OPEN UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
4 December 2000
Inventing the Online University
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University, UK
President, The United States Open University
Address on the occasion of the opening of the OUHK Learning Centre
Summary
The Internet and the World Wide Web have opened up new possibilities for teaching and research. The Open University of Hong Kong has been acclaimed as a world pioneer in using this new technology to give students access to the library. Sir John Daniel reports on the experience of the UK Open University which is the world’s biggest online university with 110,000 students and 105,000 schoolteachers using the Internet in their studies. The OU experience provides the basis for inventing an effective and exciting online university.
Introduction
Thank you for inviting me. It is a pleasure to be in Hong Kong again. I am very proud of my association with the Open University of Hong Kong and it is an honour to have been asked to speak at the opening of this new learning centre. The development of the Open University of Hong Kong has been one of the world’s higher education success stories over the last twelve years and I pay tribute to what you have achieved.
I have served on the OUHK Council twice. The first time was in 1989, when the Open College gained official status as the Hong Kong Open Learning Institute. I was working in Canada at the time and I remember being here when the HKOLI launched its first prospectus in 1989. The demand was so great that the queue of people who came to get a copy reached all the way round the block. We knew from that moment that the institution was going to be a success.
Soon after that I moved to the United Kingdom and left your Council. However, my close relationship with the HKOLI continued because it was using a range of Open University course materials. Then in 1996 the Government appointed me to the Council again and I have had the great pleasure of seeing the HKOLI become the Open University of Hong Kong.
The rapid progress of the institution to university status is a great tribute to all the staff and particularly to your three presidents, all of whom I call friends: the late Don Swift, Dr Raj Dhanrajan, who has gone on to do a wonderful job at the Commonwealth of Learning, and your current President, Professor S.W.Tam.
I much admired the way that Professor Tam led you to university status. From overseas we have watched OUHK, under Professor Tam’s leadership, pick up a whole succession of prizes for excellence. You have acquired an enviable reputation for quality in a very short time and I congratulate you all. That is why it is such a privilege to speak at the opening of this new learning centre serving central Hong Kong.
My title this evening is Inventing the Online University.
The Open University of Hong Kong and the UK Open University are world pioneers in the use of the Internet for higher education. Because we are pioneers, and because we have large numbers of students using online technology in their studies, we are already past the starry-eyed stage about the new e-world.
We are actually inventing the online university. What have we learned so far in taking university education into this new phase? I want to share with you our experience at the UK Open University so that you can compare it with your own.
Where am I coming from?
I should start by laying out the credentials and the prejudices that I bring to my topic. My principal credential is my current post as Vice-Chancellor of the UK Open University, simply because the Open University is, as far as I am aware, the world’s largest online learning community in higher education.
At present we have 110,000 of our degree-credit students who work with us online from home and another 105,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers, also online, who are doing our Learning Schools Programme. This is a programme where they learn how to use computers to teach their particular subject in the schools.
My second credential is that I have worked in four distance teaching universities. As well as the UKOU that includes two in Canada, Quebec’ s Télé-université and Alberta’s Athabasca University, and our new sister institution, the United States Open University. Distance teaching universities have tended to be the first movers in using online learning at scale and in an integrated and sophisticated way. The Open University of Hong Kong is also a pace-setter and I shall come back to that.
A possible third credential is a thesis I submitted at Concordia University in 1995 on the use of new technologies in large distance teaching universities. The book that grew out of the thesis is titled Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education.
In my book on the mega-universities, the biggest of which are in the developing world, I drew attention to the tensions in the eternal and eternally challenging triangle of access, cost and quality.
I consider that this triangle sums up the challenges facing all universities in every country. However, the problem is particularly acute for large and rapidly developing countries like China. Resources are limited in such countries. The consequence is that if providing high quality and increasing access are costly, then those countries will have difficulty expanding their higher education systems in a satisfactory way.
It is the great achievement of the open universities and the distance teaching universities to have reconfigured that triangle.
We have been able to show that you can achieve wider access and higher quality without having to increase the cost. We have developed learning systems that provide a better service and a richer experience to students when student numbers are greater.
