November 16-17, 1998
It is a pleasure to be here in Arizona and, in particular, in Phoenix.
The word phoenix has several associations relevant to the themes I shall
explore with you today.
First, of course, something powerful rising from the ashes of destruction.
Last Thursday I presided at a degree awarding ceremony in Bucharest,
Romania. The Open University has 2,000 students in that country. Romanians
often use the analogy of the phoenix for the way that their country has
developed freedom and democracy from the ashes of the destruction of the
totalitarian Ceausescu regime less than ten years ago.
Compared to that analogy using the phoenix as a metaphor for the
transformations occurring higher education today may seem extreme - but it
does make a point. Higher education is under plenty of criticism.
Restricted access, excessive costs, poorly conceived curricula, limited
flexibility – you have all heard the accusations. We must take them
seriously.
But let us remember that universities – not individual institutions
but the academic ideal – have impressive longevity. Ten years ago I
joined the world’s university presidents in celebrating the 900th
anniversary of the world’s oldest university, the University of
Bologna in Italy. You remember the finding of the Carnegie Commission,
which as part of its research, tried to identify all institutions and
organizations in western civilization that could trace a continuous
history from the Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century. They
found sixty-six: the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the parliaments
of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and sixty-two universities.
Now of course neither Arizona State University, nor the Open University – still less the University of Phoenix – numbered among those sixty-two institutions. But it does suggest that we inherit a robust tradition. To say this is not to invite complacency. To be robust and long-lived any tradition must combine lasting and motivating values with a capacity for repeated renewal. Can the 20th century university renew itself for the 21st century?
We live in interesting times. That’s why I have titled this talk ‘Tectonic Shifts in Higher Education’.
The second relevant association of the word phoenix is, of course, the phenomenon that is the University of Phoenix. It is a phenomenon. My Open University colleagues travel frequently in the United States. In the last year they have all come back reporting with amazement and amusement how the University of Phoenix has grabbed the headlines and created some panic in American higher education.
I congratulate the University of Phoenix on having such an impact. If my colleagues find the impact amazing and amusing it is because, in world terms, the University of Phoenix is still a fairly small institution overall and its distance education work hardly registers on the scale. But the guiding concepts of the University of Phoenix have shaken people up.
I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze the University of Phoenix but two comments about the conceptual shifts they have provoked are relevant to my later remarks. The University of Phoenix shocks in two ways.
First, because it operates for profit. Here I would simply remark that this is a return to the earliest medieval traditions. In their early days the universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Salamanca had no income other than what the students provided in fees and contributions. I doubt the institutions made much profit but they clearly had to cover their costs. The students made sure that profits were not excessive because if either the university or the landlords who rented student rooms charged too much they simply took off and started a new university in another city.
So if you judge that the University of Phoenix is making excessive profits all that tells you is that other universities are either grossly inefficient or user-unfriendly - or both at once. A little competition on price and service will do wonders in driving the profit margins down.
The second way that the University of Phoenix has broken the mold is in countering the almost pathological individualism that prevails in most universities with an institutionally driven agenda and practices. I shall return to this phenomenon because it has considerable relevance for The Open University, which is what you really want me to talk about.
To complete these introductory remarks, let me say that the third reason I find the word phoenix evocative is that I am a fan of the poetry of D.H.Lawrence. Lawrence used the phoenix as a symbol and it is good to be in the south-west and near to New Mexico and his grave in Taos.
So I am delighted to be here in the City of Phoenix and I thank you for inviting me. It is an honor to be the guest of Arizona State University. When he invited me Milt Glick made some extreme comments. He said that I was “the most insightful of the commentators on the new learning” and that “the Open University is the most successful extant model”.
Those are generous assessments but this is a fast moving field. Yesterday’s commentary is today’s prejudice and yesterday’s model can be today’s obstacle. I welcome the exchanges that we shall have in the next two days not least because they will help to keep the commentary relevant and the model current.
I can best use the time by addressing four topics.
First, a few remarks about the challenges facing higher education. Many people seem to feel that the Open University, through its use of technology, has found some of the answers higher education needs in order to transform itself for the new millennium. But before we apply a technological solution it is helpful to know what problem we are trying to solve.
