It is a great pleasure to be with you today and I am greatly honoured to be the recipient of the Morris T Keeton Award. I have admired the work of CAEL ever since it was created when I was working at Quebecs Télé-université in the 1970s, but this is the first time I have managed to attend your conference.
A luncheon address is not like a regular keynote. To start with, I don’t feel I have to inflict death by Powerpoint on you, so no slides. But second, I assume that you expect a talk at lunch to include more meat than the speech you might expect after dinner, when, after a few glasses of wine, jokes and stories are more digestible than deep thoughts.
All the same, I am always nervous about talking after any meal. The conversations you’re having at your table may be far more interesting than anything I might say. And I can’t help but recall the story about the lions and the early Christians.
In the heyday of imperial Rome and the persecution of the church they held spectacles in the Coliseum. A group of Christians would be pushed into the arena and then a pride of hungry lions would be released on them for the entertainment of the crowd.
The story goes that one day the Christians were in the arena, the crowd was in a frenzy and the lions came charging in. One of the Christians was seen to step forward and say something to the leading lion, whereupon he and all the other lions simply lay down on the sand.
The crowd booed and threw things but the lions wouldn’t budge. Finally the Emperor Nero called the Christian over to his ringside seat and asked him: “What did you say to the lion”. “I told him there would be speeches after the meal” the Christian replied.
I shall speak from a more personal perspective than usual and my title is Experiencing Adult Learning. Apart from combining the key words in CAEL’s name that title nicely covers the three themes of these remarks.
First, I will take an autobiographical tack and reminisce about my own experience as an adult learner.
Second, I shall argue that distance learning is now best placed to carry much of the load of quality adult learning – you would expect no less from me.
Third I shall argue, from observations of Open University students, that in the next century adult learners could acquire the major role in upholding the core values of the academy.
First then, my personal experience. I have been formally engaged in learning, as a registered student, for much of my professional career. Since arriving at the Open University in 1990 for example, I have completed a Diploma in Theology, a Master’s degree in Educational Technology, both from Canadian universities. This year I have done a new 8 credit, 36-week web-based Open University course entitled You, Your Computer and the Net.
One of the nice things about heading a distance teaching university is that you can take courses from your own institution without having faculty colleagues freak out when you show up in their class. However, you do know that staff with access to the student record system are following your progress and your assignment grades with interest which kept me on my toes.
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, proved to have a greater impact on my career than anything I had done before. Here’s how it happened.
I had an orthodox higher education in medieval universities. Bachelor’s and Master’s from Oxford University, in metallurgy; Doctorate from the University of Paris in nuclear metallurgy. From Paris I was hired to be an assistant professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Montreal. The conveyor belt of full-time education, on which I had been travelling happily for 22 years, had dropped me off into a career box labelled university faculty.
I thought therefore, that I ought to learn something about education – the scientific study thereof. It wasn’t until I was well embarked as a part-time student in a Master’s in Educational Technology at Sir George Williams University in Montreal that I realised that this was a deviant reflex for a young engineering academic.
But by then I was having a good time. It was my first experience of academic social science and my first experience of North American university teaching and it was both weird and wonderful.
It also changed my life. The program required a 3-month internship and back in 1971 everyone was talking about an amazing innovation, by the Brits of all people, called the Open University. So I went and did my internship there as an unpaid member of staff and had a conversion on the road to Milton Keynes – which is the new city where the Open University, which I shall call the OU, is located.
The OU had opened its doors to students in 1971 with a first class of 25,000. By the time I did my internship in 1972 they had admitted a second class of 25,000 so it was already a large enterprise. I found everything about it immensely exciting: the scale, the idealism, the use of media, the teamwork, the use of residential schools, the eagerness of the students, the commitment to openness. I was bowled over. I had seen the future of higher education and wanted to be part of it.
The opportunity came soon after I returned to Montreal after that summer in England. The University of Quebec was setting up an open university, called the Télé-université and I became the third staff member they hired and moved to Quebec City.
My colleagues at the School of Engineering thought I was nuts, but then in all my four subsequent career moves the colleagues I was leaving thought I was crazy so I now regard the shock on the faces of my friends when I announce a new job as confirmation that I’ve made a good decision.
The result of my part-time study was to put me in at the beginning of the most important development in higher education in our lifetimes, the modernization of distance learning.
Since moving to the Télé-université, then on to Athabasca University, I have had the privilege of always being close to the centre of the international distance learning movement, which has been immensely rewarding in every way.
Now the wheel has come full circle. In 1972 I was the lowest paid member of the OU faculty because I wasn’t paid at all. Today as head of the Open University I’m its highest paid employee and also have the most exciting academic job in the world.
