Theme: Higher Education 2000: What Will Be New? What Will Be Different?
Opening Session: The University in the New Millennium
Medium and Message: Passion, Values and Quality in the New Academy
by
Sir John Daniel
President, The United States Open University
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
Summary
As established universities rethink their missions and their methods for the 21st century new institutions are emerging with different corporate structures, tightly focussed missions, and the methods of distributed learning. Both established and new institutions are focusing excessively on the media for moving information at the expense of the messages that transform thinking. An examination of the world’s most successful distributed learning university shows that the passion of ideals that inspire and the core values of academic thinking are essential foundations for achieving learning of quality with new methods. In implementing new methods of teaching and learning innovations of organization and process are usually more important than choices of software and hardware. Such innovations also contribute to the development of the scholarship of teaching.
Introduction
It is an honor to be asked to give the opening keynote at this 1999 Accreditation and Quality Assurance Conference of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Links between the Middle States Commission and the Open University go back many years and our current relationship has two components.
First, the Open University is itself an accrediting body. In 1992 we were asked by the UK government to take on the duties of the Council for National Academic Awards, which was wound up as part of the reforms of that year that gave the polytechnics university status. We created Open University Validation Services which today acts as an accrediting and validating body for 45 institutions at the Baccalaureate and Masters levels and also has 70 institutions sponsoring research and Ph.D. students. One of our Baccalaureate institutions is Richmond, The American International University in London, which is also a Middle States institution, and we accredit other US institutions in Europe whose link here is with other Regional Associations.
I am pleased to say that our accreditation work is highly regarded by the UK’s Quality Assessment Agency for Higher Education. It has also been a stimulating new activity for the Open University as a whole because it has led us to take a lead role in the introduction of competency-based occupational standards across the whole range of UK economic life. We are now the only university that has the status of an Awarding Body for National and Scottish Vocational Qualifications. As an important spin-off we have mapped of our own academic courses, where appropriate, onto the competency-based vocational and occupational standards structure. This enables students to obtain both academic credit and a Vocational Qualification if they are so inclined. However, the Open University’s accreditation work would merit a whole talk by itself and I shall not explore it further today.
The second component of our relationship with the Middle States Commission is that our infant sister institution, the United States Open University, is one of the newest institutions in the Middle States group, having achieved candidacy status for accreditation earlier this year. I am pleased to say that Dr Richard Jarvis, who joined the USOU as Chancellor in September, is here with us today. I would like to say how impressed we have been with the representatives of Middle States who have visited us and to thank them for their very constructive and committed approach to the accreditation of this somewhat unusual new university.
Theme, Title and Topic
The theme of your conference is Higher Education 2000: What Will Be New? What Will Be Different? You have entitled this opening session: The University in the New Millennium. Since the United States Open University will be launching its teaching in the year 2000 I am acutely conscious of the changing dynamics of higher education at the dawn of the third millennium. The USOU is being launched into the USA of the year 2000, whereas the Open University began operations in the Britain of the 1970s. The contexts are somewhat different. But there are also similarities. One of the underlying themes of my remarks today is that we must not let excitement about the present lead us to forget our continuity with the past.
Eleven years ago I had the privilege, along with all the world’s university presidents, of being invited to the 900th anniversary celebrations of the University of Bologna. Those days of celebration in Italy were a moving reminder of the longevity of universities. One of the trends in higher education today is to give students increasing control over their higher education. We should remember that this may create 21st century institutions that are more like the medieval universities, which were essentially student controlled, than any more recent manifestation of the academy. Faculty who worry about the way their world is going might like to remember that, in the student-run University of Bologna from the 12th to the 14th century, the students levied fines on professors who started or finished their lectures late, failed to keep up with the syllabus, or left the city without permission.
I have titled these remarks Medium and Message: Passion, Values and Quality in the New Academy. I shall start with two observable facts. First most established universities are engaged, with more or less difficulty, in rethinking their missions and their methods for the 21st century. Second, new institutions are emerging with different corporate structures. Most of them have tightly focussed missions and some of them use the methods of distributed learning.
Regarding corporate structures I mention just four models: 1) the wholly owned university subsidiary of a for-profit company; for example, the Motorola University and the British Aerospace Virtual University; 2) the for-profit university, Phoenix being the prominent example; 3) the for-profit subsidiary of a not-for-profit university, of which there are now various examples; and 4) the not-for-profit university associated with another not-for profit university outside the USA, the United States Open University being an example dear to my heart.
These new institutions tend to have more tightly focused missions than the generality of existing institutions. The focus may be on a particular type of student – often the working adult – or on a particular part of the curriculum –usually the low-hanging fruit of business, management and ICT skills.
