16 April 1999
Quel plaisir d’être à Sudbury et en visite à Contact Nord. Malheureusement cette visite n’est que la deuxième fois, depuis mon départ de la Laurentienne en 1990, que j’ai pu me rendre dans le nord de l’Ontario. Mon épouse Kristin a été plus chanceuse car elle a eu la possibilité de venir plus souvent.
Elle était là lorsque mon ami Normand Forest, qui était mon patron à la Laurentienne comme président du Conseil des Gouverneurs, a reçu son doctorat honorifique. Elle a été présente aussi pour la cérémonie de collation de grades à laquelle notre fille Catherine a reçu son diplôme de Maîtrise pour ses recherches botaniques, recherches qui s’inscrivaient dans le cadre du grand projet de reverdissement de la région de Sudbury dont nous sommes tous si fiers. Tout cela pour vous dire combien je suis content d’être de retour moi-même.
It is a tremendous pleasure to be with you today. A few weeks ago Maxim and I met in Brunei for the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Commonwealth of Learning. Discovering that I was coming often to the USA this year, he kindly invited me to Sudbury to visit Contact North and address you.
I should note that one important event at the Commonwealth of Learning’s Forum in Brunei was the awarding of a prize for institutional excellence to Contact North. That made me very proud because it was during my time as President of Laurentian that Contact North was created. A bit like the Commonwealth of Learning itself, it seemed to me that Contact North was a somewhat tender plant in its early days, so I am delighted to see it in robust health now and winning international awards in recognition of its good work for the people of Ontario.
I’m also very grateful to you for getting me back to Sudbury. Kristin and I enormously enjoyed our six years at Laurentian and regret that we have fewer occasions than we would like to come back here together. However, I’m pleased to say that last year we did take our main vacation in Ontario - on the Rideau Canal. This year our daughter Catherine, a Laurentian graduate, has persuaded us to take a canoeing holiday in Killarney Park and we are much looking forward to that.
Today I shall talk to you from four perspectives. First, the perspective of a student in a distance learning course. I’m taking a new Open University course called T171: You, Your Computer and the Net, Learning and Living in the Information Age which the OU is running as a pilot this year with 750 students. It’s a 36-week course and I’m doing it partly for the subject matter and partly because it uses the Web intensively and I want to form my own judgements about the Web as a teaching medium. So far I’ve discovered strengths and weaknesses. A strength is the ability to move quickly between different activities in the course. A weakness is that if you travel internationally as much as I do it is nothing like as convenient as the older media – or as inexpensive to study.
I know that because when I was at Laurentian I was also a student and completed Thorneloe College’s distant-taught Diploma in Theology. That was a combination of text and audio-cassettes which travelled very easily. Indeed, I did the last two years of study in the program after I had moved to the UK and it worked fine.
Second, I speak to you as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University. Earlier in my career, in the 1970s, when I worked successively at the Télé-université and at Athabasca University, I came to admire the way that the UK Open University had transformed correspondence education, which used to have low status, into the highly successful modern style of distance learning. As the 1980s advanced it seemed to me that this pioneer had remained the leader of modern distance learning and I thought that to lead the Open University must be the most exciting job in higher education anywhere.
After eight years I still think that is it. That’s because it is an enormously idealistic, powerful, optimistic and decent institution. There is never a dull moment because there is always something new to work at. That brings me to the third perspective. Last year the Open University created a sister institution, the United States Open University, of which I am ex-officio President by virtue of my role as Vice-Chancellor of the UKOU. So, as well as heading the world’s most famous and well-established distance teaching university I am also the head of a brand new Open University with the challenge of implementing an appropriate programme of university-level distance learning for the United States at the beginning of a new millennium.
Finally, I like to be thought of a practitioner-scholar – and the scholarship aspect embraces both my role as a student and my attempts to make sense of the role of technology in education by writing about it.
My most important recent attempt is a book entitled Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. I have been flattered by the enthusiasm with which it has been received here in North America. A particularly satisfying moment was to meet a member of KPMG’s higher education consultancy team carrying a copy that was thoroughly dog-eared with constant use.
You are a sophisticated audience because Contact North has been highly successful at designing a distance learning system for its particular niche in Ontario. You do not need me to urge on you the social and economic importance of distance education. What may be of interest, however, is to update you on the Open University. When an institution is as well-known as the OU there is always a danger that people carry around an outdated impression of it.
