtual university but about its potential to achieve supposed student dreams, so the pessimists stress the potential of the virtual university to create supposed faculty nightmares. Some of people in this camp are Professor Noble of York University and the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP. What are their fears?
At the core of their anxiety is the emergence of new corporate structures for universities. It is arguable – and I would argue – that these new corporate academic structures are a by-product of the hyper-capitalist spirit of the times rather anything to do with online technologies per se. However, they came on the scene together so they are usually lumped together. What corporate structures am I talking about?
Let me cite just three models. First, there is the wholly owned university subsidiary of a for-profit company; for example, the Motorola University, McDonald’s Hamburger University and the British Aerospace Virtual University. Second is the for-profit university, the University of Phoenix being the most talked about example. Third, there is the for-profit subsidiary of a not-for-profit university, of which there are now various examples.
If you look more closely you find that these new models of university do not in fact make much use of online technology – or at least not yet. Most corporate universities, for example, conduct their teaching at sites that are often called campuses. The for-profit University of Phoenix teaches on a multiplicity of small campuses and only a small fraction of its 60,000 students are virtual learners. Some of the universities that have created for-profit subsidiaries hope they will make their money from the world of e-learning, but any profit from such activity is far in the future as I speak today.
I suppose the pessimists fear that online technology will find a more congenial home in these new corporate structures than in established universities. If e-learning proves to be successful and these become the thriving universities then much of what we take for granted about universities today will not be granted and therefore cannot be taken. What are the particular fears of the pessimists?
The first is that running a university for profit means the end of any meaningful faculty role in institutional governance. It’s hard to argue with that. The second worry is that even under not-for-profit status the organisational dynamic of technology-based teaching and learning will give the university administration greater control over the faculty than they have now. I mean control over how faculty spend their time, control over what is taught, control over the intellectual property they generate, control over the balance between teaching and research and so on. These are subtle and complex issues and they deserve a serious response. It is intellectually dishonest either to raise the rallying cry of academic freedom at the mere mention of these possibilities or to sweep them under the carpet of technological determinism and claim they are inevitable. The future is open. That’s why we have discussions like this.
These are indeed very topical issues for you since the proposal to create a Centre for Distance and Distributed Learning at the University of Alberta obviously implies that the University will get involved in virtual university developments rather than leaving them to individuals and departments in the usual way.
Academic Life in the Online World
So far I have shown that both optimists and pessimists tend to talk about the virtual university in terms of wider abstractions like student-centred learning and faculty autonomy instead of looking directly at the impact of the technology itself. What is the direct impact of online technology on academic life in the third millennium? Academics now spend more time in front of a screen than in front of a class of students. How does this change their roles?
My OU colleague Robin Mason, another Canadian, has been studying online learning and computer conferencing for more than a decade and I am indebted to her recent article Academic Life in the Third Millennium for some important insights into the daily reality of the online world. She looks in turn at research and scholarship, teaching and administration.
Research and Scholarship. You do not need me to tell you how much going online has changed research. We can now be closer to research colleagues around the world than to colleagues in the same building. Conferences are becoming more useful because of e-mail communication before the conference and the availability of the papers online afterwards. Much of the data for the conduct of research is on the web – with the risk, of course, that we come to regard as academic knowledge only that which can be digitised. Processes for the publication of results have changed completely with electronic journals and the ability to circulate papers privately both widely and rapidly. Everything has been speeded up.
Robin Mason notes that four articles she put on the web have generated more discussion, more contact with peers, more use of her work in others’ teaching and more speaking invitations than the thirty articles and two books she has published in print. For academics the personal web page has now become a key element of their scholarly identity that brings together their teaching and research. It has become a comprehensive and permanently available business card. I myself have found that putting addresses like this on the web saves my Personal Assistant a huge amount of time in responding to enquiries.
Teaching. What about teaching? The very fact that I’m here talking to you shows how things are changing. Time was an institution like the U of A, which I remember as being quite impressed with itself, wouldn’t have any truck with distance learning. Now faculty in institutions like the U of A feel pressure from two directions to engage with it. The administration wants the University to offer some online courses as evidence of modernity. Students want them for convenience and because they’ve found that, for the moment at least, faculty tend to devote more time to online communication with them than they ever did after lectures. They’ve also found that in an online seminar the students collectively have the microphone, if I may use that analogy, for a much larger proportion of the time than they would in a classroom session.
