National Association of Student Personnel Administrators
Annual Conference 2001
Seattle, 18 March 2001
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice Chancellor, The Open University, UK
President, The United States Open University
Summary
The real strength of the internet is its potential for interaction and transaction rather than its capacity to carry shovelware (course content shoveled at students down the wire). This means that student services are the most significant application of online technology in universities. With 100,000 students (and 100,000 K-12 school-teachers) now studying with it online, the Open University is past being starry-eyed about the e-world. This is serious business. What transactions do students like to conduct online? How can e-communication improve advice and guidance? How does the student association change once its members are online? The answers to these and other questions reveal that the relations between students and universities are entering a new era of maturity.
Introduction
It is a great pleasure to be with you today at the NASPA conference. You have had the generosity – or the foolishness – to invite me to appear twice on programme.
SYMPOSIUM TITLE
Here I am today at your symposium on Global Perspectives from the Leading Edge of Student Affairs – A 2001 Educational Odyssey and my subject will be
TITLE
Student Affairs and Services in the Online World:
What goes, what stays, what improves?
Tomorrow I am to give a keynote address to the main conference on the topic:
KEYNOTE
Leading at Scale: Student Support in the World’s Largest Online University. My challenge, obviously, is to ensure that those of you here today will not be bored if you come tomorrow. I’m going to try to do that by taking very different approaches on the two days.
This morning I am going to personalise it. Tomorrow I shall institutionalise. Add these two perspectives to your own experience and I hope that you will be able to triangulate to a understanding of the use of online technology in serving students at scale.
So let me come back to today and the personal account. I presume you would agree that the best people to assess the quality and effectiveness of student affairs and services in the online world are the students themselves. So I am going to take a student perspective.
I hasten to add that this will not be some fictional attempt to put myself in the place of the student. The fact is that I am a student of the Open University as well as the president of the University. I’ve been a student through most of my career and have completed a Master’s in Educational Technology and a Diploma in Theology since I joined the Open University in 1990. However, those programs were from two Canadian universities.
T171 GREEN
It wasn’t until two years ago that I became an OU student. That was in 1999 when I took a new course: T171 – You, Your Computer and the Net. I did that partly because I wanted to know more about the subject and partly
T171 WEB SCREEN
because this is our highest profile web-based course, enrolling some 12,000 students every year.
I’m taking a course this year for career reasons.
UNESCO JOB
This spring I will be leaving my two open universities, one In the US and one in the UK to go to Paris, France and become the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, with responsibility for education.
It is an exciting but daunting challenge but I think that I am going there at a promising time. Now that the Cold War is well and truly over the community of nations is finding it easier to agree about substantive issues. An important example is the agreement between the United Nations system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, on seven key targets for international development. The are focused on the elimination of the extreme poverty and the target that will be at the centre of my new job is to see that by 2015 all the world’s children are getting an elementary education.
EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE
To give you the scale of the challenge note that today 100 million children get no elementary schooling at all and another 150 million quit before they can read, write and use number. The wider target in our agenda of Education for All is to give everyone in the world a basic education. That means doing something to help the one in four adults in our world, some 900 million people, who are illiterate.
I hope those figures put into perspective the issues we face in our western universities. I hope the scale of the challenge also helps you understand why I think I need some professional development and have registered for another OU course.
U208 AND TITLE
U208 Third World Development which is a 15 credit second level course. I’m already thinking that I was nuts to undertake this course, which is the equivalent of half a year of full-time study, in a year when I’m changing jobs, changing house, and changing country. Each of those events ranks high on the list of reasons that OU students give for dropping our of their courses, so you could say that I am a student at risk.
However, I’ve already handed in the first of the six course assignments and am finding it very stimulating and worthwhile – when I can find the time to study instead of running a large university and preparing to address wonderful people like yourselves.
So what I plan to do is to take you through the online interactions that I will have as a student and comment on them from the perspective of what goes, what stays, and what improves compared to conventional ways of doing things.
Before I embark on that you need little background about the Open University but I’ll go through that very quickly.