That is a revolution in higher education. We have broken that link, that insidious link, between quality and exclusivity in education. Of course many people still act as if that link still exists. Some developing countries are still trying to copy the elite models of the past.
But the real needs of those countries will not be met by a few elite institutions with small numbers of students. Those needs call for the methods of open and distance learning. They call for us to develop those methods for the future drawing on all new media and technologies that can be useful.
Pros and cons of online learning
This evening I want to talk mainly about the new technology that is causing so much excitement all over the world and in almost all areas of life. I mean the internet, the web, the e-world, the online world. What will be the impact of these new technologies on universities?
Over the last twelve months we have lived through interesting times in the e-world. Those people who have lost a lot of money through the failure of dot.com companies must wonder if the e-world is really such a good thing. They have learned that there are pros and cons to investing in this technology.
What about us in universities? What are the pros and cons of online learning? Let me begin with a heretical statement. We are used to carrying on about the accelerating pace of change. I’m going to suggest that the pace of change may now be decelerating and that our next challenge may be to cope with a bit more stability.
I give you two examples. First, I suggest that we can now foresee the technologies that will be available and will become available over the next ten years. That was not true in the same way in 1990.
Of course, knowing the technology doesn’t remove the challenge, because what we don’t know is how consumers will use the technology available. Plenty of money has been lost in the last few years by those who guessed wrongly about the technology that ordinary people would actually use, and fortunes will continue to be won and lost.
This is where my first credential for speaking to you is relevant. With over 200,000 students online the UK Open University is operating at the industrial scale that takes it beyond Hawthorne effects and early adopters and allows us to get a feel for what actually pleases real people.
My second example is corporate organisation. I predict that the present level of corporate churn, acquisition and merger will calm down, simply because the captains of business and industry can’t continue getting it wrong indefinitely. Of course, that doesn’t remove the challenge either, because actually running the business well may be more difficult than hoping for salvation in reorganisation.
So what does Open University experience teach me about the pros and cons of online learning. Lets start with the cons. I’ll name three.
Cons
The first is that online learning is currently a fad, so people do not discuss it rationally. Fortunately the dot.com shakeout that began at the beginning of this year has been useful reality therapy and we’ve all found that enthusiasm for the e-world can, like share prices, go down as well as up.
Six weeks ago The Economist newspaper reported a survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers which showed that Americans now spend online an average of one hour less a week than they did a year ago. The proportion of people using the internet from home in the USA, which went up from 28% to 42% between 1998 and 1999, has only risen to about 44% in 2000.
The second con for educators, especially those who are idealistic about increasing access, like the Open University, is that moving online can exacerbate inequalities of opportunity between rich and poor. Countering this tendency requires special measures.
The UK government has recently launched its learndirect project, renamed from the University for Industry because it is neither a university nor for industry. This is aimed particularly at basic employment skills for those who came out of school least well equipped.
learndirect intends to deliver most of its learning products online but, of course, most of its target audience have neither computers nor internet connections at home. So the government has created many hundreds of computer-equipped learning centres in friendly places like pubs and shopping centres. It will be interesting to see how it goes and I declare an interest since I serve on the board of learndirect.
The third con is that the technology is still pretty primitive. The 110,000 regular Open University students who link with us online use just about every make of computer known to humankind and nearly all rely on the plain old telephone system, sometimes in countries where the system is indeed very plain and very old.
It’s hard for us to forecast a time when, say 90% of students will have high-end computers and broadband connections. That’s because we have 30,000 students taking our courses outside the UK and those numbers are expanding, especially in the developing world. In Hong Kong you are more fortunate, because you already have extensive broadband networks, but that will not be true for some years for your work in the rest of China.
So much for the cons. They are the more frustrating because the pros are quite exciting.
Above all, students like the online services we offer. The simplest and most obvious wins are on the administrative side because online gives the student a better service and saves the University money. Let me give some examples.
To situate the figures let me recall that the Open University has about 180,000 degree credit students this year: 1,300 doctoral, 40,000 masters and 140,000 undergraduate. You can see that the 110,000 who are online are more than half the student body but there are still 70,000 who are not online.
