Introduction

It is a great pleasure to be with you today.  This is the third time that Ben Massey has invited me to speak to this conference but the first time that it has not clashed with my holiday.  I thank Ben for his persistence.

You have an impressive collection of papers and abstracts for this conference.  I shall do what keynote speakers are supposed to do and take a general view.

For my title I have simply taken the title of your conference The University of the Future and the Future of Universities.

You also have a subtitle, Learner-Centred Universities for the New Millennium.  My chief qualification for addressing you is that I am associated with one of the most learner-centred universities of the old millennium, the Open University.  But I have only been on the payroll of the Open University for ten years.  That means that while I can take no credit for the first twenty years of its design and development I can, for that very reason, bring some objectivity to my assessment of it.

Many judge that the Open University was the most important innovation in higher education of the 20th century.  Therefore, since universities – rightly - change rather slowly, it has considerable relevance for the design of universities in the 21st century, not least on this dimension of learner centredness.

When you work in a particular university you are only too well aware of its shortcomings and of the areas where it could do better.  The Open University is both an institution with inspiring values and a highly interdependent organisation.  That makes it a very self-critical organisation.  Our University Senate, which numbers over 1,000 members, and our university newspapers – which have editorial freedom – are fora for the expression of that criticism.

However, visitors to the Open University often say they are amazed by how student-centred we are compared to their home institutions.  This has been particularly the case for the many American visitors who have come in connection with the start-up of the United States Open University.

I must give some credit to our staff for this student-centredness.  I have never worked in an institution where the motivation of service to students runs so strongly from the senior officers through the faculty and administration to the clerical staff and the packers and fork-lift truck drivers in our warehouses.  However, probably a more important reason for our student-centredness is that 30 years ago the Open University was designed as a system from the student outwards.

It was designed as an open learning system.  What I want to argue today is first, that the principles of open learning systems have much to offer to the future of university and, second, that the large open learning systems which I call the mega-universities are an important model for the university of the future.

I shall approach the topic as follows.

First, I think it is necessary and helpful to look back over the old millennium, in which the idea of open learning and open universities became commonplace.  I shall try to summarise the key developments and achievements that will be the basis for their activities in the new century.

Alongside this review of what open universities have achieved I shall look briefly at the changing circumstances and attitudes of conventional higher education.  Are open universities still special?  How will their tasks be different in the 21st century because of the changes taking place in higher education generally?

Then I shall look forward and ask you to think with me about the answers to a series of questions about universities in the 2000’s.

The first question will be WHY.  Why do we think open learning is important?  Why do we distinguish open universities from conventional universities?  Do open universities have a distinct set of values and are those values important in the new century?  Are open universities more student-centred by nature?

Next I shall take the question WHOM.  Whom should open universities serve?  Are their potential students and clients changing or should they change?  How are their expectations of open learning changing?  As conventional universities change do all universities now have the same clientele?

After that comes the question WHAT.  In particular, what should we teach?  Will the curriculum of the 2000s be different from the curriculum of the 1900s?  Should the curriculum of open universities be the same as that of campus universities?  If not, how should it be different?

WHAT brings us to HOW.  The change of century corresponded very precisely with a major change in the technological environment in which we operate, at least in the developed countries.  The world is abuzz with talk of e-commerce and e-learning.  Obviously this will affect us and we are already thoroughly engaged with it.  But are we talking about evolution or revolution?  Is the previous experience of open universities with distance learning and their previous success now a handicap or an asset?  To use Christensen’s terms (Christensen, 1997), is e-learning a sustaining or a disruptive technology for them?

Finally, I suggest we ask ourselves the question WHERE.  Although most universities now do some teaching outside their own countries this activity is still fairly marginal.  But in the world of e-learning it seems that everyone can claim to be a global university.  How do we address this opportunity in a responsible way and are there things we can to together?
So, that’s the menu for the meal.

Let me now go back to the starter course and look back to the last millennium and beyond.