So the first issue is: technology is the answer – but what was the question?
Second, I should say something about the Open University. The level of interest I find in the OU as I travel in the United States flatters me. The OU is a remarkable institution, but I suspect people often mistake the reasons for its immense success.
So I’ll ask the standard questions about the Open University: why, who, when, what, where, how and, importantly, how well? I mean how well does it perform? How does it perform so well? How is it that in Britain’s recent national assessment of the quality of teaching in Engineering the Open University, which is by far the UK’s largest university, outperformed famous and exclusive schools such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, London?
Today I shall not talk at all about the other large distance teaching universities, which I have called the mega-universities. That’s simply because time is limited.
If you want to know more about the mega-universities, most of which are larger than the Open University and are making a contribution in the developing world – which is where it really matters – read my book on the subject.
Or ask me questions afterward. Today I shall use the Open University as a surrogate for all the mega-universities.
So, third, I shall try to extrapolate from the OU’s success and derive some general conclusions about the successful application of technology in higher education.
What is technology anyway? What are the crucial technologies for the successful renewal of higher education?
Fourth and finally, I shall apply these thoughts to the question of what we might do together.
What are the possibilities for collaboration and joint ventures between the Open University of the United States and Arizona State University, the Maricopa Community College system and the other institutions in this region? I shall bring you up to date on the creation of The Open University of the United States and, in particular on the alliance that was announced last week between USOU and the Western Governors University.
Together we are setting up a new entity, to be called the Governors Open University system. That will create an exciting platform for collaboration in many areas.
Technology is the answer: what was the question?
Let me now take those questions one by one, beginning with problem identification. Technology is the answer: what was the question?
The key questions vexing higher education vary as you move around the world but the challenges facing most universities are a blend of four basic ingredients: access, cost, curriculum and flexibility.
First there is the simple question of access. Are universities responding effectively to the needs of all who could benefit from their programs? The United States has a higher education system of enormous extent and diversity. A larger proportion of the US population gets involved in higher education than in most other countries. But there are still gaps.
Poor people and ethnic minorities are under-represented. Universities are not always very welcoming to lifelong learners who want to study at their convenience rather than the university’s convenience. I’m talking about adult students who expect to find parking on campus and to have their previous credits and studies assessed at fair value.
The contemporary access problem is with graduate studies. We don’t seem ready for a mass higher education system at the graduate level. Universities seem reluctant to define the quality of their graduate programs in terms of anything positive that the university does. Instead they fall back on defining quality in terms of the previous academic records of the students they admit. With more and more students coming to graduate programs in mid-career that is an increasingly meaningless criterion.
The reluctance of universities to open up their graduate programs has led to the interesting phenomenon of postbaccalaureate certificates taught by a range of bodies without much reference to the normal accrediting processes. This simply shows that where there is a market people have a way of getting access to what they want. It’s just that conventional higher education – and the higher education policies of the states – are not ready for the market economy they find themselves in.
Ingredient number two in the tectonic shift is cost. I won’t say much about that. The cost of university study has risen by more than inflation for many years and people are beginning to wonder whether it’s worth it. Fund-raising, rather than academic leadership, has become the main function of university presidents and that compounds the problem. On the one hand their success at fund-raising postpones the day of economic reckoning. On the other hand their reluctance to lead their universities to new paradigms of teaching and learning postpones the day when solutions to the crisis will be implemented.
The third challenge is curriculum. We have assumed too readily that we must chase after every piece of shrapnel thrown out by the knowledge explosion. So employers complain that graduates know too much but can do too little. The temptation is to choose between the dichotomies that present themselves. The better response is to refuse the dichotomies by realising that good graduates need a blend of qualities. They need liberal arts and useful arts; they need generic skills and specific skills; they need theory and practice; they need knowledge and competence.
One of the reasons I am so excited about the Governors Open University system that I shall talk about shortly is that we shall be able to blend the competency-based curricula developed by the Western Governors University with the learning outcomes specified by the courses of the Open University.