The Open University was a political creation. Most significant innovations in higher education have been driven by politicians – whatever academics say. Here three politicians had four objectives. Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to increase access to higher education for working adults, and to use new technology for learning and teaching. Jennie Lee, the Minister who got the show on the road, wanted to prove that a technology-based university could be as good as the best. Margaret Thatcher wanted to reduce the costs of higher education.
The launch of the Open University coincided with the first moon landing in 1969.
OU MISSION
Everything seemed possible and the new university was given an ambitious mission: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
USOU
Fast forward thirty years to the launch of the United States Open University.
RICHARD
Some of you will know the distinguished Chancellor or the USOU, Dr Richard Jarvis, who was previously Chancellor of the Nevada system and had a long career in the SUNY system before that.
The USOU has added two further goals to the original OU mission statement to respond to the challenge of today’s web-enhanced global economy:
USOU OBJECTIVES
to be open as to time and open to the world
What has the Open University achieved and how?
STATS
This year the OU has 180,000 students in degree credit courses, including 1,400 Ph.D. students and a graduate school of 40,000. There are another 140,000 or so in continuing education and professional development programs including 110,000 teachers learning to use IT in the classroom.
Who are all these people? They are mostly working adults, they span the age range from teens to nineties and they have a broader socio-economic profile than most universities. We’ve just admitted 50,000 new students and nearly 15,000 of them are on fee waivers or financial assistance.
Where are they? Most are in the UK but there are 30,000 students in the rest of the world. Openness to places – globalization - is very real for us.
Quality
What about quality? Britain has a fierce state-run quality assessment system for its universities. There may be some overkill - because British bureaucrats believe that nothing succeeds like excess. However, the system does allow direct quality comparisons between campus universities and the Open University. What do they show?
RAE
In research the OU ranks in the top third of UK universities and some of its research is world leading. One research team will soon send a lander to Mars to find out whether there is life there. They keep asking me for more money so I have my fingers crossed that their lander, Beagle II, doesn’t disappear into a deep hole like the last US Mars mission.
TQA
In teaching the Open University ranks in the top 10%. This is a list of the elite UK universities where most programs are rated as excellent. The OU is well up the list. In recent years nearly all programs assessed received excellent ratings, including subjects that require lab work.
EXCELLENTS
I was particularly proud of the result for General Engineering where the Open University was the only English university to score full marks. Oxford and Cambridge, who also have pretty good schools, got lower grades!
GEN ENG
So here is a University with high quality output but few restrictions on access. To have broken that historic – and insidious - link between quality and exclusivity in higher education is the Open University’s proudest achievement. And it is a transferable technology.
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH
That tradition of operating at scale is now being applied to the e-world where we use online technology at industrial strength. I imagine that these figures make the OU the largest online university for whatever that is worth. One thing it is worth is to get you quickly through the Hawthorne effects and to teach you what works and what doesn’t work.
I’m going to take you through the student experience at the Open University by illustrating it with my own case. Experience has taught me that it is not wise to go online internationally when you are giving a conference address in a hotel, so this will be a static presentation – but you’ll get the message.
OU HOME
I’m interested in becoming an Open University student so I go to the OU’s home page on the web. As you can see, I can go off in a number of directions from there. I’ve heard that the OU has a pretty extensive regional support structure and since I’m about to move to Paris, France I’m interested to know whether the University has any presence there. So I click on THE OU NEAR YOU and come to a map of the OU’s regional centres.
REGIONAL MAP
If I lived in the UK I could type in my postcode and it would direct me to my local centre. However, it also tells me to click here if I live in Mainland Europe, which I soon will. So I do that.
NORTH REGION
This brings me to the North Region of the OU in Newcastle which looks after all the students in Continental Western Europe. Here there is a welcome message from the Director of the OU in the North and a menu which allows me to find out more about the OU in Mainland Europe. I click on that.
LIST OF COUNTRIES
This gives me a choice of countries and I choose France.
FRANCE
Here I find the details of the OU’s co-ordinator in Paris and a list of the events that are being put on for students.
So I’m reassured that the OU has a presence in Paris. There’s someone I can contact and there are various student events that I can attend if I want.