Open Learning: the legacy of the 20th century

What does open learning bring into the 21st century from the centuries that preceded it?  The idea of teaching at a distance goes back a long way.  In the West we credit St Paul with having been the first large scale user of the technologies of distance learning as he taught the early Christian church.

Before 1900 technology set the milestones for distance education.  The key inventions were the communications system of the Roman empire, which allowed for safe travel, the printing press, which made it possible to multiply copies of learning materials, and the postal service, which allowed for their distribution to individuals.

Not surprisingly correspondence education took off towards the end of the 19th century.  In the 20th century many new technologies came into use: radio, the telephone, the cinema, television, programmed learning, computers and the internet to mention only the main ones.

However, the milestones of open learning in the 20th century were set by politics rather than by technology.  The creation of the UK Open University in 1969 was a particularly significant milestone.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s many countries followed the example of the UK and set up open universities of various kinds.  Those institutions had an important impact although until about 1990 they remained rather separate from the rest of each country’s higher education system.  You might say that until 1990 the open universities concentrated on being open and the traditional universities focused on being universities.

That began to change in the 1990’s.  On the one hand some of the open universities, without in any way losing their reputation for openness, began to gain a strong reputation as universities.  Meanwhile, the traditional universities, helped by a combination of government pressure and technological opportunities, began to be more open.

For the open universities the UK Open University provided a benchmark in two ways.  Early in the 1990’s the Open University was asked to take on the task of being a national degree validating agency and became, in effect, a sort of supra-university for Britain.  By the end of the 1990’s the Open University was up in the top decile of UK universities for the quality of its teaching and in the top third for research.

When the Open University achieved higher ratings for its teaching of Engineering than Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, London it was a sign that what had begun 30 years earlier as a radical and suspect initiative for second-chance students had now become a well-respected university.

Meanwhile, whereas in 1990 only a small proportion of traditional universities offered any distance learning courses, by the year 2000 very few did not have such offerings.  Today no self-respecting university president can admit to not offering courses online.  This raises the obvious question: if everyone is offering distance learning why do we need open universities?  Or, to put it another way, what do open universities offer that is special?

The first thing that open universities offer is great experience of carrying out distance education successfully and at scale.  Millions of people have received a higher education that they would not have been able to obtain through conventional campus education.  This is one of the great educational success stories of the 20th century and I give an account of it in my book.

Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Daniel, 1996).

By conducting distance teaching at scale the open universities have found out what works and the most successful examples combine four elements:

1) Excellent multi-media study materials produced by faculty working in teams.

2) Close personal support to each student by faculty with special training in working with adults. At the UKOU an associate faculty member is assigned to every twenty students and feels personally responsible for the progress of each.  I enrolled as a student myself last year and I felt very well supported.

3) Good logistics and administration.  We are all finding, as we sample the world of e-commerce, that successful e-services depend on getting the ‘services’ right as well as getting the ‘e’ right.

4) Faculty who remain current by involvement in research because this helps to create the intellectual buzz that students find so attractive.

While all universities might aspire to build these pillars, the idea of teamwork in teaching is not yet very widespread outside open universities.  One reason that traditional universities welcome the internet so warmly is that they suppose it facilitates online teaching by academics working as individuals.

However, I believe that course teams are a very important aspect of open universities since they make teaching intellectually challenging and exciting for the faculty.  This excitement communicates itself to the students through the course materials.  Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, always says that the course team is the Open University’s most significant contribution to the advancement of higher education.

What the course team process does is to establish the notion of a scholarship of teaching that the USA’s Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been promoting, with increasing success, for the decade.  For the Carnegie Foundation scholarship has four key features.

First, it is public.  Open University course materials are indeed on public view, but I stress here that the drafts of all materials are shared between members of the course team right from the earliest stage.

Second, scholarship means critical review.  It is a strong Open University course team tradition that each individual’s first draft gets comprehensively criticised – some would say massacred – by colleagues on both academic and pedagogical grounds.

Third, scholarship creates a community, which is the course team itself and the wider university.

