COUNCIL OF VALIDATING UNIVERSITIES
Annual Conference 2000
University of Manchester
7 September
The Validity of Validation
After Dinner Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
It is a pleasure to be with you and thank you for inviting me. Although I do plenty of public speaking I always find the after dinner variety challenging. You know the line from the poem: The mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley sheep are fatter. The nice thing about after dinner speeches is that they are expected to be shorter and therefore sweeter. The problem, of course, is that views of what constitutes sweet after dinner remarks vary considerably. They vary, in particular, according to how much people have imbibed.
It’s always a good principle for an after dinner speaker to stay about one glass behind the average per capita consumption in the room. Get too far behind them in the drinks stakes and you won’t understand why your audience is laughing at something that was not meant to be funny. Get too far ahead of them and your audience won’t understand why you are laughing at something that isn’t funny.
That’s all very well when you have your audience in front of you as I do now. But it’s hard when you’re preparing your remarks back home. Will this be an abstemious crowd or are they likely to get stuck into the sauce? With some conferences it’s hard to know. In your case I assumed that people who work in validation have nothing against a glass of wine, or even something stronger. I assumed this simply on the basis of your work of validation. Part of it consists of keeping a straight face while a group of academics try to persuade you that their particular programme is the best thing that ever happened in academic life. I assumed that life in that environment would be intolerable if you couldn’t let your hair down a bit at the end of the day.
However, your organisers told me that you are a serious lot and that you would expect me to say something about the themes of your conference, namely globalisation and foundation degrees. Derek Pollard, your incoming Chair, told me that he did not want me to say much about validation at the Open University.
One of the first things a sensible Vice-Chancellor learns is obedience to instructions from his colleagues, so I shall try to follow those instructions. They are challenging instructions because on globalisation Robin Middlehurst, who spoke to you this morning, is a hard act to follow.
Indeed, while I was writing this I received the latest issue of the e-mail newsletter that Carol Twigg puts out from the States called the Learning MarketSpace. Most of the issue is a paean of praise for Robin’s recent report The Business of Borderless Educationwhich is held up as a far better analysis of the globalisation of education than anything available in the USA. So on globalisation you’ve heard from the best. All I can hope to do is to round that out from the perspective of a practitioner. The OU now has over 30,000 people taking its courses outside the UK so we know something about the reality of operating in other countries.
On Foundation Degrees the problem is quite different. At the moment there are no students taking Foundation Degrees so we are all speculating or asserting positions. I can do that as well as anyone but I do regret that I will not be here for the talks by Dianne Willcocks and Nick Harris tomorrow. Foundation Degrees took us all a bit by surprise, and they certainly took the emerging qualifications framework by surprise, so it will be very helpful to hear how the framework is dealing with it.
So the one subject on which I might have had a free run, validation at the Open University, is the one on which I must be brief and impose a self-denying ordinance out of respect for your chair elect. But let me start there.
When I came from Canada to join the Open University in 1990 it was outside both of the main national higher education systems of the time, the universities and the polytechnics. We were one of three ‘royal peculiars’, the others being Cranfield and the Royal College of Art, that were funded directly by the DES. I arrived to find the Department of Education and Science, as it then was, conducting a Review of the OU.
At that time the OU’s grant, and all the policies made about it, depended on the whim and discretion of ministers. In view of the rough ride that the OU had had in the 1980’s, with accusations of Marxist bias – shown on investigation to be baseless – cuts in funding and suchlike, my new colleagues were deeply suspicious of this review. I took the view that an Open University should be open and insisted that we had nothing to fear from honest scrutiny.
In the event, we discovered more than a year later that the real purpose of the review was to decide what to do with the OU in the reform of higher education that was looming in 1992. The decision was to throw the OU into the large new tank of sharks created by putting the old universities and the newly upgraded polytechnics into a single funding framework. The fact that we were the largest shark in the tank was only mildly reassuring because we were such mild, gentle and open people compared to the hoary veterans of the old CVCP and the Committee of Polytechnic Directors.
But we pitched in and tried to be constructive. As a newcomer without allegiances to the old blocs we tried to bring both sides together and to mediate some of the sillier disputes about how two universities in the same city should choose names.
Partly because of our national reach, and partly, perhaps, because we were seen to be a constructive and territorially disinterested institution, we were approached to provide a service in continuation of the CNAA. Many of my colleagues assumed this would be doing this as a pro bono service to wind down this validation service. In the event the reverse proved to be true. OUVS has grown steadily.
Much of this is due to the wise and careful leadership of Dr Derek Pollard and I pay tribute to him tonight. There are few people who are better informed than Derek is about the award framework of higher education and training in this country. I have particularly appreciated the way he has integrated an awarding body function for N and SVQs into our accreditation work and I will come back to that when I touch on Foundation Degrees.
Observing the work of OUVS over the years – and defending some of its decisions against critics in the rest of the University – I have come to a strong conviction of the importance of the work that you are all doing. Validation seems to me a vital element of any policy of widening access.
Your work widens access in two ways. First, of course, it extends the range of institutions and therefore of students, who can study at degree level. Second, and also very important, is that it widens the intellectual and academic scope of higher education. Traditional academics tend to fight off new disciplines. The CNAA in the 1980s and your own validation activities sometimes have to make difficult decisions about new disciplines. One thinks of osteopathy and chiropractic, now part of the establishment but once very much on the fringe. As knowledge expands the range of disciplines will expand and making decisions about when a new discipline has the scientific basis and corpus of evidence-based practice that merit admission into the mainstream is a very important decision.