The final challenge is flexibility. Lifelong learners need greater flexibility in time, place and mode of study than universities have traditionally offered. But this is not a simple issue. Just as a completely rigid structure breaks and a completely flexible structure falls down, so students need convenience of access to be blended with requirements of performance that oblige them to give some priority to their studies. The course that you can begin whenever you like, do the work whenever you like, and finish whenever you like is probably a course that very few people will ever finish.
That is my take on the challenges that universities face. Some of these shoes may fit your particular situation more than others but I would be surprised if your institution can’t get its feet into any of them.
What is the relevance of the Open University?
My next question was to ask what is the relevance of the Open University to these challenges. I shall be brief.
The Open University was set up in the UK nearly thirty years ago with a simple but inspiring mission: to be open as to people; open as to places; open as to methods and open as to ideas. Earlier this year when this mission was being reinterpreted and renewed for the establishment of The Open University of the United States, two more elements were added: open to time and open to the world. Lets take the elements of the original mission one by one.
Open to people. Who does The Open University system serve? This year about 200,000 students: 1,500 doctoral; 30,000 in taught graduate programs; 110,000 at bachelor’s level and over 60,000 taking non-assessed study packs or being assessed for competency-based vocational qualifications. It’s a very diverse student body in age, family background, ethnicity, occupation and so on. In terms of both numbers and diversity the OU is open to people.
Open to places. Where does The Open University operate? First, it operates all over the United Kingdom. My founding predecessor, Lord Perry, told the staff he appointed in 1970 to design a learning system that would suit a lighthouse keeper minding a lighthouse off the Scottish coast. Today lighthouses are mostly automatic but in our fast-paced world there are plenty of people who need, like the lighthouse keeper, to be able to study in an autonomous fashion. That’s true of students who move around the world for their work, and they soon took the OU overseas. At our main annual examination session last month 1,500 of the 156,000 examinations written were special examinations arranged in nearly 100 countries.
Early this decade we decided to treat the whole of the European Union as our parish and today there are some 7,000 students in the EU outside the UK. At about the same time we got involved in helping Russia and the countries of Central Europe with the training and education in business and management needed after the collapse of the Soviet regime. We now have partner institutions in Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic offering our Certificate and Diploma in Management in the language of each country.
Those programs, which are now entirely fees supported, today enrol over 10,000 students for OU credit. I am very proud of what has been achieved. Among the 50 students to whom I awarded Management Diplomas in Bucharest last week there were some wonderful stories of new companies created and old enterprises transformed. I doubt whether any other western program is making such a massive educational contribution to the economic transformation of the former Soviet bloc.
The OU also has partnerships in Hong Kong, where 6,000 students of the Open University of Hong Kong take UKOU courses for HKOU credit. In Singapore another 6,000 students are taking courses for UKOU credit through a partnership with the Singapore Institute of Management. There are smaller partnership programs in other Asian, African and Latin American countries and, as I will explain later, we are now working with partners in the United States.
I am convinced that these many overseas links have made us a better university academically. When students travel to study in another country they are fairly tolerant of cultural and academic bias in the courses they take. When I did my own doctorate at the University of Paris, for example, I didn’t expect Paris to reproduce the academic climate of Oxford for me. But when people stay in their own country and study courses from another, as over 20,000 Open University students do, then they are more critical of unexamined assumptions of all kinds. Our course teams now have to challenge every assumption of normality that drafts of course material contain. I think that is a very important element of academic quality.
Open as to Methods. What methods does the Open University use? I often get asked this question. People ask, do you teach on the Web? To which I often reply, do you teach on the photocopier? That tends to lead to a useful discussion. The OU uses all kinds of methods and integrates new ones as they become available.
The key determinants of whether we use a particular teaching medium are 1) whether students have access to it at home, 2) whether they like to use it, and 3) whether we find there is a reasonable relationship between what students learn from the medium and the effort required of course teams in using that medium.
Our general conclusion is that there is no single magic learning technology. People like variety and most still like to have some learning materials that they can drop on their toe and take on vacation. That’s why we call ourselves a multiple-media distance learning system with strong student support or, in short, our service mark: Supported Open Learning.