So I go back to the home page
OU HOME
and decide that I ought to find out more about the OU STUDENT EXPERIENCE. I know that this is a difference type of university and I want to know more. So I click on that.
YOUR FUTURE
This gives me another set of choices. If we were live the keywords describing the choices flash in turn. We’re not live so you’ll have to take my word for it that I clicked on the square titled WHY CHOOSE THE OU.
WHY CHOOSE THE OU
This gives me a drop down text that gives me a short sell on the OU, stressing that it is the best option for busy people who want to study part-time. It tells about the OU’s successful methodology of supported open learning and lists some of the large employers who sponsor their staff to study with the OU.
That’s fine so I pick another box WHAT SUPPORT WILL I GET?
WHAT SUPPORT WILL I GET?
I want to know what this Supported Open Learning business is all about and this page gives me a short description. It tells me, in particular, how the OU will help me get started if I haven’t studied for some time and it explains that for each course I take I will have personal tutor who will support me by e-mail, phone, regular mail and, if I wish, face-to-face meetings.
That’s reassuring. The next thing I want to know is how all this fits in with my previous study. I’ve accumulated credits, degrees and diplomas in three countries. Now, I may not want to use this if my aim is to do a whole new degree in order to learn about a new subject, but I’d like to know what the arrangements are. So I click on COUNTING YOUR PREVIOUS STUDY
COUNTING YOUR PREVIOUS STUDY
and find a general description of the arrangements with a link
CREDIT TRANSFER
To a special Credit Transfer website where I can enter my previous credits and qualifications and get an indication of what the OU would let me use towards my new qualification. I won’t follow that up just now, but it’s good to know that it’s there. This seems like quite a well organized institution so I’m going to take the plunge and become a student.
OU HOME
So back to the home page and off into the section on Courses and Qualifications to a page on CHOOSING YOUR SUBJECT.
CHOOSING YOUR SUBJECT.
Do they have anything in the area that I want to study?
Here I have to explain a slight subtlety which threw me at first but, in fact shows that the OU knows what it is doing. I’m already registered and studying my course, which is called U208: Third World Development. It so happens that this course will finish its life in 2001 and reappear in 2002 in a new version with a new course code and title. So you can’t any longer find the course I’m taking this year in the course list for enquirers for next year. So for the purpose of this part of the itinerary I’ll use the new course, U213. Let’s plug that in.
U213
U213 DESCRIPTION
You can see that the title Third World Development changes to International Development: Challenges for a World in Transition. I think the point that the title change is making is that poverty and development is no longer a First World, Third World issue. There are desperate pockets of poverty in the USA and the UK and some very rich people in India. Poverty is now a global challenge.
Anyway, I like the look of the course and when I scroll down
STUDYING OUTSIDE THE UK
I find that I can study this course outside the UK in France. Sounds good so I’m going to reserve a place by clicking on Make a Reservation.
RESERVE A PLACE
You can see that this starts with a checklist. The University wants me to be sure that this is the course for me and asks questions like whether I have the time to study and whether I’m sure this is the right level of difficulty.
I answer yes to all those questions and then go on to complete the
CONTINUING STUDENT RESERVATION FORM.
So I’m a student at the Open University.
OU HOME
Before I go on into my life and interactions with the University as a student it might be helpful to run around backstage, so to speak and give you a feel for how all this is developing in quantitative terms. I’ll talk about this more tomorrow, when I look at all this from the institutional perspective.
Let me just say here that at the moment the use of the Learner’s Guide, where I learned about Credit Transfer and how the OU works, is attracting about 70,000 hits from students and potential students each week and getting very good feedback. To date some 75,000 course reservations have been made online, which is 30% of the total. In other words 70% of the students are still reserving their places by phone, regular mail or in-person visits to one of our centres.
So, back to being a student. I now have a home page so let’s take a look at that.
OU HOME STUDENT HOME
So I go to the sign on page.
SIGN ON
PASSWORD
Give my number and password.
STUDENT HOME
Here I am in my home page.
This is the gateway to a lot of useful information. I could, for instance, find out the exact timetable of the despatch of the course materials and know when to expect the next batch. I could look at the student handbook if I wanted to check on the regulations. I could head for the electronic library, but let’s do that later.