There is a widespread belief that these new institutions are particularly committed to the methods of distributed learning. I have not done a survey but I do wonder whether this is really true. I suspect that the numbers of distributed learning students in established universities far outstrip those in the new institutions. Most corporate universities, for example, conduct their teaching at sites that are often called campuses. The for-profit University of Phoenix teaches on a multiplicity of small campuses and only a small fraction of its students are distributed learners in the accepted sense of the term. I believe that the United States Open University is unusual in making distributed learning its only mode of operation.
Observing these developments leads me to the first proposition that I shall argue in this address. I suggest that as they develop themselves for the future, both established and new institutions are focusing excessively on the media for moving information at the expense of the messages that transform thinking. When the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan claimed that the medium is the message he captured an essential truth – but not the whole truth. New media do indeed initiate change in society, but unless the new media carry clear messages the change they initiate is rudderless.
Thirty years ago, when the Open University was founded, television was transforming society; today, as the United States Open University begins life, the net is transforming society. Since new media transform society they also have a transforming effect on universities. They change the expectations of the students and the opportunities for teachers. These changes inevitably have the effect of altering, sometimes in a subtle way, the messages that universities carry and the purposes that they pursue. My second proposition is that we should be alert to origins of these alterations of message and purpose, alter to the nature of the alterations themselves, and alert to the likely consequences of the changes.
The Backlash against Distance Learning
In the year now ending we have all noticed developing a backlash against distance learning in the United States. The AAUP now has this mode of learning firmly in its gunsights. In her forthcoming book Traditional Degrees for Non-Traditional Students, Carole Fungaroli urges students to avoid online learning – although I note that the first chapter of her book is available online. (Sometimes we all have to forget our principles and do the right thing.) She says that one of the things missing from distance learning is passion, adding that distance learning started out well-meaning, but very quickly became an opportunistic, money-making enterprise.
She is making the important point that distance or distributed learning has become so enmeshed with the other changes taking place within higher education that it has become a summary expression for all of them. Distance learning has become a catch-all term for virtual universities, online universities, for-profit universities, corporate universities and any other development that worries faculty.
That’s fine for the purposes of polemics but those of us charged with leading the higher education enterprise owe it to our colleagues to start from sharper definitions. Ms Fungaroli urges that reputable universities should stay as far away from distance learning as possible because it is going to besmirch them. That’s a sensible prescription if distance learning is indeed a corrupting influence, but if the real villain is one of the other trends for which distance learning has become a surrogate then it makes less sense. We may not need to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.
When Ms Fungaroli states that distance learning started out well-meaning, but very quickly became an opportunistic, money-making enterprise she omits to note two things. First, almost all innovations go this route. Did you know, for example, that there is pornography on the internet? If not you are excused now to go and make the discovery. Second, distance learning has already been through several cycles from idealism to opportunism and, most importantly, back from opportunism to idealism. St Paul, undoubtedly history’s most successful distance teacher, was also undoubtedly an idealist, but can the same be said for all today’s fund-raising tele-evangelists? Correspondence education began in the last century with very noble motives but by 1970 it needed Jessica Mitford to prick the opportunistic and corrupt balloon of the enterprise with her famous article in the Atlantic Monthly: Let Us Now Appraise Famous Authors.
One of the idealistic responses to the opportunistic situation Mitford deplored was the creation of the Open University, about which I shall say more in a moment. Over thirty years it has established, among those who are familiar with its work, a formidable reputation for its quality, scale and impact. I shall try to explain why that has happened and why it has been so widely copied. There are now numerous countries where the distance-teaching university is by far the largest university. The USA, however, is not one of them.
Although the United States Open University is now bringing the Open University’s idealism and methodology to this country it is largely the development of the net that has caused the sudden upsurge in distance learning activity that is worrying so many faculty members across the nation. Furthermore, as I just noted, the increased attention to distance learning is often conflated with new corporate pressures to create some scary scenarios.
That’s why it will be helpful for me to talk about the Open University. An examination of this institution, which is acknowledged as the world’s most successful distributed teaching university, shows that a passion for ideals that inspire and a commitment to the values of academic thinking are essential foundations for achieving learning of quality with new methods. Such a review also reveals that, in implementing new methods of teaching and learning, innovations of organization and process are usually more important than choices of software and hardware. Such innovations also contribute to the development of the scholarship of teaching. Let me explain.
Why was the Open University established?
By a nice coincidence the Open University was inaugurated in 1969 in the same week that the Apollo astronauts returned from the first moon landing. It was a time when everything seemed possible. The previous year universities around the world had been in turmoil. It was time for a new beginning and the Open University’s first Chancellor, Geoffrey Crowther, captured the spirit of the times when he charged the new University to be: open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. That remains our mission statement today. The United States Open University has adopted it too, but added two more ‘opens’ to reflect its own current context: open as to time, and open to the world.