However, the longer I am in this business the more I realise that what has made the OU successful is not what technology it uses but how it sets about using all technologies. There are a number of approaches or attitudes that we take for granted and I realise, as we try to work in partnership with others, that in most universities these approaches and attitudes are not granted and cannot be taken.
First there is the course team. We put together groups of academics and others to prepare each course. In some ways this is like a research team, so there is nothing inherently deviant about the approach. It creates a dynamic and mutually critical environment where the cut and thrust of academic debate can be very lively and people are used to having their first drafts of teaching material torn apart in a rather public way.
But for those who adjust, and most do, the course team is why the OU is such an intellectually exciting place to work. And there is no doubt that the quality of the resultant course materials is vastly superior to what any individual could produce on their own. I mean superior both as academic material and as teaching material.
Second there is equality of esteem. Course teams, and the OU staff generally, include many highly qualified professionals in addition to the faculty. I refer to media producers, editors, software designers, librarians, warehousing specialists, educational technologists, graphic artists and so on. Over the years, in the course team environment, we have come to take for granted a parity of esteem between these people and the faculty from the various academic disciplines.
Recently I was chastised, at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, for using the term apartheid to describe the relations between faculty and non-faculty on some campuses. I agree that is an emotive term but it means ‘separate development’ in Afrikaans. It is clear to me that whatever the relationships between academic and non-academic may be on a particular campus, the separate development of the expertise of these groups of staff will not take you far in distance learning.
That is because, third, organising distance learning requires what writers about management call ‘loose-tight’ arrangements.
Fourth, loose because distance teaching at scale requires division of labor. This is a radical change from standard academic practice where a single faculty member designs a course curriculum, organises the learning resources, instructs the course and assesses the students. For an OU course literally hundreds of people are involved in the various parts of the teaching process.
One group, the course team, prepares the learning materials – and there is division of labor even within the team. Another group, the tutors, will work with the students on local basis to provide personal and academic support. Another group drawn from tutors and course team will plan the assessment strategy. When the final exams are written another cadre of people will mark the scripts.
The arrangement has to be tight as well as loose because all these groups and their actions are very interdependent. The autonomy of individual schools within the university is less than you are used to because many processes must be done at an institutional level for the university as a whole.
Fifth, project management of the whole process is essential. Teamwork is the foundation of success.
For these reasons the separate development of different parts of the distance learning enterprise is not an option.
Sixth, the division of labor must be highly co-ordinated. This is why it is so difficult for a campus university to move into distance learning at scale and with quality. Much of the behaviour required is deeply counter cultural for traditional faculty. But it does happen to be the way that most modern knowledge-based industries operate.
Open to ideas. Openness to ideas is a defining feature of all universities. It means doing research and I’m proud that the OU ranks in the top 30 UK universities for the scale and quality of its research. We have research of world-class caliber going on in all our faculties and schools and award over 100 PhDs each year. Given the scale on which we teach its vital that the OU be a research university.
People often talk about the useful influence of research in keeping teaching up to date. That’s fine, but one of the interesting effects of the course team approach is that at the OU teaching keeps research up to date. As course teams grapple with teaching topics in a contemporary way they frequently encounter issues where the intellectual analyses are not clear and this can lead some members to engage in the research necessary to make them clearer.
I sometimes encounter the view that faculty who work in distance education are some kind of downtrodden proletariat who have sold their birthright of independent thought. I observe that the opposite is true. I have worked in eight universities in five jurisdictions and I find the Open University to be the most vibrant intellectual community of all of them. One manifestation of this is the way that interdisciplinary work seems to thrive, both in teaching and research.
I promised to say a word about measures of success. The reform of the UK university system in 1992 saw the introduction of national systems for the assessment of quality that have become increasingly sophisticated. Most universities complain about the demands of these systems, which are indeed considerable. However, for new type of university like the Open University they have been invaluable because they have allowed us to benchmark ourselves against others with very happy results.
For research there is a huge operation every few years when the Quality Assurance Agency puts together panels of academic peers in about 70 subject areas and each university is invited to submit its research for assessment by the panels for those research areas where it is active. The panels give grades to the research at each institution and the state funding body uses these to determine the funds that each university gets for curiosity-oriented research from the national government.