In the USA, for example, I regularly meet people who suggest, rather condescendingly, that the OU is an old-fashioned form of distance learning because it doesn’t teach exclusively on the Web. It’s correct that we don’t teach exclusively on the Web, although we could if we wanted to. But we have good reasons for not teaching exclusively on the Web. They are related to the fact that the OU may well be the world’s largest on-line academic community with 50,000 students linked to the University and the Internet from their home computers.
I haven’t met anyone who claims to have a bigger on-line student body and, of course, it is that student body, which includes all sorts of people as well as myself, that keeps us in touch with the reality of what works well when it come to course design and learning methods.
So I shall put the Open University in perspective and talk about its recent achievements.
First, why was the Open University set up? Why did the UK government, thirty years ago this month, issue a Royal Charter for a completely new type of university. The reasons were summed up in a brilliant short speech made by Geoffrey Crowther, the University’s first Chancellor, at the inaugural ceremony in 1969. He said that the purpose of the OU was to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. That noble and challenging mission has guided us to this day.
When we set up the United States Open University last year I presented this statement to the new American Board of Governance as material to work with in developing a mission statement for USOU. They said that it was fine, and simply added two further areas of openness: open as to time and open as to the world.
Second, how has the Open University fulfilled its mission. What has it achieved in 30 years? The OU began operations in 1971 with a first cohort of 25,000 students and a generation later it can claim considerable success in achieving the objectives set by its founders.
Open to people
In order to be open to people the Open University's most radical step was to remove all academic pre-requisites for entry. In 1999 the proportion of new Open University students without the conventional entry qualifications for UK universities was higher than ever. Each year this category accounts for one-third of the new graduates of the Open University , supporting the conviction that, with proper learning systems, access to success in higher education can be greatly expanded.
The University has expanded the range of people in higher education: in age; in socio-economic circumstances; in gender and among disabled people. The numbers speak for themselves. There are about 150,000 students taking OU degree programmes this year and another 50,000 involved in continuing education or vocational assessment. It’s a large operation and a diverse operation. There are 6,000 students over 60 and 800 over eighty – yet the numbers of students under 24 are also rising rapidly. And the really big numbers are between 25 and 45.
Open to places
In pursuit of its mission to be open as to places the Open University has become an increasingly international institution. In 1999 more than 30,000 students are taking Open University courses outside the UK. The largest concentrations are elsewhere in the European Union, the former Soviet bloc (where courses are available in local languages), Hong Kong and Singapore. There are also growing programmes in Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Africa, and India. As I noted the United States Open University is developing activities and partnerships south of the border.
Open to methods
Openness to methods has caused the OU's use of media and technology steadily to evolve. The TV programmes broadcast on the terrestrial channel BBC2 for 20 hours per week are still the most visible expression of the Open University's openness to methods to the general public. Some of them have an audience of over two million viewers.
Less visible to the public have been the newer teaching and learning media that the Open University has added since its foundation. Of particular note are personal media, i.e. equipment such as audio and video cassette recorders and personal computers owned by students. Last year we shipped 1.1 million audio cassettes to students and nearly half a million hours worth of videotape viewing.
Right now we have 50,000 students on-line from home and they are exchanging 200,000 messages a day, mostly with each other but also with the associate faculty members who are their personal mentors. That’s a density of internet use by students that few universities can match. In 1998 we sent out 340,000 floppy disks to students. That was 20% down on the year before but we sent out 130,000 CD-ROMs and those numbers are going up fast.
Open to ideas
Openness to ideas is the raison d’être of any university. The Open University has fulfilled this idea through a commitment to research and through its practice of developing courses in teams. The course team gives the Open University's courses much greater quality and intellectual vitality than you usually get in distance teaching - or in classroom teaching for that matter.
A key facet of openness to ideas is that all faculties of the University house research of international calibre. A celebrated example is the work of the OU's Interplanetary Sciences Research Unit, which is a major European centre for investigation into the possibility of life on Mars.
I am sure that this commitment to research partly explains why the OU ranks 11th for teaching quality and is part of the elite group of British universities that have most of their programs rated as 'excellent'. This includes subjects like Music, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, where distance education would not appear to enjoy a natural advantage. A few months ago the OU scored the maximum of 24/24 for its teaching of General Engineering, outdoing Cambridge and all other UK Engineering Schools.
That is a quick summary of what the OU was intended to do and what it has done. My third question is: why has it been so successful?