These ideals captured the goals of the politicians whose energy created the Open University. Here little has changed because their four goals are identical to the goals for higher education that state governors enunciate today. Harold Wilson had two goals: to expand access to higher education and to harness modern communications technology to the enterprise. Jennie Lee’s goal was a new university whose quality would rival the best. Margaret Thatcher wanted to see the costs of higher education reduced.
The staff who created the Open University invested the mission and the goals with further idealism. Open to people meant not just open to more people but open to a greater diversity of people. Access meant access to success. Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor, shared Carole Fungaroli’s disdain for the opportunistic, money-making enterprise that correspondence education had become. By bringing the values of public sector, not-for-profit education to the new enterprise he created a student-centered university of quality. Thirty years on we can see the dimensions of its success.
The Success of the Open University
Data on the Open University is widely available and is summarized in some of my own speeches on the OU website < http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/ >. Today I simply want to highlight aspects of its success that touch on the mission of the Middle States Commission and illustrate my theme: Medium and Message: Passion, Values and Quality in the New Academy. I shall comment first on scale, quality, and student outcomes.
Scale
The scale of the Open University is a key element of its success, not just in meeting its goal of enhancing access but also in driving costs down and quality up. The idea of economies of scale is easy to grasp. The cost structure of the OU calls for large upfront investments in the preparation of course materials and relatively low marginal costs for offering these courses to additional students. The investment cost associated with materials is not primarily their physical support: paper, video, CD-ROM or the web, but the cost of having teams of academics and other professionals work together over substantial periods to produce courses that are academically rigorous, intellectually stimulating, and pedagogically efficient.
Less easy to grasp are what I call the qualities of scale. Clearly, the more students take a course, the greater the upfront investment that can be made. With distance learning, however, having large numbers of students also increases the quality and intensity of the personal and interactive support they can be given – which is not the situation for classroom teaching. Having larger concentrations of students in any one locality gives three benefits. First, each student is nearer to the associate faculty member (tutor) assigned to their local group; second, the tutor can more readily arrange local group meetings; and, third, it is easier for students to meet each other informally and create self-help groups.
Note also that these advantages of scale carry over to online support by associate faculty. Even where geography is not a factor, Metcalfe’s Law tells us that the value of a network to participants is proportional to the square of their number. The reality of this for students in online courses is the variety of computer conferences in which they can take part.
For these reasons it is helpful that the Open University has 160,000 students in degree credit courses. The two largest this year are an 8-credit level one Technology course, T171 You, Your Computer and the Net, that has over 10,000 students signed up for our January session. This is a web-based course. Even larger, at over 12,000 students, is our new 15-credit level one social science course, DD100 Understanding Societies which is in more traditional format.
Obviously not all courses are on this scale. Our 1400 Ph.D. students each have an individual research program as they would at any other university. Some of our taught courses have less than a hundred students enroled each year –although I don’t like there to be too many such courses. Obviously, like all universities, the OU cross subsidizes the low enrolment upper level courses from the high enrolment courses at lower levels. However, even our graduate courses have substantial enrolments. Those in the MBA program, which produces 25% of all UK MBAs, number in the thousands and the same is true for the MA in Education.
Quality
What about quality? As part of the drive for accountability British universities have been subject, for most of this decade, to a state organized quality assessment system that uses teams of academics drawn from a range of institutions to assess the quality of research and teaching in each university by discipline.
For research this is done every four years with activity broken down into seventy discipline areas. In 1994 the Open University came 33rd out of the 100 UK universities and in 1998 we rose a few places to 29th. We have research of international excellence going on in each school and some, like our Planetary Sciences Research Institute, is world leading.
To assess teaching the Quality Assurance Agency chooses a number of disciplines each year. This year, of the disciplines the OU teaches, they chose General Engineering, Psychology, Biology and Physics. The visiting teams have to assess the quality of teaching in the discipline in each university on six dimensions: Curriculum design, content and organization; Teaching, learning and assessment; Student progression and achievement; Student support and guidance; Learning resources; and Quality assurance and enhancement. The university’s teaching is rated on a scale of four on each of these six dimensions, so the maximum score you can get for the teaching of a particular discipline is 24/24. By convention the press regards 22/24 and above as ‘Excellent’
Here are the Open University’s results for the year: General Engineering 24/24; Psychology 22/24; Biology 23/24; and Physics 23/24. In other words our teaching in all of these disciplines, none of which would appear to lend themselves easily to distance learning, was rated as excellent. I took particular pleasure in the result for General Engineering because we were the only university to get full marks; Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, who have very respectable schools of Engineering, had to be content with 23/24.