I decide to check my record
STUDENT RECORD
It starts with my address and general details and I see that I can amend these if they are not correct. Pretty soon I’ll need to change this for my Paris address, e-mail and phone, but I’ll do that next month.
MAILINGS
If I scroll down I have a choice of how I want to receive my mailings. For the moment I prefer to have them come by post but when I get to Paris I may opt for the administrative mailings to come electronically. The OU is famous for sending out a lot of administrative mailings to students and I won’t want all that bumph cluttering up our apartment in Paris. So far 16,500 students have opted for the electronic service.
U208 AND TUTOR
Then I have the details of the course I’m taking and you’ll see the name and details of my tutor. She lives in Oxford and works for the Oxford University Press editing their History of the British Empire. She works part-time as a tutor for this course. I went over to Oxford for my first tutorial on the last Saturday morning in February and there were 12 other students there. These face-to-face sessions are optional for students but many find them valuable. Once I get to Paris it will be more difficult for me to attend tutorials because I doubt that any are held in Paris for this course. But it’s only three hours to London through the Channel Tunnel and there will be plenty of tutorials there.
OTHER COURSES
Finally the record lists the other courses I’ve taken. You can see the Computer and the Net course that I talked about – and you can see that I passed. The course on Promoting Health got there because when the system was new I visited OU Student Services in my capacity as Vice-Chancellor and so show me the system they registered me for a course and then immediately cancelled it. I was impressed to find it on my record.
To pop behind the scenes again, let me note that this facility of viewing the record is proving immensely popular. Right now 35,000 students check their record online every week and there have been 109,000 first time users. Last year there was one student who liked the reassurance so much that he checked his record over a hundred times.
Back to me as a student. And let me remind you that this is real. I’ve been to my first tutorial and two weeks ago I mailed my first course assignment to my tutor. I felt rather pleased with myself because the submission deadline was not until last Friday, March 16th. But I knew that if I procrastinated it would get mixed up with my preparations for your conference.
Another element in my course, and in many OU courses, is a residential school. In the summer months the OU takes over the campuses of 12 British, one French, one German and one Spanish university in order to give students an intensive week of laboratory work, field trips, seminars, language practice and so on. About 35,000 students attend residential schools each year and there is one for my course.
In the large enrollment courses students get a choice of venues, but my residential school is offered only at the University of Sussex. However, I do have a choice of weeks and I can make that choice online.
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
So I go to the residential schools site and plug in my course code, U208.
U208
It shows me the dates
DATES
VENUE
Then gives me a description of the venue and how to get to the University of Sussex by road or public transport. Finally a chance to book.
BOOK
TRY AGAIN 6TH MARCH
But it told me that bookings weren’t open until March 6th. That’s OK because I need to find out what’s in my diary at UNESCO before I can choose a week.
OU HOME LIBRARY
So back to the home page. The next thing I need to know about is what I can expect from the library, so I type in Library
WELCOME
which takes me to the Welcome page. This tells me about services available on campus, which are primarily aimed at the Faculty, and services at a distance so I choose that.
SERVICES
I’ve been hearing about a service called ROUTES, so I go to that.
ROUTES
It stands for Resources for Open University Teachers and Students and the idea is to make available, for each course that the University offers, a quality-assured set of electronic documents and data that are kept up to idea. This is to spare students the wasted time thrashing around trying to find relevant resources using search engines. This is very much work in progress. Right now ROUTES contains just over 2,000 electronic documents chosen for 105 of the University’s courses. When I checked before Christmas it was only 1,600 resources for 60 courses so this is being developed fairly quickly.
That corresponds to the steep rise in student use. In 1999 students accessed some 60,000 articles electronically through our library. In 2000 that jumped to 176,000.
HOME OU ON TV
Another element of my course is a series of six documentary TV programs which are broadcast on the national BBC2 TV network. I can find out more about that by clicking on OU on TV.
OU ON TV
This site gives me the schedules but also tells me about other series and the exciting website, OPEN2.NET, that the OU and the BBC maintain in support of the programs. These TV programs have a large audience, sometimes in the millions, among the general public and OPEN2.NET allows viewers to follow up the subjects of the programs in more detail.