In cybernetics there is an important principle, the principle of requisite variety. It says that in a complex world you must have a variety of responses if you want to be able to cope. The principle of requisite variety means that we should welcome and applaud your work in diversifying the provision of higher education through validation.
That means that I hope you will resist the potentially homogenising influence of QAA benchmarks and of the whole £250 million quality assurance industry. It has had a beneficial impact on the system but there must be a worry that will soon be into diminishing returns from this huge investment as everyone plays it safe and quality assurance becomes conformity assurance.
You have a particular responsibility to protect your validated institutions from these pressures. It is important to ensure that institutional variety can flourish. You must insist that programmes can be different and be of commensurate quality. They do not have to be the same.
These pressures to homogenise the UK HE system and to limit the variety of programming that a university can offer through validation or through direct operation overseas lead me naturally to make a few comments about globalisation. If the principle of requisite variety applies in the UK it applies par excellence when you operate overseas.
As of this year the OU has had the interesting experience of operating in the United States through our sister institution the United States Open University. We are discovering, if we didn’t know it already, that a lot of people in countries outside the USA find the American system of higher education more attractive than the British or indeed any other national system.
That is partly, of course because the USA is the current hegemon, the only superpower, the most successful economy, etc. etc. But it’s also because US higher education is more varied and, dare I say it more exciting and user friendly than provision in the rest of the world. Fine that we Brits should defend our patch by trying to ensure quality, not fine if all that does is produce a boring conformity of institutions that are terrified to adapt to local conditions and needs overseas for fear of what the QAA will say.
Having an operation in the USA is proving extremely stimulating for the OU. It is not an OU operation but an American university going through the American regional accreditation system with the Middle States Association. But the need to adapt OU courses for USOU needs and to compete with the local and Canadian providers that the USOU could also use is sharpening us up quite somewhat. Moreover, it seems already clear that many British students will rather like some of the shorter courses and some of the programme structures that the USOU is developing.
And not just Britain. Already we have found that the best response to an explicit programme need in Malaysia is a combination of OU and USOU courses. This is the reality of globalisation.
But having said that we should respect the US higher education powerhouse let’s not sell ourselves short. Technology is closely allied with globalisation and there is a propensity to assume, especially in Whitehall, that in anything to do with technology the US is automatically ahead. It’s not true. There is no university in the world that even comes close to the Open University in the scale and quality of its use of the web in teaching and learning.
On scale there is no contest. Today the OU has 90,000 regular degree students working with the University online in their studies. On top of that there are some 75,000 schoolteachers in our Learning Schools Programme who are learning to use computers effectively to teach their subjects in the classroom. They are online too.
Quality is more elusive because this whole area of online education is bathed in hype, not to say plain lies. My colleague Diana Laurillard, whose book, Rethinking University Teaching, is the classic text about the use of technology in higher education, tries to follow these developments closely. She finds most of the applications of the web to university learning deeply disappointing. That’s because they are not actually applications of the web for learning, they are mostly applications of the web to teaching.
Another colleague, John Naughton, whose recent book A Brief History of the Future: the Origins of the Internet, is a major best-seller, calls this approach shovelware. You simply shovel your lecture notes onto the web and hope for the best. John is also the brains behind our own blockbuster course T171 You, Your Computer and the Net, which I took as a student myself last year. I’m glad I did, not just because I learned to create web pages before many of my colleagues but also because we have 12,000 students taking that course as I speak and even more who have reserved places for its next offering in 2001.
I feel reassured to know that they are getting the good experience I had. When you operate at scale like this you really get to know what works and what doesn’t. The OU certainly doesn’t think it has all the answers to online higher education – but we do think we have discovered some of the questions. We will be ready with answers when the HEFCE e-university project comes out of purdah.
We do indeed live in a complex world when globalisation and technology are changing the assumptions we can make about higher education. But I urge you not to be downhearted. As people involved in validating and being validated you have had to think hard about issues of quality and student service, and thinking hard always puts you ahead of the game.
I said I would conclude with a comment about Foundation Degrees. At the OU we think this is a very important development. We think that for several reasons.
First, FDs seem a good approach to widening participation.
Second, we know that there is a demand for programmes, which combine solid academic grounding with inculcation of core skills and a solid vocational element.
Third, we find it very significant that a government which is not known for giving away control has, by calling these degrees, handed over to the universities the right to define what they are.
With that right comes a big responsibility, namely the responsibility to define these programmes so that they deliver on the promise. We at the OU are taking this very seriously and I urge you to do so to. For example, we intend to insist that the vocational element of each of our FDs, whether validated or directly taught, is explicitly linked to occupational standards.
We are also determined that it is not good enough to think of FDs simply putting a new academic badge on HNCs and HNDs.
As people involved in validation you know more than most of your colleagues about programme structures and programme outcomes. I urge you all to pick up the challenge of Foundation Degrees and to show government that universities know about higher education and can do it better than government.
British higher education and British education generally is not going to conquer the world on the basis of governmental control freakery. Maybe the current crisis over teacher recruitment will drive that lesson home at the primary and secondary level. We, by the way we implement Foundation Degrees can begin to turn back the tide of control in higher education. And that will help us compete on all fours in the global environment.
Thank you.