This operation is taken very seriously and some universities trade star faculty like football players in the run up to these exercises – although this is officially frowned on. As I said, the OU ranks in the top third of universities on these ratings and the money that flows with them. We are not up there with Oxford and Cambridge but we are well-placed in the second league.
In teaching we are right up there in the premier league. In a somewhat similar process the Quality Assurance Agency puts together panels each year to go and look at the quality of teaching in particular disciplines in each university that teaches them. This year they have done Engineering and next year they will do Biology, Psychology and Art and Design.
The teams have to assess the quality of teaching in the discipline in each university on six dimensions: Curriculum design, content and organization; Teaching, learning and assessment; Student progression and achievement; Student support and guidance; Learning resources; and Quality assurance and enhancement. The university’s teaching is rated on a scale of four on each of these six dimensions, so the maximum score you can get for the teaching of a particular discipline is 24/24.
After that build up I have to tell you, of course, that our most recent assessment at the OU was in General Engineering and we learned in September that we had gained the top score of 24/24. Last month we heard the result for other universities and noted that Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, which most people think of as top Engineering schools only made 23/24. For the OU that result was not a flash in the pan. Earlier we had scored 24/24 in a very different discipline, Sociology.
Now that this process has been operating for some time you can construct meaningful league tables from the results. The most common approach is to take the proportion of disciplines in which a university’s teaching has been rated as excellent, which means 22/24 or above on the scale I described. If you do this you find there are only about 15 UK universities that have had most of their programs rated as excellent and the Open University places tenth in that list.
We are very proud of that because thirty years ago the British press and its educational establishment said that the OU would never work and that it certainly wouldn’t be able to teach serious subjects like science. Yet among the subjects in which we have been rated excellent are Chemistry, Geology, Music and Business, in addition to Engineering. These are all subjects where you would not think that distance learning had a natural advantage.
If I dwell on this aspect of quality it’s not just because I’m proud of our performance, although I am. It’s because the idea that distance learning is inherently inferior dies hard, especially here in the United States. So I want you to understand that the Open University has combined top quality with large scale. If you combine our student numbers with our quality rankings you find that in Engineering, in Music, in Geology, in Chemistry and in Social Policy a majority of all university students in England studying in excellent-rated programs are at the Open University.
We have broken that insidious link between quality and exclusiveness of access which has tarnished education for centuries and is still rampant in many universities today.
Why has the Open University been successful and what role has technology played in its achievement. That is the third question I said I would address and I’ve touched on it already. But let me go back to basics for a minute.
What is technology?
The definition that we give to our OU students is that technology is the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organizations consisting of people and machines.
The key points in that definition are first that technology is more than applied science. Non-scientific knowledge is areas like design, craft, management is important, as is the tacit knowledge that we take for granted. The second point is that technology is about practical tasks not understanding, which is the domain of science. Teaching large numbers of people, wherever they happen to be and however they happen to be equipped is a very practical task. Third, the definition reminds us that technology always involves people and their social systems as well as hardware.
So what are the important technologies for distance learning? You’ve already gathered that in my experience the soft technologies of process and organization are more important than the hard technologies of electronics, lasers and bits and bytes. No amount of technology will help you if you can’t organize yourself to use it effectively. Conversely if you are well organised, if you have defined the practical task you wish to carry out and if you have a good sense of the social system you are operating in then you will likely achieve a good result even without much fancy hardware.
That’s why I said that the technologies of teamwork across disciplines, division of labour, and project management are so important. These are the ingredients of a learning system which is what our universities have to become.
The Open University uses the service mark ‘Supported Open Learning’, rather than the term distance education to describe what it does. I consider that there are four elements to successful supported open learning:
I said that I would conclude by talking about what we might do together and say a word about what the Open University is doing in the United States. Let’s start with that.
As I explained when I described how the OU is open to places the Open University has not become a global web of learning by setting out to export itself. Someone once said that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absent mind and the OU’s expansion has come because people in other countries seem to want to import it.
Three trends have brought the OU to the United States. First, individual students who began OU study somewhere else moved here and wanted to continue.