The first answer that it began with very strong political support, relatively good funding and some very good people. They designed and built a learning system whose key elements have both stood the test of time and shown themselves capable of evolution as times have changed. Those key elements are four:
1) Well-designed multiple-media teaching materials:
The key innovation here was the course team. The founding Vice-Chancellor of the OU, Walter Perry, believes that the course team is the most important innovation in higher education that the OU has made. Putting together substantial interdisciplinary teams of faculty and professional staff costs money. However by working together in a collaborative but critical style the team ensures that the material of the course is both academically up-to-the-minute and lively; and that it is efficient to learn from.
2) Personal academic support to each student:
The key innovation here was the notion of tutor – what we now call associate lecturers. These are part-time employees of the OU, usually with full-time jobs as faculty in other higher education institutions or as employed professionals. The OU spends nearly $Can 5 million each year providing training to them. They are devoted, dedicated and effective and many students eulogise about their role. This role has evolved. The big challenge at the moment is to develop protocols to make on-line tutoring maximally effective and efficient.
3) Efficient logistics:
Administration and logistics are just as important as good courses and good tutors. The Open University operates on a large scale and relies crucially on the efficiency and effectiveness of its logistic and administrative systems. We have over 150,000 students in degree-credit programmes and at our main examination session last year they wrote 120,000 examination scripts at sites in 111 countries. That’s just one example of the challenges of scale. The number of scripts that went astray was in single figures.
This is an area where new technology can help to improve service levels by giving staff and students up-to-date information. The University has just spent $Can 20 million in a five-year programme to redevelop its record and logistic support systems and has taken advantage of this project to modernise many of its business processes. It has been remarkably successfully and staff are currently making 100,000 transactions per day on the new system. In the next stage the benefits of access to these systems will be made directly available to students and tutors.
4) Faculty who also conduct research:
I’ve mentioned the general commitment to research across all the disciplines that we teach. One particularly important area of investigation for the OU is the use of technology in education, where I suspect we must have the world’s largest group of talented researchers. They work in two related units. The Institute for Educational Technology advises on the design of courses and conducts intensive research on the nature of OU students and the effectiveness of our courses. The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 with a mandate to combine leading edge development of the Web, the Internet and on-line communication generally with the scaling up of the resultant technologies to reach large numbers of students.
The KMi has a special commitment to the development of enabling technologies for students with disabilities. It is constantly developing new applications of the Internet (such as its worldwide telepresence system, KMi Stadium).
I should digress for a moment to talk about the Knowledge Media. What are they? It’s a term that was invented simultaneously, back in 1995, at the Open University and the University of Toronto. The term designates the results of the convergence of information and communication technologies and cognitive science. Knowledge Media is a useful term, better than multi-media or the information superhighway, because it reminds us that these technologies mediate knowledge in ways not previously possible.
You can see the awareness of the importance of the knowledge media in any university. Faculty sense, almost instinctively, that this time it's different. They may not subscribe to the view of my Knowledge Media Institute that the knowledge media will change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge - but they suspect that the knowledge media do have radical implications for academic work.
That's because the knowledge media are about the capturing, storing, imparting, sharing, accessing, creating, combining, transforming and synthesising of knowledge. The knowledge media are not just a technical format, such as CD-ROM or computer conferencing, but the whole presentational style, the user interface, the accessibility, the interactivity. For our ability to transmit and manipulate symbols the knowledge media are such a quantitative advance, such a quantum leap, that they represent a qualitative change.
Those are some comments on what the Open University was created for, what it has achieved and why it has been successful. For the last part of these remarks I shall address the next obvious question: OK, so what next?
The best way to describe a tremendously active and exciting period of change at the OU is to return to the elements of openness that were our original mission.
Open as to People remains the core of our mission. The OU has brought hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into higher education and we are proud of that. However, the focus of the UK government is now not so much on expanding the postsecondary education of ordinary people as on reaching the really disadvantaged. These are people living in areas, rural or urban, where the take up of opportunities for higher education is very low. They are those who left school without qualifications and without ever wanting to see education again. They are those who are struggling to gain or retain employment in a world that has fewer and fewer unskilled jobs.
A key plank of the UK government’s platform for addressing this tough challenge is an election manifesto commitment called the University for Industry to be set up ‘in association with the Open University’. UfI, as it is known, will not be a provider and organiser of education and training but rather a broker and facilitator that will encourage the rest of the UK system to do more in this area. The OU is taking various new initiatives to help the UfI project by expanding its own curriculum both alone and in partnership.
