January 20, 2000
Remarks by the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Daniel
Thank you so much for inviting me to this launch of DD100: An Introduction to the Social Sciences: Understanding Social Change. It really doesn’t seem very long ago that we had a party in the BBC to celebrate the launch of D103. I was still the ‘new’ V-C then and I remember being amazed to learn that over 50,000 people had taken D102 over its lifetime. I’ve just checked the figures for D103, which has been taken by 59,629 people since 1991. Now we are launching DD100 and David and Kath have told me they expect our new course to reach 100,000 students over eight years. We are off to an amazing start with over 10,100 registered for it this year.
To put those numbers in perspective recall that back in 1963, the year that Harold Wilson launched the idea of the OU into our political discourse, there were only 130,000 students in all UK universities combined. Whichever way you look at it the Faculty of Social Sciences has made and is making a massive contribution to higher education in the UK and further afield.
I am particularly flattered and touched that you have given me a speaking part today because I am known to have been a student in T171: You, Your Computer and the Net as part of the pilot group last year. I received a very imaginative Christmas card from the Social Sciences Deanery which made me realise that there is some sibling rivalry between DD100 and T171, both of which have record-breaking status. But of course DD100 is the record breaker. All I can say in defence of my decision to take T171 is that you were not offering a pilot of DD100 last year.
Anyway, I’ve tried to make up for my apparent favouritism by working my way through Block 1 of DD100 and I’m very impressed. I enjoyed questioning my own identity and I was delighted by the attitude of questioning that pervades the course. I admire the Canadian political thinker John Ralston Saul and working through DD100 reminded me of his statement “that we must alter our civilisation from one of answers to one which feels satisfaction, not anxiety, when doubt is established.”
DD100 establishes doubt and then helps students address it from various perspectives. I found the tone, style, and structure of the course very attractive and I congratulate the course co-chairs, Kath Woodward and David Goldblatt, the 49 other members of the course team and the external assessor, Professor Nigel Thrift, on a magnificent job. Meeting Kath and David last week gave me some insight into the sheer intellectual energy that has gone into DD100.
This course innovates at level one in ways that you will hear about in a moment. It charts a new path in the components that it doesn’t have: no final exam, no summer school. And it breaks new ground in other ways: the cumulative development of study skills; the interdisciplinary style throughout; the website for the 600 tutors; the cross-cutting of the Blocks and the themes of the course; the assessment linked to skills. In summary this course is both sophisticated in concept and yet simple in execution: the OU at its best.
Much now rides on this course, not only because it is the largest course the OU has ever offered but also because of ways in which the OU has changed this year. Of all undergraduate students this year 37% are new students, up from 31% last year. Furthermore two courses, DD100 and T171 account for 30% of those new students, nearly 20,000 people. Of even more significance is that 22% of new students this year are benefiting from some form of financial assistance, up from 6% last year.
In fact in DD100 the proportion of students with financial assistance is much higher than 22%. That is excellent news in the sense that this year the OU is more open to people without much money than it has been for many years. It is also a challenge. Our aim is to give these students access to success, not access to failure. That’s why I’m delighted that you are putting such energy into the presentation and maintenance of the course with the ongoing involvement of many in the course team.
It’s also why I am pleased that you are developing special versions of the course beginning with a partnership with UNISON. If DD100 achieves its aim of helping many thousands of people become autonomous, mature, adult learners you will have rendered a great service to those individuals and to the wider community. Not to mention the service to the Faculty. If most of those now embarking on DD100 complete it with enthusiasm they will keep you busy on upper level courses for years to come.
And you are also rendering a great service to the Open University as a whole by standing up for some core values that we neglect at our peril. I was much taken by the explicit statement in the introduction to the course that, and I quote:
“DD100 seeks to maintain and extend the OU’s democratic educational mission: to reach and enthuse an enormously diverse student population; to insist that critical, informed, reflexive engagement with the direction of social change is not a matter for elites or professional social scientists alone”.
I find that statement particularly inspiring at a time when universities are being enjoined to concentrate on the much more limited mission of transmitting knowledge to students for highly instrumental and utilitarian purposes. Which is not, of course, to suggest that DD100 is not useful. What could be a more useful contribution to the economy of the UK in the 21st century than to develop mature, autonomous adult learners?
So I congratulate all of you who are making DD100 happen and l leave you with another quote from John Ralston Saul. In the very last sentence of his book Voltaire’s Bastards he deplores “the narrowing effect of a civilisation which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions.”
I believe that DD100 is going to make a massive contribution to unifying individuals through questions.
So let’s give the course a good send-off.