Fourth, scholarship is something scholars talk about.  In the Open University this is expressed by the fact that courses take on a life of their own.  Years after a course has been retired faculty and students will refer to its demise with nostalgia or relief, depending on the pride they felt for it.

The essential point is that an open university course team is one of the highest expressions of scholars being scholarly.  Once faculty allow themselves to be classified, for the purpose of teaching, as content-matter experts, they have abdicated their academic role. They have also usually drained away much of the passion that will excite the learner.  The course team, on the other hand, is an academic building site.  The team clarifies academic debates so that students can engage with them, not in order to give them ready-made answers.

I conclude that the open universities have learned how to carry out distance education successfully at scale and I emphasise that this is not merely a technical success.  Through the principle of the course team we have become better at teaching than conventional universities, on both academic and pedagogical grounds.

I mentioned teaching at scale.  One of the criticisms of open universities is that they are using an old mass production model at a time when modern life is based on individualisation and the notion that small is beautiful.  There are two responses to that.

First, a tidal wave of young and not-so-young people will be seeking higher education around the world in the next twenty years so we desperately need mass providers like the mega-universities.

Second, I believe that this criticism misunderstands the open university model.

Yes, we do seek economies of scale in the preparation of course materials and, frankly, I don’t see how you can produce really good learning materials in any medium without a significant investment, particularly of academic time.  You cannot consistently make significant investments unless you can amortise them over large numbers of students.  The quality course materials are not, however, the totality of the learning experience for the student.  That learning experience is mediated by working with a tutor who comments on the student’s work and organises groupwork either online or in person.

It is partly through this interactive work between real human beings that open universities reinforce the attitude and practice of systematic scepticism that should be the mark of a university graduate.  Good universities should not be feeding answers to the their students, they should be teaching them to ask good questions and to find and evaluate the answers to those questions.

The Changing Circumstances of Higher Education

So much for the achievements of open universities in the 20th century.

In order to show why they will have even greater importance in the 21st century we need to look at the ways in which higher education is now changing.

Higher education is changing to respond to the new needs of society in what some call the new economy.

Two realities define the new agenda for higher education in the new economy: lifelong learning and technology.

We talk about the era of lifelong learning.  The term rolls easily from the lips of educators - but it doesn’t appeal much to ordinary people.  It sounds to many like a life sentence in an institution they disliked, namely school.  What does that tell us?
If people are to want to learn regularly throughout life they need more from their initial education.  The school system must make children enjoy learning and give them the solid foundation required for the e-inclusive society that we call want to see.

Then their first experience of university must give them a degree of flexibility - not the illusion of a degree for life.  We need people who can ask good questions, not people full of answers.  We need fast learners.  So lifelong learning means strengthening initial education.

The second implication of lifelong learning is that higher education must become more accessible, diverse and flexible.  Lifelong learning means helping people learn what they want, when they want and where they want.  Today large numbers of adults, with work and family responsibilities, need to move on from the education and training they now have to acquire new skills, new knowledge and the ability to ask new questions.  For many such people going to campus is not an option – and they are a much bigger group than the 18-22 year-olds.  Lifelong learning also means helping such people become independent learners.  Just think of the impact on the economy if we all became even ten percent more effective at acquiring new knowledge quickly by ourselves.

Third, lifelong learning means a new concept of quality.  People want the assurance that what they learn will be up to date and will give them competencies that employers value.  In short, citizens are interested in the output of higher education for themselves.  But most universities are still focused on inputs.  An undergraduate program is good if the entering freshmen have good high school grades; a quality graduate program is one that recruits people with high grade point averages.  In an era of lifelong learning that misses the point.  The only valid measures of quality are the outputs of the programs.

Fourth, because lifelong learning means more education and training, it must also mean cutting the costs of education.  There are two reasons for that.  First, by improving productivity, IT is cutting the costs of almost everything.  That is why the new economy can give us growth without inflation.  Universities must join the trend to higher productivity and lower costs.  Second, there are challenges ahead for government expenditures because e-commerce and e-living generally will make it harder for governments to assess and collect taxes.