A year ago we introduced a facility whereby students could check their academic record. 20,000 do so every week and there have been 80,000 first time users. One student likes the reassurance so much that he has looked at his record a hundred times so far this year. We started a similar service for our 8,000 associate faculty to check the records of their students a few weeks ago and 1,000 of them have already used it.
In February we put all our courses and qualifications information online and invited online course reservations. 65,000 reservations have been made since then and more than 8 million pages have been accessed. Nearly 30% of course reservations are now electronic.
We have also created a student guidance website that gets rave reviews from students and receives 70,000 page hits per week. Nearly 12,000 students have opted for electronic mailings of all administrative materials, which creates significant savings for us, and some 60,000 students have validated e-mail addresses on file.
Finally, on the administrative side, another success has been the online booking of the residential schools that are part of some OU courses. Students can select from a range of dates and venues and really appreciate making their choice and booking online and receiving immediate confirmation.
So much for administrative uses of online communication. It is absolutely clear to me that those students who are online get a better service and equally clear that we can provide most services at less cost. Flipping that over, it means that it is costing us more to serve the students who are not online less well.
Turning to the academic side, let me start with the library. This is an area where the OUHK has an international reputation and we have been inspired by your work. Until very recently the core function of the UK Open University library was to serve the faculty in the course development process. We provide all students with the basic books and texts required for each course and make arrangements with local libraries for ancillary materials. Nevertheless, students were beginning to seek help with online resources. In 1996 they accessed no articles online. By 1999 they accessed 80,000
So this year we have turned the library outward towards the students in our OpenLibr@ry project. It was launched in July and 12,000 students have now registered.
As well as being able to access a large number of texts and databases the library is creating, and will keep up to date, an ensemble of carefully selected electronic documentation for each course. So far we are talking about 1,800 online resources for over 80 courses. This is proving very popular with students who appreciate being able to go straight to relevant materials instead of floundering around in all the nonsense on the web.
The increase in online library use is staggering. In October 1999 we had 40,000 hits to our library webpages. In October of this year that rose to 126,000. The number of OU students rose by only 10% during that period.
Library services is, of course, an area where the Open University of Hong Kong is a world leader. I congratulate you on the international prize that you won for your electronic library – a prize that was awarded to Professor Tam in the same hall in Stockholm where the Nobel prizes are awarded.
I think that both OUHK and UKOU experience teaches us that the great strength of online technology, as far as students are concerned, is its use for communication and interaction about the course and for accessing documentary resources, rather than as a vehicle for transmitting course content. I emphasise that I make that comment in the context of university education and it does not necessarily apply to very short courses and training in basic skills.
The UK’s learndirect project that I mentioned earlier, which has courses as short as ten minutes, will deliver most of its learning material entirely on the web – although it will have human tutors available. However, at university level the picture seems different. University courses tend to be longer and students are required to read. Our students tell us clearly that if we require them to read a book then they want to have the book as bound pages, not the book on a computer screen.
I had this experience myself last year when I enrolled as a student in a pilot offering of one of our web-based courses, T171: You, Your Computer and the Net, which would be an 8-credit course in Canadian terms. There were two set books and I was grateful that they were provided with the course as paperbacks.
There were 900 students doing the pilot and I was glad that I was one of them because 12,000 students took the course this year and an even larger number are due to start it in January. Although the OU is used to operating at industrial scale coping with this demand was a challenge. We appoint a tutor for each group of 25 students so we had to find hundreds of new associate faculty members to fill this role.
Aside from the course material that is on the web and on CD-ROM, the major teaching application of online technology for our students is conferencing, where we use, on a pretty massive scale, the FirstClass system developed by SoftArc.
Organisational changes required to make online learning work
I shall pursue the further advantages of online learning by addressing the organisational changes required to make online learning work. On the way through I will touch on some examples of inter institutional work and highlight some of the challenges and pitfalls.
I shall refer particularly to the work of my colleague Diana Laurillard.
Diana is one of those rare people who is both a first-rate thinker and a first-rate doer. Her book Rethinking University Teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology has become a classic and she is just finishing a new edition.
As Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning Technologies and Teaching at the Open University she has guided the huge growth in online activity that I have been talking about. I cannot do better than take you through her model for making all the pieces fit together.