This means offering more certificate and diploma programmes that are less than a full degree. It means offering shorter courses and more frequent start dates. It means creating alliances to offer a wider range of vocational courses at a distance than are currently available in the UK. It means articulating OU programmes more explicitly with the needs of employers and the programmes of other providers. It’s an exciting and challenging agenda of change –which is happening at the same time as the OU is expanding its Master’s programmes in what is already the UK’s largest graduate school with 30,000 students.
I have already described how the OU is open as to places. We have been taken by surprise by the speed of development of our international reach. The focus of work is now to strengthen strategy and organisation in order better to serve our 30,000 students outside the UK and respond to future demands. Our new business subsidiaries, OU Worldwide, Ltd. and OU Worldwide (USA) Inc. are already helping us give better service to partners.
We have developed five models through which people and institutions outside the UK can take advantage of the Open University.
Direct Teaching
The first model, which we use in the rest of the European Union, is to enrol students directly just as if they were in the UK. That now accounts for about 9,000 students in Ireland and continental Europe. It’s interesting that the numbers in the Republic or Ireland are now greater than in Northern Ireland. We hold commencement exercises in Dublin, Brussels and Paris – as well as in fifteen UK locations – and we have staff on the ground in most European countries.
Whole course user
In the second model, which we call whole course user, other institutions buy our courses and teach them for their own credit. The biggest example is the Open University of Hong Kong, where UK Open University courses for the MBA and in undergraduate Math, Science, Computing and Technology account for some 7,000 students. Even though students get OUHK credit and awards such an arrangement needs a close academic planning partnership if it is to work well. The Florida State University is also a whole course user for our Master’s level courses in Open and Distance Learning.
Institution as Tutor
The third model we call Institution as Tutor. This involves a partnership between the Open University and another body. Students take Open University courses and programs for OU credit and awards but the local institution plays a vital role in local student support, administration and logistics. We have partnerships like this in 23 countries and in 19 cases the local government is investing some funds to support the venture.
The most developed examples are in Singapore, where we run an Open University Degree Program with the Singapore Institute of Management for 6,000 students and in the countries of the former Soviet bloc where some 15,000 students are taking our management courses in six local languages. This program has been the major Western contribution to management education in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In Canada we have a partnership with the University of Waterloo for a Master’s in Technology Management.
Validation
Model four is the accreditation and validation by the Open University of teaching, whether face-to-face or at a distance, in other institutions. Some years ago the OU was asked to takeover the UK’s national accreditation commission, the Council for National Academic Awards. We set up Open University Validation Services which now accredits some fifty institutions at the Bachelor’s and Master’s level and has over 100 institutions sponsoring 500 PhD students in the OU research degree program. Open University Validation Services is highly regarded internationally for the quality of its work.
Sister University
Having listed those four models I have to admit that they still didn’t provide all that we needed to respond to the growing interest from individuals, institutions and employers in the United States. We felt that in the highly developed and sophisticated US higher education system we could make our most effective contribution through the establishment of an independent American university that shares the goals and values of the UK Open University.
So the Council of the Open University decided to set up the United States Open University as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation registered in Delaware and licensed as an institution of higher education in that state. It has a Board of Governance largely made up of distinguished Americans from various walks of life. Last month our new university achieved candidacy for accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges. It is seeking licenses to operate in other states as well as Delaware.
USOU will operate in two related ways. First, it will have the capacity to teach its own courses and programs. We start this year with Master’s and Upper Division courses in Business, Computing, Software Engineering, European Studies and International Studies and we shall develop the program further in 2000 taking advantage of the UK Open University’s huge bank of quality courseware. Second, and very importantly, USOU seeks partnerships with American universities and colleges in order to help them increase their reach and impact through Open University methods.
Let me now turn to what is new in our teaching methods. All of us who are engaged in distance learning face the challenge of adapting our methods to make good use of each new technology. The Open University has made a major commitment, under the skilled leadership of Professor Diana Laurillard, who is our Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning Technologies and Teaching, to develop a technology strategy.