So much for lifelong learning.

I summarise its implications in terms of the eternal - and eternally challenging - triangle of access, quality and cost.

The good news is that technology can help higher education to reconfigure that triangle in the direction of lower costs, higher quality and greater access.  The open universities have been at the forefront of that reconfiguration and

I shall return to their role in asking the next question: why will open universities be important in the new century?
Why are open universities important in the 21st century?

I may surprise you by suggesting that the significance of open universities in the ecology of higher education in the coming years will flow from their traditions and values.

Surely, tradition and values are what we associate with ancient campuses and ivy covered classroom buildings?  The problem is that conventional universities are now embarking on initiatives in distance learning where their usual traditions and values are not just unhelpful but actually dangerous.  By contrast the traditions and values of open universities, even though they have developed over relatively short periods, are much more relevant to current challenges.

Let us look at the issues of funding, social inclusion, and information technology for examples of what I mean.

Start with funding.

Because universities have a mission of research they have an infinite capacity to spend money.  However, they tend also to argue that the cost of their teaching activities will always outstrip inflation.  Since government finances are constrained in most countries this means that the rising costs of teaching must be met either by charging more to students or by getting more money from commercial or private sources.  The result is higher fees to students and a tendency to commercialise the university through advertising and sponsorship.

For an excellent treatment of the commercialisation of universities I refer you a provocative and insightful new book by Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

Open universities have to worry about funding too, but they have two significant advantages, one related to their values, the other coming from their tradition.  The core value of open universities is to be open to people and this makes them extremely reluctant to discriminate against disadvantaged people by erecting financial barriers to study.  Furthermore because of the traditional way they operate, through distance learning at scale, open universities teach at lower costs than conventional universities.

Taken together these two assets of open universities will allow open universities to be the principal upholders, in the new century, of the notion of higher education as a public good, rather than as a private benefit.

These issues obviously impact on the contribution that universities will make to countering social exclusion.  This will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century for all countries.  Even in the ‘new economy’ created by a decade of steady growth in the USA one in eight Americans (and almost one in five American children) lives in poverty.

Conventional universities find it almost impossible to address this problem.  Their instinct is always to be highly selective at entry so that poor people, who usually go to poorer schools, mostly lose out – even where the university is ready to provide financial assistance.

The wider problem is that most countries still need a massive increase in the absolute numbers of people going to university if they are to empower their citizens to live fulfilling lives in the 21st century.

Yet most conventional universities still instinctively base their reputation on exclusiveness and restricted size.  Only the open universities have both the mindset and the capacity to satisfy the hunger for higher education on the scale we now require.

The issue with information technology is rather different.  Information technology is now pervasive and all universities believe they can use it to good effect to expand their impact – usually by offering special online courses at high fees to new clients in the commercial sector or overseas.  Aside from the fact that a primitive ethos of commercialisation and profit seems to flow into higher education as it goes online, the key problem is that universities are bringing very simplistic thinking to their use of electronic technologies.

In this context I recommend another stimulating new book, The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.  John Seely Brown is the Chief Scientist at Xerox PARC, which invented more of today’s information and communication technologies than any other research centre, so these authors have solid credentials as information technologists.

The fundamental theme of their book is that it is all too easy to reach the wrong conclusion by letting the logic of information push aside the more practical logic of humanity.  They comment on the tremendously impoverished notion of education that people who are transfixed by the logic of information bring to their discussion of learning.

The idea of learning as the steady supply of facts and information, although parodied by Charles Dickens 150 years ago, is alive and well in much of today’s discourse about the Internet.  Each generation has its own fight against images of learners as wax to be moulded, jugs to be filled, and slates to be written on.  The Internet simply adds the new image of the hydroponics system giving each plant its regular dose of nourishment without human intervention.