Now that this process has been operating for some time you can construct meaningful league tables from the results. The most common approach is to take the proportion of disciplines in which a university’s teaching has been rated as excellent. This is a list of the top twenty out of the UK’s hundred universities. Last year the Open University placed eleventh in that list. Given the recent results I have shown to you I expect that next year we shall be in the top ten of the UK’s hundred universities, with nearly two-thirds of our teaching programs excellent rated. Unlike the Carnegie classification, which is a classification abused as a ranking system, this table is unabashedly a ranking of universities by the quality of their teaching.
If you combine OU student numbers and quality rankings you find that in Engineering, in Music, in Geology, in Chemistry and in Social Policy a majority of all university students in England studying in excellent-rated programs are at the Open University.
Student outcomes
I turn now to student outcomes. Traditionally part-time higher education has high drop-out rates. So does distance learning. Combine the two and you often have very high drop-out rates. the Open University is proud to swim against this current. Course by course our completion rates are around 75% - and these are long courses, usually either 8 or 15 credits in US terms. Roughly half those who pass their first course graduate with a bachelor’s degree in eight years.
Of even more interest is the impact of Open University study on students’ lives, because the evidence here gives the lie to the accusation that distance learning drains passion and enthusiasm out of the student experience.
Two years ago the UK conducted a survey of graduates from all universities to find out how they were changed by doing a university degree? The results did not differ greatly from university to university, except that graduates from the Open University, much more than graduates from elsewhere, said that university study had changed their lives.
That seemed odd. The average age of OU students on entry is 34 so you would think their lives had achieved a degree of stability. Conversely, you might think that the young, malleable students who study full-time at university after secondary school would be changed by the experience of university. Perhaps they are, but if so they are much less aware of it than our older OU students, perhaps because it is mixed in with the general process of maturation.
How do Open University graduates say that study has changed them? Like all graduates they find that the degree has made them more employable. But our mature students give greater importance to personal development than to employability. They mention new careers, better job opportunities, more self-confidence, a sense of achievement, more opportunities in life and new friends as the results of their studies. One Open University graduate reported, with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation, that ever since doing a degree with the Open University he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question.
There is also evidence that study as a mature person makes a proportion of people more likely to get involved in the life of the wider community. 46% of Open University graduates report an enhanced interest in current affairs, reading non-fiction and watching more serious TV programs. 40% said that as a result of their studies they had become more interested in helping people in need. 20% had become more involved in cultural activities. 10% had become more involved in political activities. Clearly Open University study has an impact on people. I have worked for nine universities in six political jurisdictions. Never have I met graduates who are as passionate about the transforming effects of their studies as the thousands of graduates who talk to me each year at our 25 commencement ceremonies.
The Elements of Success
How do we explain the Open University’s success? It is a combination of four elements:
1) High quality study materials
2) Personal academic support to each student
3) Good administration and logistics
4) Symbiosis between teaching and research.
Except for the link between teaching and research those four elements all appear to be linked to the media of teaching and learning, so why did I begin by stressing the importance of the message?
This is where the importance of process comes in. My predecessor, Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, always says that the most significant innovation he introduced was the idea developing courses in teams.
This automatically establishes the scholarship of teaching that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been promoting, with increasing success, for the last decade here in the USA. For the Carnegie Foundation scholarship has four key features.
First, it is public. Open University course materials are indeed on public view, but my point here is 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 OU course team tradition that each individual’s first draft gets comprehensively criticised 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 OU 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 the OU 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 OU 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.
Another key aspect of process is the role of the 7,000 associate faculty. Here again the role is not to provide ready-made answers but to help the student engage with the debates of the course. What amazes visitors to the Open University is the very high level of interdependence and interaction between those involved in all parts of the teaching system. Full-time faculty monitor the commentaries of associate faculty on student assignments in order to spread good practice. Faculty from other universities are involved at all stages from course concept to final exam. Students are exchanging up to a quarter of a million messages a day on computer conferences.
It is indeed a great irony that critics often accuse distance learning institutions of draining the interaction out of the academic experience. My own observation, based on experience in all sorts of universities, is that no institution matches the good distance teaching university for being a buzzing hive of communication and interaction.
Conclusion
Let me conclude. I have argued that universities in the new millennium must not be misled into mistaking the medium for the message. I have warned against misusing distance learning as a surrogate for other trends, such as the resurgence of proprietary institutions, when reflecting on the future. I have tried to show that faculty roles can be unbundled in helpful ways and in unhelpful ways.
If we wish to ensure passion in learning and excitement in teaching there are some things we unbundle at our peril. Above all, we must preserve the notion of the community of scholars interested in teaching and research. The Open University has knit the community of scholars more tightly together than ever before by giving equal importance to the scholarship of teaching and the scholarship of discovery. I hope that the United States Open University will continue and develop that tradition.