Faculty also find that online teaching requires different skills. Preparing the visuals and text often obliges them to rethink the content. Putting it all together may require teamwork with others. If the course attracts large numbers then the teaching function may need to be unbundled and a number of virtual tutors appointed to handle communication with the students. If the students are located in several countries misunderstandings of culture and language are much more likely to occur than if the same students were all assembled on one campus.
Administration. Marking student assignments is both a teaching opportunity and an administrative responsibility. Multiple choice tests on the web can be more sophisticated and assess understanding and critical thinking as well as rote learning. However, the design of good questions and useful automated feedback is more demanding on the faculty member. The electronic submission of essays leads students to expect rapid turnaround but also makes it easy to keep copies and to log each step of the process. Online working also helps academics to respond with less effort to the increasing burden of bureaucracy that results from greater pressures for accountability on their institution.
That is a rapid review of the virtual university from the perspective of the collectivity and through the experience of the individual faculty member. Just as people can be optimistic or pessimistic as a group, so the individual can also find the world of the virtual university exciting or depressing. Robin Mason concludes that there has never been a more exciting time to be an academic because, if we conceive our profession as ‘the activity of learning’ the online world is making us rethink it in a very creative way.
But to faculty members who joined universities in order to conduct research and lecture to students this can be a different and threatening world. Academics are used to being jacks of all trades. For many research is still essentially an individual pursuit. Teaching is still a craft industry in which the individual faculty member designs the curriculum, organises the learning environment, instructs the courses, supports students in difficulty and assesses their performance. This craft tradition is now under pressure to give way to the working habits that other professions take for granted: division of processes into their component tasks; division of labour to carry out these tasks; specialisation for this purpose; and teamwork with project management to make it all fit together.
Some academics take the view that if they had wanted to work in that way they would now be earning a lot more money outside the university. They became academics because they were ready to trade some income for a higher degree of individual autonomy and a life which integrated a range of intellectual challenges in a holistic manner. For such people, and they are some of our best, the unbundling of academic work into separate jobs is deeply unpalatable.
It is dishonest to pretend that the threat is not there. John Sperling, President and CEO of Apollo Group, the holding company of the University of Phoenix, has this to say:
“Society also recognises that the overwhelming percentage of faculty research is undertaken more to advance personal careers than to benefit society at large. There is a growing consensus outside the academy that research should be pretty much confined to the large research universities and that all other institutions of higher education should focus on teaching.”
and he goes on:
“Most faculty members simply cannot make the transition from their traditional roles as self-directed scholars to teaching demanding and assertive adults”.
Note that Sperling is not some philistine from outside the academy. With a doctorate from Cambridge and other degrees from Reed College and UC Berkeley he has paid his academic dues.
In that quote Sperling alludes to the changing nature of the student body. The shorthand expression for this is the transition from student to customer. This was brought home to us sharply at the Open University by a value-for-money study that we have just conducted on our marketing activities. It pointed out that not long ago the University was in a seller’s market and its principal challenge was to manage the supply of its courses and programmes. The corollary was that students respected and were loyal to the University, accepted its ways and complied with its requirements. They were committed to the long haul and to working with the system.
Plenty of evidence suggests that this description still fits many current students. But the study points out that many of today’s part-time students and potential students bring to their dealings with universities the attitudes they have as customers in other areas of life. They demand service now, they want courses tailored to their needs, loyalty is at a discount because their personal desires have primacy, they are impatient with bureaucratic systems and if they don’t find what they want they will go elsewhere rather than work with the system.
Implications for the University of Alberta
The University of Alberta must be in a somewhat similar position. You have elected to restrict your size and maintain a sellers market for full-time undergraduate and full-time doctoral education. You are used to measuring quality in your own terms, which usually means measuring inputs such as the high school grades of your entering undergraduates or the GPAs of your entering graduate students.
This may well be a sustainable business. If you define yourselves as primarily a research university the numbers who will want to come and study here because of your good name could well sustain the University for the foreseeable future. I assume that you would not want to become solely a research institute but would prefer to remain a broadly-based university.