We say that the 21st century will be the age of knowledge.  Brown and Duguid stress that knowledge lies less in databases than people.  They note that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again it would have to start from scratch because although it still has the data it has lost the human expertise that took it there last time.

These authors argue that an excessive commitment to the internet could destroy some of the most valuable features of universities.  One reason is that university degrees include a certain amount of misrepresentation – a word that they use in a positive sense.  They mean that behind the façade of the degree a university conducts many activities that are socially valuable - but are not easily valued in the marketplace.  As they put it:

The ability of the degree to shelter these activities from close scrutiny, immediate justification and micromanagement helps provide society with more diverse and versatile candidates than it knows to ask for.

I often argue that university campuses will always be in demand because they create a protected environment where young people can come to terms with life, love, liquor and learning - while sparing the rest of the community the sight of these often unsightly processes.

It is particularly ironic that information technology is being used as a pretext to take the slack out of university degree programmes by micromanaging learning at the level of the individual course.  That is because so many of the people who have made great contributions to technology and business in recent times did so by using their time at university to learn and experiment outside the formal curriculum.  Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds are just two examples.

This in turn suggests that we should be wary of using information technology to strip out the notion of student cohorts by individualising all learning.

The general public is not just being old-fashioned when it accords the highest reputation to those universities that place most emphasis on students learning in small groups.  You could get a student perspective on that by standing next to me at Open University degree ceremonies as new graduates speak to me about their studies.  The importance they attach to tutorial groups and residential schools as part of their Open University experience is very clear.

That is why open universities will have a central role in the use of information technology in higher education in the coming years.  It is not that we know all the answers.  But we do know some of the questions and our technology-based teaching systems already include plenty of the practical logic of humanity that many conventional universities are abandoning in their rush to offer e-learning.

Whom should open universities serve?

This brings me to the question of whom open universities will serve in the 21st century.  I often say that the student body of the Open University is so diverse that any generalisation about is likely to be false.  However, we can identify certain trends.  In Mega-universities (Daniel, 1996: 37) I noted that the student profiles at the different institutions were tending to converge.

At the beginning the Asian mega-universities enrolled large numbers of school leavers whereas the Open University focused on adult students.  In recent years, however, the average age of students at the Asian institutions has risen steadily whereas the Open University has seen a sharp increase in the number of students aged under 25.

The student profiles of the open universities are also changing as their curricula change.  In the early days of the Open University, for example, most students were taking a second chance to obtain an undergraduate degree.  Today that function remains, but for large numbers of other students the Open University has become the first choice for continuing professional development.  The trend to lifelong learning, which will gradually become a reality rather than merely a slogan as the century advances, will largely determine the curriculum, and therefore the student body, of the open universities.

This will lead them to focus more strongly on the vocational, occupational and professional aspects of higher education and I expect them to make a strong contribution in this area.  At first sight it might appear that distance teaching universities could have difficulty coping with training for occupational standards that require assessment in the workplace.

First sight is, however, deceptive.  One of the strengths of open universities is their ability to plan and implement educational systems on a large scale and this will be an asset.  The Open University is expanding in this area through its newly created Assessment Service which can organise competency-based assessment all over the UK.

Those are some brief comments on who our students are and will be.  What about their expectations?  Last year the Open University commissioned a study to determine whether its marketing activities give value for money.  The study found that the Open University’s advertising was very efficient at attracting enquiries but it noted an important trend.  Students in open universities, as elsewhere in society, are behaving more like commercial customers and are therefore less inclined to submit readily to the regulations and authority of the institution.

This will create pressure for open universities to be more flexible and to place a higher value on customer service.
In general open universities are already more student centred than campus institutions but we all need to pay attention to this trend in student expectations.

My own view is that while doing everything to ensure that each transaction with a student is handled promptly and effectively, we must avoid creating a climate in which learning is reduced to transactions between individual and institution.  Good universities are academic communities and our aim must be to create a context in which the students are, and feel to be, members of their university.  At the Open University our student association plays a very important role in this respect, not least by organising hundreds of computer conferences to encourage student-to-student communication on both study-related and extra-curricular matters.

