Malaysian Institute of Accountants
"Rebuilding the Organisation for Competition"
Kuala Lumpur, 18 February 2000
Remarks by Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
I am very honoured to have been asked to say a few words this evening in the context of Dr Zainal Ahmad’s address to you on rebuilding the organisation for competition. It is a great pleasure to be with you and I would like to say how much we at the Open University have enjoyed our contacts with the Malaysian Institute of Accountants. We are delighted by the MIA’s decision, taken yesterday, to endorse the collaboration between the MIA, the Open University and the OU (M) to offer the OU MBA programme in Malaysia.
The Open University has been following the evolution of the university system in Malaysia with interest for many years, most especially, of course, the recent initiatives aimed at increasing the role of distance education in Malaysian higher education. We at the Open University would like to put our long and successful experience of distance learning at the service of the people of Malaysia, not only through the link with the MIA, but also through involvement in the work of the UNITEM consortium of Malaysia’s universities.
I know that you will find the Open University MBA programme a great asset in the professional development environment for accountants in Malaysia. It is already the largest MBA programme in Europe, its students are networked all over the world, and it has an excellent reputation because of its strategic and international focus.
In the short time you’ve kindly given me the most useful thing I can do is to reflect the theme of the evening, Rebuilding the Organisation for Competition, and make some remarks about how the Open University has responded to a fast-changing environment. Some say that the Open University is able to compete in new ways because it has rebuilt the concept of the University. To tell you how it has done so I shall use the simple structure of asking the key questions you can ask about anything: Why? When? Where? How? and What?
The Open University is now by far the largest university in the UK with 170,000 students in its degree programmes this year. But 30,000 of those 170,000 people are studying Open University courses outside the UK and those 30,000 people make up a large international university in their own right.
But why was the Open University created? Four political aims came together. First to allow more people to access university study. Second, to use modern communications technology in teaching and learning. Third, to create a new type of university whose quality would be as good as any in the world. Fourth, and this was Margaret Thatcher’s contribution, to find a way of reducing the costs of higher education. That goal, I imagine, will be of particular interest to you as accountants!
When did this happen? The idea was launched by the future UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1963, a Royal Charter was granted in 1969 and the first intake of students, 25,000 of them, began work in 1971. They were mostly all mature people, working adults who had always wanted to get a university degree, and they responded to this opportunity with enormous enthusiasm.
At the Open University’s inaugural ceremony the first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, said that its mission was simple but challenging: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. Those goals still inspire us today.
Where is the Open University? Its home base is in the UK and most of its 3,600 full-time staff work at the main campus at Milton Keynes which is located, appropriately perhaps, half way between Oxford and Cambridge. The students, however, are all over the world. Last October, as our main exam session, they wrote their exams in 108 countries. Most of the students outside the UK are, however, concentrated in the twenty countries where we have partnerships, a good example being the 6,000 students who are taking the Open University Degree Program at the Singapore Institute of Management not far from here.
That partnership with SIM is a two-way affair since some courses developed in Singapore also get taught back in the UK. What we are trying to build, and what we would like to involve Malaysia in, is a world-wide network of partnerships aimed at giving people access to high quality distance learning. It is great to have the Malaysian Institute of Accountants in that network. Another partner is our new sister institution, the United States Open University, which begins teaching this year and which will also be involved in the MBA programme here.
How does the Open University work? How does it serve these tens of thousands of students around the world and work with its many partners? It does so by teaching at a distance, indeed most consider that the Open University was the pioneer of modern distance learning at university level. Its distance learning system, which it prefers to call supported open learning, has four vital components.
First, it provides the students, at home or at work, with excellent multiple media course materials prepared by teams of academics and expert professionals.
Second, it assigns a personal tutor to each student for each course. The tutor comments on the student’s work, holds group meetings from time to time face-to-face or over the net, and is available for help when needed by phone, mail or e-mail.
Third, the OU is very proud of the quality of its logistics and administration. You’ll appreciate that giving a good experience to such a large and dispersed student body means moving tons of material and a trillions of bits of information in a reliable and timely fashion.
Fourth, the Open University’s academics are engaged in research, some of them, such as Professor Colin Pillinger who is preparing to send a lander to the planet Mars to see whether there is life there, are the best in the world. When you teach on such a large scale its important that the academic staff are leaders in their subjects.
What has the Open University achieved? The numbers tell you that it has achieved its aim of being open to people. 170,000 is a lot of students and their backgrounds reflect the diversity of the wider community more than you usually find in universities. And 170,000 is just the students in degree programmes. I’m not counting, for example, the 35,000 teachers who this year are learning to use computers in the classroom through our Learning Schools Project.
The geography I outlined tells you that we have gone a long way towards the aim of being open as to places. We look forward to having a growing number of Malaysians, through the MIA, associated with the world-wide Open University community. The OU MBA programme, with thousands of students spread over thirty countries – all of them networked together in computer conferences - must be the world’s most international MBA.
In pursuit of the goal of being open to methods the OU is constantly adding the benefits of new information and communications technology to its learning system. This year there are 80,000 OU students online from home, making up the world’s largest academic cybercommunity. We are very interested in Malaysia’s Multi-Media Super Corridor because we invest large resource in teaching through multi-media and regularly win prizes for the excellence of our efforts. We admire the commitment that Malaysia is making to new technologies in teaching and learning and we’d like to team up with you so that together we can be at the cutting edge of developments.
What has the OU achieved in its mission of being open as to ideas? What we have shown is that if you give research-active academics the tools and the technology they can produce a distance learning system that achieves greater quality than most campus teaching and at much lower cost. And that’s not just my opinion.
The UK’s national rankings of teaching quality had the Open University in 11th place a year ago and since then all its subject assessments have resulted in excellent ratings. I am particularly proud of the fact that the Open University was the only university to receive the maximum quality score of 24/24 for its teaching of engineering.
Oxford and Cambridge, I’m sad to say, had to be content with 23/24.
So the Open University, which was launched as a radically new type of university thirty years ago, has proved to be hugely successful. Millions have studied with it and hundreds of thousands have earned degrees that are highly regarded by employers. How has this come about?
It has a lot to do with Dr Ahmad’s theme this evening, rebuilding the organisation for competition. The OU is constantly rebuilding what it teaches in order to reach new groups of learners. It is constantly rebuilding its information and communications systems to take advantage of new technology. It is constantly retraining its staff so that they can rise to new challenges. It is constantly redefining and refining its links with its partners around the world.
Here in Malaysia, for example, the OU MBA will become an integral part of the local scene and the course will evolve to reflect Malaysian realities. Students in other countries will then be able to study cases of the dynamic business developments here. In this context links with professional associations such as the MIA are invaluable.
That’s why I’m delighted to be with the Malaysian Institute of Accountants this evening and I thank you for giving me this opportunity to say a few words to you.