Which leads to the second part of these remarks. The thirty-year legacy of modern distance education now equips it to play the central role in the expansion of adult learning that we shall see in the next century. I shall have to justify that statement because the United States has come rather late to distance learning so you are now having the arguments about its validity that the rest of the world had a generation ago.
But it’s good that you are having those arguments. That is what the academic mode of thinking, which we all value so much, is about. Looking at the evidence, reasoning about it, making hypotheses, and trying to test them.
The unfortunate aspect of the debate about distance learning in the United States right now is that it has got mixed up with various extraneous issues. An obsession with particular delivery technologies is the least of the problems.
More serious is that people confuse distance learning with scary new types of institution, such as corporate universities, virtual universities (whatever they are) and for-profit universities. In fact there is no particular connection. The most successful for-profit university, Phoenix, is only marginally involved in distance learning. Its genius is to have commoditized campus teaching.
The same goes for corporate universities, which, when they are not just a fancy new name for the company training department, carry a heavy freight of corporate propaganda. Virtual universities seem to come and go rather quickly – in keeping with their name.
The Open University, and the various similar universities that have been modelled on it in other parts of the world, have shown that distance education allows you to preserve – even enhance – the core academic values of the university and yet provide students with programs that are better, cheaper, and more flexible.
That is the revolution in which it has been my privilege to be caught up - thanks to my strange decision to become an adult learner in my first faculty job.
This is not the place to detail the achievements of distance learning over the last quarter century. For that I refer you to my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. But since some of your colleagues are still involved in sterile research comparing distance learning and classroom teaching – which is rather like comparing air travel and railroads – some facts may be helpful.
Today Open University teaching is recognised to be of better quality than the teaching of most other UK universities. It also costs significantly less. It is also more flexible and for all these reasons it is more accessible. I’ll take them in reverse order.
With 160,000 students in degree credit courses there are now more students in the Open University than there were in all UK universities combined when the idea was first launched in the 1960s. Furthermore, the student body is more diverse on just about every measure than you find on campus.
The flexibility of the OU’s multiple media distance learning system explains why there are now 30,000 students taking our courses outside the UK. In countries outside Europe we operate with a local partner so that we can be sure of the quality of the personal tutorial support that we believe to be such an important part of our learning system.
Our partner here in the USA is the recently created United States Open University whose founding Chancellor, Dr Richard Jarvis, took office in September. The USOU will launch in 2000, a new University for a new millennium, and I hope that it will become an active member of the CAEL community. The USOU merits a whole talk to itself so Ill just focus today on its UK parent.
The cost of an Open University degree, according to a UK government study is between sixty and eighty percent of the average of other universities, depending on the subject of the degree.
Finally, the OU has now established itself in the top ten percent of UK universities and colleges for quality. Only about 20 universities have had most of their programs rated as ‘excellent’ by the national quality assessment agency and the OU is up there with the leaders in that elite.
This year all four of our programs that went through assessment: General Engineering, Biology, Physics and Psychology were rated as excellent. Indeed, in General Engineering we were the only University to get the maximum score of 24/24 on the teaching quality assessment. Oxford and Cambridge, who reckon to have good Engineering schools, had to be satisfied with 23/24.
If you combine the quality of the Open University with its scale you get a remarkable result. You find that in various disciplines, like Music, Geology, Chemistry, Social Policy and Engineering a majority of all students in England enrolled in excellent-rated programs are at the Open University.
If I stress the success of the Open University it is not just because of my pride in its achievements. It is because in the USA we are still hung up in debates about whether distance learning is as good as classroom teaching.
I'm not hostile to learning on campus, indeed, I predict that rumours of the death of the campus are greatly exaggerated. Campuses will always be in demand because they create an environment where young folk can come to term with life, love, liquor and even a little learning - while sparing the rest of the community the sight of these often unsightly processes.
But if learning is the focus, and for adult students it is, then distance learning can be much better and of more consistent quality. The fact that it can cost less may not matter here in America, a rich country that supports its universities generously, but it matters a lot in most other parts of the world where the cost of traditional approaches puts them out of the reach of growing populations.
What is the key to doing distance education well?
We have found that success rests on four pillars:
Combine distance learning with adult and experiential learning and I believe that you have a very important part of the future of the academy and, if it does not sound to grandiloquent, the future of our society. This is my third topic so let me explain what I mean.
Two years ago the UK conducted a survey of graduates from all universities with the aim of trying to define a concept called graduateness. How is someone changed by doing a university degree?
The results did not differ greatly from university to university, except in one case. Graduates from the Open University, much more than graduates from elsewhere, said that university study had changed their lives.
At first sight that seemed odd. The average age of OU students on entry is 34 so you would think their lives had achieved a degree of stability. Conversely, you might think that the young, malleable students who study full-time at university after secondary school would be changed by the experience of university.