Start with the aim of meeting the needs of students. This means, in particular looking at what and how they learn, that is to say course design, and at the way courses are brought to them, i.e. the technical infrastructure.
This requires careful attention to resource planning. One way of accessing the necessary resources may be through external partnerships. But no matter what external help you bring in there is a major challenge of staff development within the institution.
It is vital to ensure the quality of what is done, and to determine whether what you have done really does meet students’needs so that you can feed corrections back into the process.
Let us take these issues one by one.
As far as student needs are concerned, we assume they need active learning that is efficient and enjoyable, in a supportive environment.
The question for course design then becomes, how does technology support an active learning process?
In the T171 course that I mentioned there is online interaction with resources and students.
There is also the discussion and conferencing environment that I mentioned. The growth of conferencing at the OU has been phenomenal.
From less than 2,000 users in 1994 it has risen to 110,000 now. There are 16,000 conferences running of which 2,000 are organised by the students themselves for social purposes and moderated by students.
All in all there is a lot of activity with some 20,000 messages being sent and 150,000 messages read every day – and more on weekends when OU students do much of their studying.
But it is important not to get carried away.
If one word sums up the theme of this talk, it is the word balance. Here at OUHK you are showing your commitment to balance by opening this new Island Learning Centre, to enhance person-to-person contact, while at the same time developing OUHK as an online university.
We find that students want balance in the use of conferencing. Some conferencing is good. Too much is a distraction for many students.
But the advantage of operating at scale is that you quickly learn what works. The main conclusion here is that the key to successful teaching and learning online is effective moderation of the conferences by the associate faculty.
My colleague Gilly Salmon has pulled together all we have learned in her new book, published two months ago, E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online. It sold out in three weeks but the publishers, Kogan Page, are now printing to meet the demand.
You also have to balance the media mix.
Our introductory computing course M206 Computing, an Object-oriented approach, creates practical interactive environments and has a rich media mix. Students were enthusiastic, but note how often they resorted to older media by printing things out.
Another key area where you must achieve balance is student workload. Incorporating new technology almost always leads to an increase in student workload. Unless you get this under control students will simply walk away from your wonderful course.
Conferencing has been extraordinary for the OU in many ways. It has, obviously, increased communication between students. It has also helped to make us feel like an international organisation as well as being one. There are 30,000 people taking Open University courses outside the UK but we didn’t used to feel like a particularly international organisation.
Today, when students find themselves on conferences with students in India, Hungary and the USA they see the world differently.
It has also been a liberating technology for our 7,000 students who declare a disability of one kind or another. In an electronic conference people are judged by their contribution, not by their looks or their mobility. Disabled people find this exhilarating.
Most of our conferencing is asynchronous but we have also developed synchronous internet conferencing, for language and business courses, where small groups of students can talk in full duplex audio while operating on a common screen.
This has proved very popular and the comments indicate that students are not shy of taking advantage of it.
Another popular medium is CD-ROM which we are exploiting in a range of courses. Our introductory science course, S103 has many exercises, including this onewhere students work out the carbon cycle. It seems to go down well, as does an exercise on the structure of the brain. Here students note in particular the efficiency of their learning.
We don’t only do this in science.
Our course on Homer combines the strengths of computing for searching and manipulating text with access to the plans of Mycenae.
Students comment on how this enhances the quality of the learning experience.
I must not, of course, forget broadcasting and our longstanding relationship with the BBC. We are now creating exciting learning journeys by broadcasting programmes with a popular theme in prime time and then leading interested viewers to a website where they can follow up the issues raised. This series Rough Science explained scientific ideas by putting a group of scientists on an uninhabited island and watching them put scientific principles to work to make soap, generate electricity and so on.
These quotes show that it went down very well – especially with this 11-year old whose interest was greater than his ability to spell.
This example shows the value of an external partnership. We are very fortunate to be able to bring the expertise and experience of the BBC to such a project.
Let me move on now to the technical infrastructure. An obvious point is that the institution has to have a web development capacity both centrally and in its departments.
At the OU our web development group is responsible for maintaining and developing a website that is very actively used.