What should open universities teach?

After those comments about our changing student body let us look briefly at the curriculum.  What should we teach that we are not already teaching?  This is clearly a question that has to be answered in each country according to its own needs but I note three areas of worthy of attention.

The first, which fits with our mission of openness and our role in reducing social exclusion, is the development of short-cycle programmes, i.e. degree-credit programmes leading to less than a BA or BSc (BS) degree.  In the United States the Associate degree has made a huge contribution to widening participation in higher education and is a useful model.

The Open University is about to launch a range of Foundation degrees, which cover the first two-thirds of a Bachelor’s degree and integrate academic foundations, vocational competencies and core generic skills.  We expect them to attract working students who do not feel ready to make the commitment to a full Bachelor’s programme.

The second curriculum area is the corporate university.  Hundreds of companies in the USA have recently renamed their training departments corporate universities and this fad is catching on in other countries.  In some cases companies are not just following fashion but actually want to revamp their internal education and training.  These firms provide an opportunity for universities to help them with both the creation of an in-company learning system and the provision of content for that system.

Third, I fear that traditional universities will neglect the importance of providing a strong and exciting curriculum in areas that are not directly employment related.  The more that conventional universities restrict themselves to a work-related curriculum the more the open universities should offer a broad curriculum that can excite the human spirit.  It is noteworthy that as well as having the largest business school in Europe the Open University also has more students studying Greek and Latin than the other UK universities put together.

Each year at our Open University degree ceremonies I converse with thousands of our new graduates and I ask many of them to name their favourite course or subject.  Areas like Social Sciences, Humanities and Mathematics come up just as frequently as employment-related courses.  Indeed, my impression is that students gain more confidence by studying these areas than they do by taking courses linked directly to their work.

That is important because a central aim of university study is to give people greater confidence and autonomy as human beings.

How should open universities teach?

So much for what we teach.  What can I say about the topical subject of how we teach and how we expect our students to learn?  Others at this conference are addressing this subject in more detail so I will make some general comments.  What are we to make of e-learning and what are we to do about it?  Here are five observations.

First, particularly in the United States, the Internet has changed the concept of distance education in the last few years.  Until as late as 1997 distance learning, for most American academics, meant using broadband networks to teach simultaneously and synchronously to a number of groups at distant locations.  The focus was on reproducing the classroom teaching that is at the heart of the university experience in the USA.  That has now changed.  Today distance learning means asynchronous teaching on the web.

Second, this takes academics away from the teaching model they are most familiar with, so in using the web they tend to revert to the older pedagogical model of correspondence education.  At its simplest, and it often is very simple, this consists of loading up the course notes in html and using the web to turn the pages and administer a quiz at the end of each section.  My colleague John Naughton calls this shovelware.

This reversion to the model of correspondence education can also bring with it the temptation to adopt some of the sharp commercial practices that gave correspondence education a bad name.  If you want to defraud people the net holds much more promise than the post office box.

Third, this simple and rather impoverished model of e-learning seems to produce a backlash among students.  Today the trend is to embed teaching on the web within a wider range of activities and to use the term web-enhanced courses rather than web-based courses.

Fourth, our own Open University experience of the use of the net and the web at scale indicates that its most powerful and popular use is for communication between people about the course rather than for dumping the content of the course on each student’s computer.

Fifth, getting best value out of this communication on the internet and empowering our 8,000 associate lecturers to use this teaching and learning medium cost-effectively is not straightforward.

I refer you to a new book by my colleague Gilly Salmon, E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, for some of the lessons we have learned.

The advice I give to the open universities, as they engage with the e-world, is neither to lose their nerve nor to abandon their principles.  Those who are jealous of their success will, of course, try to suggest that they are now old-fashioned institutions using obsolete technologies.  It is easy and self-serving for people who sell servers and networks to suggest that any university that doesn’t do all its teaching on the net is doomed to extinction.