No doubt they are, but if so they are much less aware of it than our older OU students, perhaps because it is mixed in with the general process of maturation. Perhaps life, love and liquor take precedence over learning.
How do Open University graduates say that study has changed them? Like all graduates they find that the degree has made them more employable. But our mature students give greater importance to personal development than to employability. They mention new careers, better job opportunities, more self-confidence, a sense of achievement, more opportunities in life and new friends as the results of their studies.
One Open University graduate reported, with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation, that ever since doing a degree with the Open University he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question.
I conduct my own informal study each year, at our twenty-five commencement ceremonies, when many thousands of Open University graduates comment to me individually about their studies. A surprising number do second, third and even fourth baccalaureate degrees. I’ve often heard the comment, ‘I’m now studying properly what I only did superficially in my first degree as a young student’.
My conclusion is that the era of lifelong learning allows us to target our efforts at the right age group. We should not oppose the drift of our younger students to increasingly vocational, professional, utilitarian and instrumental types of programs. We should not try to force liberal arts down their unwilling throats. Let them learn about adult life and acquire a decent competence that will earn them a living.
For the majority it is later, as lifelong learners, that they become mature students in both senses of that term. They are then ready to seek understanding and more alert to the nature of knowledge. That is the time for the inculcation of the academic mode of thinking that makes hypotheses, and the development of the systematic skepticism that examines the evidence.
University education, in its fullest sense, may well be inappropriate for the young. It is only later, as minds are matured by life experience, that they are ready for real university study.
Perhaps we are returning to an older human tradition which valued the wisdom of older people. You could argue that for most of this century we have tried to provide wisdom through the university education of a small elite of very able young people. Now that we are educating many more young people beyond school it is natural that we focus on making them occupationally competent rather than precociously wise.
But there is more. There is evidence that study as a mature person makes a proportion of people more likely to get involved in the life of the wider community.
I expect that Open University data is typical. 46% of our graduates report an enhanced interest in current affairs, reading non-fiction and watching more serious TV programs. 40% said that as a result of their studies they had become more interested in helping people in need. 20% had become more involved in cultural activities. 10% had become more involved in political activities.
Those percentages, applied to an OU graduating class of many thousands each year, are a contribution to a more cohesive society that becomes very significant if you add in similar proportions of all mature graduates from your institutions.
This assumes, of course, that engagement with the wider community is a good thing, but I plead guilty to that charge. A future where we simply live and move nervously in and between the electronic security of our separate gated communities, be they smart condominiums, prisons, colleges or office buildings, is not one that appeals to me.
Thomas Jefferson, who is arguably the greatest public figure that the modern world has produced - despite recently revealed sexual peccadilloes that seem to go with the presidential territory - said that humanity divides into two groups. There are those who fear and distrust the people and those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. I am proud that one product of Open University study is numbers of graduates who identify with the people and do something about it in the Jeffersonian tradition.
Those who have confidence in the people have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition. But our power structures often see the consciousness of the citizenry as a danger which must be lulled and channeled towards the inoffensive and superficial.
We each have our views on where to raise the consciousness of our fellow citizens. The point of producing graduates who engage with the community is not to channel its concerns in a particular direction but to encourage the general civic consciousness that is the foundation for decent democracy.
That is how I interpret the meaning of your conference title: Building the Future through Learning.
I end on another personal note. I said that joining the Educational Technology program at Sir George Williams University changed my life. What I did not confess was that I dropped out of the program in 1977 without doing the required thesis because I was then busy moving to Alberta and another change of job.
Fifteen years and two more jobs later I found myself at the Open University. Meanwhile I had done various other courses as a student and completed a Diploma in Theology. I caught the study bug again and decided that I wanted to embark on a part-time degree in Law.
At this point my wife, Kristin, sat me down and we had a robust discussion about having time together at weekends and suchlike. It ended with her saying in exasperation: “Well, if you must become a student again, why dont you finish the Master’s in Educational Technology program that you dropped out of?”
I took her at her word. Sir George Williams University had now become Concordia University. They pointed out that my coursework was obsolete and that re-registration after fifteen years didn’t fit their regulations. But, being one of Canadas beacons of commitment to adult learning, they agreed to let me back in, observing that I had obviously made some use of my earlier studies.
Thus it was that in 1995 I completed a thesis which I then developed into my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. Just as the earlier study launched me on a new career, finishing the program renewed me as a scholar and practitioner and allowed me to develop a wonderful new set of international contacts.
That is why I am very proud to be the recipient of the Morris T Keeton Award. You are honouring someone who took 25 years to complete a degree. But combining adult learning with work experience has been my story for thirty years and it has been an exhilarating trajectory. This award is icing on the cake and I thank you for it.