My second point is that in a university like ours it is important for our 180,000 strong student association to have their own web presence and activity. Hence a very active website and the 2,000 electronic conferences that they moderate themselves. They are much more draconian in chucking out students who behave badly than the University would ever dare to be.
The third point is that it is important to track what is really going on. What proportion of students have PCs and net access compared to the projections?
Also, what proportion of our part-time associate faculty have PCs and net access?
Then there is the question, what proportion of courses are using ICT?
Here you can see that the proportion of courses, the lower curve, fell below projections. There has been a decrease in the optional use of information and communication technology in courses.
For the good reason that students don’t rate it as highly as compulsory applications. That is obvious when you think about it, but it is a reminder that integrating ICT into courses is best done by making it a mainstream activity.
This brings me to resource planning. I shall not say much about this because it is something that every institution has to do for itself. The key thing is that is must be done. I shall not explain the following graphs but simply use them to illustrate the way that we are trying to keep track of the demands that the move to ICT rich teaching makes.
Is development sustainable in terms of the demands it makes on software designers, are costs being amortised on increasing student numbers, and what does the productivity look like?
A key issue is staff workload. We find that making part of a course ICT based is more demanding on staff time, at least in the early years. This means that workload planning, costing tools and productivity methods are all important.
Nor must we forget the students. Courses with a high IT component regularly report workload problems which are a major reason for students dropping out. This means that making learning materials efficient, planning the student’s study time, and keeping a balance of media are vital.
We are trying to grapple with this through a course resource appraisal model which allows the faculty to course team to model various blends of teaching media in terms of the type of learning they seek to achieve, the student workload and the cost. It is an inexact science but it is vital to attempt such planning.
Equally, quality assurance must have a high priority.
This applies to the software that we ship and also to the electronic transactions between tutors and students, notably in the marking of assignments. In 1999 only 1.5% of student assignments were submitted electronically. That went up to 9%, or 60,000 assignments, this year. Providing our tutors with a marking tool that is robust, easy to use, and helpful for the student is a very high priority.
In all this, of course, we have to keep an eye on the UK’s very rigorous national teaching quality assessment programme. And then, like you at OUHK, we get pleasure from winning prizes for our work, which suggests that we must be doing something right as we grapple with this new world.
Let me summarise the lessons we have learned in terms of the model I showed earlier:
First, we are trying to promote active learning in a supportive environment in ways that meet academic and logistical requirements
In course design we seek a balance of ICT and non-ICT material so that courses are interactive and communicative. This means paying close attention to both the production and presentation of the course.
The technical infrastructure must support complexity and growth and we have to manage expectations of students and staff.
In order to have the resources to match the challenge we must maximise reversioning and customisation with close attention to workload planning.
Particular foci of external partnerships should be collaboration on innovation and benchmarking best practice.
This is a massive staff development challenge. Individuals and course teams need training for the challenges and rewards for their successes.
Then to complete the cycle, it is vital to put in feedback loops to gauge the quality of all activities and to seek external validation wherever possible.
I realise that all this makes the future of online learning sound terribly difficult and complex. Is the game worth the candle? At the Open University we think so.
What are our conclusions so far as we develop into an e-university?
First, students appreciate supported active learning
Second, the Open University community responds with enthusiasm to e-services
Third, ICT is labour intensive, so you need to control costs
Fourth, you also need continual process improvement
Fifth, we are sure that we are right to seek a balance of ICT and non-ICT approaches
And, finally and very importantly, we must remember that online learning is a means to an end. For us the purpose is to be an Open University, defining ourselves in terms of what we do for people, not an e-university defining ourselves in terms of the technologies we use.
But we do believe that these new means will help us achieve our goals better by reconfiguring the triangle I mentioned earlier in the direction of lower costs, higher quality and wider access.
In driving forward this agenda we at the UK Open University look forward to working with you at the Open University of Hong Kong. I like to think that my presence here at the opening of your new Island Learning Centre is a symbol of that partnership.
References
Daniel JS Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education
Laurillard D. (2000)
Laurillard D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology, Routledge
Salmon GK (2000) E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, Kogan Page