The sixty-four thousand dollar question is what you do about the working professionals who seek graduate or occupational qualifications that they can study for part-time. I assume you would like to serve them too because you have many professional schools on campus. These working people, however, come to you as customers rather than as students. They will be less likely to assume that your teaching must be good just because this is the University of Alberta.
The point that I am working around to, somewhat gingerly because I’m your guest, is that in this world of specialisation of function you cannot assume that just because you are good at research you will give all your students a better experience than any other university around.
I thought I would take advantage of the world of the web to look at Alberta’s four universities from the perspective of a customer. I went to the websites of the U of A , the U of Lethbridge, the U of Calgary and Athabasca University. I was looking particularly for information that would help me reach conclusions about how customer friendly and welcoming each institution is.
The first thing that struck me on the U of A’s website was the frank admission that it had lost some points last year in the Alberta government’s assessment of its accessibility. If you had admitted another 250 students you would have received more than an extra million dollars in grant. It wasn’t clear from the website whether the University regretted not taking the extra students or was rather proud of making a stand for exclusiveness. Elsewhere it brought me up to date on the U of A’s place in the Maclean’s Magazine rankings and told me about the achievements of some of the faculty. I didn’t find anything about student satisfaction.
However, I got a useful lead on the University of Lethbridge website which told me on the first page that Lethbridge ranked highly in government surveys of student satisfaction. It didn’t give details but that did allow me to use the search facility on each website to look for ‘government surveys’. This didn’t yield anything at Lethbridge, Calgary or the U of A but I struck gold at Athabasca University http://www.athabascau.ca/reports/survey99.htm which reported the results of an Alberta Learning survey of over 7,000 students at all Alberta’s universities and university colleges. The website gave the results for Athabasca alongside the provincial average but did not give any government website where I could find the results for other universities.
Altogether I got the impression that universities are a bit touchy about this survey. I could guess Athabasca was prepared to publish the results because it appears to come out of the exercise very well, scoring substantially above the Alberta average for general satisfaction with course relevance, teaching quality, overall experience and course availability. It also scored at least ten percentage points above the average in nearly all the specific questions about satisfaction with teaching.
I hesitate to draw conclusions from all this without knowing what this survey revealed about the strengths and weaknesses of the U of A. However, the survey does allow me to make the general point that if students do start to behave like customers you could find yourself being outperformed by institutions like Athabasca. You may not yet regard Athabasca as a peer institution but it is clear that by focusing hard on giving value to the student as customer it has acquired a lead in student satisfaction that might be hard for other universities to catch up with.
Whether this matters or not depends on how you think the world will evolve. Just as I’d finished my quick survey of the websites another straw in the wind blew across my desk. This was the ten New Year predictions of the Corporate Universities Newsletter that is published in the USA. Hardly a disinterested party, obviously, but the first two predictions are worth quoting:
Lessons from the Open University
Those are some comments about the environment we face in this new century. If you do decide to pick up the challenge and expand distance learning at the U of A what can you learn from the experience of the Open University? I hasten to say that we are also worried by the trends I have mentioned. While we are not in the Oxbridge league as a major research university each of our faculties has some world class research and we produce over 100 Ph.D.s each year. We are determined to remain a research university for reasons I will mention in a minute.
Furthermore, while no institution I know seems to have the OU’s power to generate devotion from its students I doubt we are yet as customer conscious as, say, Athabasca. Indeed, calling students customers is guaranteed to raise hackles in discussions in our 1000-member Senate. Most of us resist a purely transactional definition of the relationship between the student and the university. We prefer to think of students as members of the university rather than as buyers of commodities.
In these terms we have been judged to be very successful. The UK government does not conduct nation-wide surveys of student satisfaction but it does organise a pretty ferocious system for the assessment of teaching quality. Each year it picks a number of disciplines and sends in teams of academics drawn from across the country to assess how well that discipline is taught in each university. The 1998 league table shows the OU 11th out of the 100 UK universities in terms of the proportion of disciplines where teaching is ranked as excellent. When the rankings for 1999 are published I expect we shall have risen into the top ten because all our rankings this year have been excellent. I was pleased that we topped Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College in our teaching of General Engineering, being the only university to gain the maximum possible score of 24/24.