First what is our goal? What are the strategic challenges facing the Open University, especially those involving new technology? In harnessing the knowledge media the Open University faces the same key challenges as most universities, namely:
- Teaching effectiveness and learning productivity;
In this context several developments are particularly important for the Open University in 1999:
CD-ROM
I start with CD-ROM. The 1999 version of the OU's first level Science course, S103 Discovering Science, uses the full multimedia capabilities of CD-ROM on a large scale. This course invested millions of dollars in making eleven CD-ROMs which engage each of the 4000 students on the course in some 60 hours of work. The University considers that for the next few years CD-ROM is the only technology that can bring the advantages of interactive multimedia into most students' homes. These CD-ROMs are proving enormously popular with students, who seem to be convinced that the highly interactive nature of the medium increases their learning productivity and challenges them to think by forcing them to answer questions.
Computer Conferencing
Second, I should flag computer conferencing, which has been the most successful large-scale application of the knowledge media in the Open University so far. Students enjoy being able to communicate with each other and there are 6,000 active conferences to prove it. We have already gone through several generations of computer conferencing software. Let me pay tribute to the quality of FirstClass, a conferencing product of Ontario’s SoftArc Company of which the OU is one of the world’s largest users.
Tutors can assemble conference groups on the network. In my own course at the moment I have to work in a conference with six other students, whom I will probably never meet in person, to design and build a website. Computer conferencing also allows students to create their own groups for various social and professional purposes. The Open University Student Association plays a very helpful role in moderating these conferences. It is this sort of activity which explains why OU students are posting about 20,000 messages every day and reading about 200,000.
Tutoring
Third, the tutorial support system, especially the care given to commenting on student assignments, is a key element in the Open University's success. Pilot projects of increasing scale are being conducted to test newly developed techniques for handling the electronic submission of student assignments. Each year the University handles over one million student assignments and has sophisticated monitoring and quality assurance arrangements for this purpose.
The assignment handling process is so central to the quality of the University's teaching that it simply cannot afford to introduce new methods in this area until they have been proven to be reliable to operate at scale and popular with students. I’ve just submitted my first assignment electronically. It was a lot more complicated than putting a stamp on an envelope but I surprised myself by managing to do it.
The Web
Fourth, let me comment on the World Wide Web. In twenty-five years of successful teaching the Open University has learned that there is no magic single learning medium. Our plan is therefore to integrate the use of the Web into the University's broadly based multiple media learning system, not to move all teaching and learning activities onto the Web. However, the University sees particularly exciting opportunities for combining the use of the Web with broadcast television.
Broadcast television remains a core element of the Open University's academic strategy. It is the primary vehicle through which it achieves its charter goal of 'promoting the educational well-being of the community generally'. The University is increasingly designing its TV programmes, which sometimes attract an audience of millions, with this wider general audience in mind.
Broadcast television is about to undergo a digital revolution that will increase the number of channels and offer possibilities for interactive programming. Together the Open University and the British Broadcasting Corporation see exciting possibilities of combining the strengths of broadcast television (the ability to reach large audiences and create interest in a topic) with the advantages of the Web (to allow individuals to explore the topic interactively and in greater depth).
So much for the next developments in openness to methods. I’ve already made some comments about being open as to ideas and noted that the Open University has always considered research a part of its mission. The volume and quality of OU research has increased steadily over its short history and it now ranks about one-third of the way down the league table of UK universities on this criterion.
The challenge here is to continue to enhance research activity at a time when our government is being more and more selective in its funding of university research. There are moves afoot to concentrate public research spending in a limited number of universities. It is not clear where in the league table the gap between research rich and research poor universities will emerge, but the OU is determined to be in the research group. The test will come when the national next research assessment exercise is completed in 2001.
I’ll stop there. It has been a pleasure to talk to you. I hope that my account of the aims, achievements, methods and plans of the Open University have been of interest, even though Contact North works to a very different model. I hope that I have managed to share some of the tremendous excitement and buzz that you find at the Open University.
Let me conclude by saying that every time that I have changed jobs in my career the colleagues I was leaving thought I was mad. When I left Ecole Polytechnique to go the Télé-université my engineer friends thought I was nuts to go into something as dodgy as distance learning. When I left the Télé-université to go to Athabasca my Quebec City friends, for whom the earth ends at the Ottawa River, felt sorry for me. When I returned from Alberta to Montreal to work at Concordia, only months before the 1980 Quebec referendum, my Alberta friends thought I had taken leave of my senses. When I left Montreal to come to Sudbury in 1984 my Montreal colleagues expressed their condolences. And when I left Sudbury and God’s Country of Northern Ontario in 1990 to go to Britain many in the Laurentian community thought I must be soft in the head.
I hope I’ve convinced you that it was a good move and I’m having a great time.
Thank you. Merci