Second, multinational corporations that enrolled their European staff on our courses transferred some of them to the US and the US parent or subsidiary then wanted to enrol some local staff. That was when we hit the problem that most large US companies will only sponsor their staff to take courses that are regionally accredited.
Third, a number of US universities asked us to partner with them to address some of the challenges of access, cost, flexibility and curriculum that I mentioned at the start. Our main partnerships to date are with the Florida State University, the California State University and Western Governors University.
We have always made it a principle, when we operate in a particular jurisdiction, to go in through the front door, so to speak, to put our cards on the table and to become officially recognised. In that spirit the Open University of the UK has established this year a sister university, the Open University of the United States. USOU is registered in Delaware and is seeking accreditation through the Middle States Commission. There will be a visit at the end of this month.
Let me say a word about our current partnerships. The first, with the Florida State University (FSU), is aimed at adapting Open University courses for use in upper division programs that will be offered at a distance. The aim is to give holders of associate degrees from Florida’s community colleges the chance to advance to a bachelor’s degree in a convenient and effective manner. Work is under way on three such programs: Computer Science, Information Science and Liberal Arts. The programs will be offered for FSU credit in Florida and may be offered jointly by USOU and FSU in other states.
The partnership with California State University (CSU) is focused on initial teacher education. CSU is adapting the materials and methods of the OU’s Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) to produce a mass enrolment teacher training program that will address the drastic shortage of qualified teachers that is looming in California. The program will be offered for CSU credit in California but may be offered in other states jointly by agreement with those states.
We have had an agreement with the Western Governors University since the G7 summit in Denver last year. That agreement took a major step forward last week when we announced that WGU and USOU are forming an alliance to create the Governors Open University System. That will bring together the credit programs of USOU with the competency- based degrees of WGU, a combination in which we see great synergy. In the fullness of time we expect the Governors Open University to gain accreditation in its own right.
I should stress that we do not see this as an exclusive arrangement. We simply took the view that it was simplest to start with an alliance of two because the difficulty of creating something new increases as at least the square, if not the cube, of the number or partners. But we hope other organizations of various kinds will join in as the Governors Open University System develops and that it will gradually spread nation-wide.
I hope that the Governors Open University System may provide a framework for things that we might do together with institutions in Arizona. The best time for discussing those is in the smaller meetings I will be having over the next two days but let me make a few final comments.
I hope it is clear from my earlier remarks what the key elements of a successful supported open learning system are, and that is the starting point for collaboration.
The first area of collaboration is in course and curriculum development. I mean putting our nest intellects together to conceive the curricula of knowledge and competence that people need today. We must offer students as wide a choice as possible of quality open learning courses. USOU can draw on the huge stock of courseware of the UKOU but some of it will need adaptation and extension and we shall want to add more options and electives to the programs. That requires bright and committed faculty. The key question for me is whether it is best to involve faculty through institutional partnerships or by contracting with them individually – or maybe a mixture of both.
The second area of collaboration is in course presentation and support for learners. That involves people and geography. If the Governors Open University System grows to the same scale as the UK in, say 15 years time, it will need more than 30,000 faculty tutors. Again, the question is whether to contract institutionally or individually. The point about geography is that many students like to have some face-to-face meetings with their tutor and other students. Any organization, and I think particularly of the Community Colleges, that has facilities in many accessible locations may be interested in providing that service to the system.
The third area is articulation. UK Open University experience is that about one-third of our incoming students transfer in credit from other institutions and that one-third of those who leave us without a degree use their OU elsewhere. An important part of the mission of the Governors Open University System is to help students use the credits they have already gained in an efficient way. One obvious area of articulation is between associate degrees and upper division programs.
Those are just three obvious areas where we could work together.
But it’s time for me to stop talking and let you challenge me in discussion. Let me conclude by saying how honoured I am to be invited here. It is very timely for me to be in Arizona and the West right now. Exciting is an overused word but I believe the alliance between WGU and USOU to create the Governors Open University System has created an important vehicle in which we all can carry forward the best of the academic tradition into a new millennium and inaugurate a new era for higher education.
Thank you