What is the secret of our success? We find that it rests on four pillars:
1) excellent study materials produced by faculty working in teams;
2) close personal support to each student by faculty with special training in working with adults;
3) good logistics and administration and
4) a faculty who remain current by involvement in research.
Let me also say a word about faculty roles at the Open University because our experience provides great reassurance for those worried that distance learning takes the excitement and intellectual challenge out of teaching. We find the exact opposite. Let me focus particularly on the key difference between Open University teaching and classroom teaching, which is that we develop courses in teams.
My predecessor, Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, always says that the course team is the OU’s most significant contribution to the advancement of higher education.
What the course team process does is to establish the notion of a scholarship of teaching that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been promoting, with increasing success, for the last decade in the USA. For the Carnegie Foundation scholarship has four key features.
First, it is public. Open University course materials are indeed on public view, but my point here is that the drafts of all materials are shared between members of the course team right from the earliest stage.
Second, scholarship means critical review. It is a strong OU course team tradition that each individual’s first draft gets comprehensively criticised by colleagues on both academic and pedagogical grounds.
Third, scholarship creates a community, which is the course team itself and the wider university.
Fourth, scholarship is something scholars talk about. In the OU this is expressed by the fact that courses take on a life of their own. Years after a course has been retired faculty and students will refer to its demise with nostalgia or relief, depending on the pride they felt for it.
The essential point is that the OU course team is one of the highest expressions of scholars being scholarly. Once faculty allow themselves to be classified, for the purpose of teaching, as content-matter experts, they have abdicated their academic role. They have also usually drained away much of the passion that will excite the learner. The OU course team, on the other hand, is an academic building site. The team clarifies academic debates so that students can engage with them, not in order to give them ready-made answers.
The Centre for Distance and Distributed Learning
I promised to conclude with some friendly comments on the proposal to create a Centre for Distance and Distributed Learning here at the U of A.
First you have to decide whether you want to develop distance learning or, if you prefer, elements of a virtual university approach, here at the U of A. This question requires serious thought because it is by no means a risk free option. Distance learning makes your teaching much more public than it is now, so you will want its quality to at least match your current reputation. Yet, as we have seen, it will be hard to catch up to the quality of the specialised institutions that have made customer satisfaction in distance learning their watchword.
Because of these risks I would argue that if you do decide to develop distance learning you must set up a centre like the one proposed. This is my logic. Distance learning has its own Catch 22 for institutions. If you want to do it well you need to invest serious resource. In the long run you cannot make such an investment unless you can amortise it over large numbers of students. But the moment you register large numbers of students you create a process that cannot be managed as a cottage industry by an individual faculty member. Even if you don’t do as far as a 24-hour concierge for each course you will need to introduce division of labour and specialised student support functions.
Once you do that both economic and quality considerations suggest the creation of a support unit operating university wide because most of the functions that need to be supported are similar from course to course.
The Centre could also be a useful channel for the allocation of special funds for virtual university developments. These should be allocated through a serious process, with submission and evaluation of bids analogous to research funding proposals.
The Centre could also help to change university processes to make them more friendly to virtual university developments. I’m not just talking about customer-friendly processes for students. Getting the promotion and pay system for faculty to take account of this activity – or even to give proper recognition to good teaching of any kind – is not something that will happen without determined lobbying. Finally it provides a useful sorting office for the many offers of collaboration on virtual university developments that must flow into the U of A on an almost daily basis.
Conclusion
Those then, are my thoughts on the implications of virtual universities for the University of Alberta. It has been a pleasure to talk to you and I hope it will be a pleasure for you to engage me in discussion and show me, where you think necessary, the error of my ways and my analyses.
References
Daniel, John S (1996) Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London
Mason, Robin (1999) Academic Life in the Third Millennium, in Mélanges: L’enseignement à distance à l’aube du troisième millénaire, CNED, France pp. 259-268
Skolnik, Michael (2000) The Virtual University and the Professoriate, in S.Inayatullah and J.Gidley (Eds.) The University in Transformation: Global Perspectives on the Futures of the University, Praeger Press, pp. 55-67
Sperling, John (1999) A Business Model of Higher Education in 2025, in Universities in the Future, M. Thorne (Ed.), Department of Trade and Industry, London pp. 104-119