Faced with this sort of nonsense I urge you all to keep your nerve and focus on the students.  The students will be our best guides to what works and what doesn’t, what they like to have e-delivered and what they would prefer to study in other ways.  We must develop our tactics for e-learning with them in mind.  I recommend two particularly helpful concepts at the level of tactics.

The first is the technology adoption life cycle.  Here the work of Geoffrey Moore is exciting and I provide a summary of his stimulating books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado in my own Mega-universities text.

The key idea is that the behaviour of the early adopters of a new technology may not tell you much about how the mass market will respond to your innovative use of technology.

There is a wealth of practical advice about how to cross the chasm from the early adopters into the tornado of the mass market.

The second concept is the Innovator’s Dilemma, the title of a closely argued book by Clayton Christensen.  The basic concept is that new technologies come in two types.

First there are sustaining technologies which, as the term implies, sustain and advance our current work in an evolutionary manner.  But then there are disruptive technologies which cannot be integrated into our current operations in a straightforward way.  They require a different organisational structure in which to flourish.  If they do flourish, however, they can transform the whole enterprise.

The challenge, it seems to me, is that for universities the internet is sustaining in some areas and disruptive in others.  At the Open University, for example, the net is sustaining in that it extends the opportunities for students to communicate with each other.   But it is disruptive in that it does allow a distance learning system to be reconceived from scratch.

The Open University has 160,000 students and clients online at present, which may make us the biggest university in cyberspace for whatever that is worth.  It does mean that we are learning a huge amount about effective e-learning and I expect you are too.  We must pool this information.

Where should open universities teach?

My final question is where?  Where will universities be teaching and what principles should guide us?

The Open University now has some 30,000 students taking its courses outside the UK with a presence of some kind in 43 countries.  That rises to 111 countries if you count the places where we arranged exams for students last year.  It is already a substantial international operation but it is only recently that we have started to create policy for it in a systematic way.

Now, thanks to e-learning, all universities have the potential to operate globally – or at least in countries where you can work on the net cheaply and reliably, which is not quite the same thing.

I expect that the current enthusiasm for going global will calm slightly as institutions get into some of the tricky questions of student administration that have to be addressed if you intend to operate at scale.  There are also some even more important issues of curriculum that need to be thought through when we operate outside our own borders.

In her study of the development of global higher education my colleague Robin Mason (Mason, 1999) found that few institutions had really addressed these questions.

I suspect that open universities may find themselves at the forefront of these global developments as traditional universities that seek to offer a few of their programmes around the world look to us for help with the necessary infrastructure.  My colleague Geoff Peters calls this the Railtrack model by analogy with the structure of Britain’s now private rail system.

There may also be some exciting opportunities for the open universities and the traditional universities of the world to work together in providing a world-wide infrastructure and tutorial services twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Conclusion

I conclude that open universities and open learning will have a central role in higher education in the new century.  Social, economic, political and technological forces are all pulling this form of education to the centre of the policy stage.

But they must remember, above all, that their first duty is to their students.

We have a democratic educational mission to reach and enthuse an enormously diverse student population; to insist that critical, informed, reflective engagement with the human condition is not a matter for elites or professional experts alone.

By urging students always to be sceptical, always to ask questions and never to take things for granted we aspire to lead them beyond information and knowledge to understanding.

This understanding then illuminates their actions as they fulfil their roles in a complex, democratic society.

That is how open universities will encourage all universities to be more learner-centred.
 

References

Brown, J S & P. Duguid (2000) The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press.
Christensen, C M (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When technologies cause great firms to fail, Harvard Business School Press.
Daniel, J S (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page
Klein, Naomi (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Flamingo
Mason, R D (1998) Globalising Education: Trends and Applications, Routledge
Moore, G A (1991) Crossing the Chasm, HarperBusiness
Moore, G A (1995) Inside the Tornado, HarperBusiness
Salmon, G.K. (2000) E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, Kogan Page

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