I’m finding my TV programs for my course very useful. They are documentary in style, not lectures, and take you into the Third World to see and understand the reality through local eyes.
What next? Well I’ve heard that the OU has a very active student association so let’s take a look at that.
OUSA
The Student Association has nearly 200,000 members and is highly organised.
WELCOME TO OUSA
The arrival of the online world has revolutionised the way that the OUSA Executive works and how it keeps in touch with its members. It is by constitution an apolitical body dedicated to serving its members. One of the ways it does so it by running hundreds of computer conferences on the FirstClass conferencing software system.
Some of these are about the business of the association and about getting student views about issues before the Board and Senate of the University, where students have substantial representation. Others are social and hobby conferences. There are many OU student societies. So for example, the OU Society of Bell Ringers – actually they call themselves Change Ringers, have their own FirstClass conference.
A particularly useful service from the University’s point of view is that OUSA organises computer conferences for all the courses where online communication is not mandatory. Students who have the technology like to use it. My course, for example, does not have an official computer conference but the Student Association has created one. It either persuades a faculty or associate faculty member to moderate the conference or supplies a moderator from among the student body.
Putting on my Head-of-Institution hat I must say that OUSA does the University a huge service by the way that it moderates these and all the other conferences it runs. That’s partly because students can be much more draconian in enforcing codes of conduct than the University would ever dare to be. Students who misbehave are disconnected by OUSA without much ceremony.
I’ll come back and say a bit more about conferencing in a minute but just to finish the story let me leap ahead.
One of these days, possibly after I retire, I intend to finish my Open University degree. When I do I shall want to collect the degree in person at a Commencement. We just call them degree ceremonies and because of the scale of our operation we hold nearly 30 of them each year around the UK and Europe and in Singapore. Suppose that I’ve qualified for my degree and want to choose a ceremony. That too can be done on the web
DEGREE CEREMONY
I should comment here that our Chancellor, who presides at some of these ceremonies and is pictured here, is Lady Betty Boothroyd, who was until last summer the Speaker of the House of Commons. Some of you will have seen her on television keeping our unruly parliamentarians in order. She does a wonderful job at these ceremonies and the students and graduates adore her.
Anyway, suppose I’ve just qualified and I want to know where I can go to a degree ceremony.
LIST OF CEREMONIES
So I go first to the list which shows where and when they are and how many guests I can invite in each case. I’ve heard that Ely is a very impressive venue so click on that.
ELY VENUE
It tells me about Ely Cathedral and shows me a picture. There are also maps and information on travel. It looks good so I move to the program for the day.
ELY PROGRAM
This tells me about the timings and where I have to go to robe. I can then reserve a place at that ceremony.
I should note that in my capacity as Vice-Chancellor I shall in fact be presiding at the Ely ceremonies this year, where one of the honorary degree recipients will be the first chair of the Board of Governance of the US Open University, Ed McBride.
We attach a lot of importance to our degree ceremonies because our students do. Here in the States commencements are often rather raucous affairs in the football stadium. We aim for a blend of dignity and informality and the graduates say they appreciate it. In my eleven years at the OU I’ve officiated at over 100 such ceremonies. I talk to every graduate as they come across the stage and from the 50,000 of them that have told me about themselves on these occasions I have heard some truly heart-warming testimonials about the impact of study on adult lives.
Well, I’m nearly through the itinerary. Now I’m a graduate, so it’s natural for me to look at the Alumni website.
ALUMNI
This has the sorts of services that you will be familiar with. And I imagine that your alumni websites include a welcome from the President of the University just as ours does.
ALUMNI JSD WELCOME
The scale of our alumni group, which is about a quarter of a million graduates and a million others who have studied with us at some time, gives us some unusual options. For example, we publish a monthly alumni magazine, Open Eye, as a supplement to a national daily newspaper, The Independent, so that reaches a large audience outside the University community proper.
TITLE
So, it’s time for me to wrap up and turn it over to the panellists and yourselves. My title was Student Services in the Online World: what goes, what stays, what improves. I’ve addressed this implicitly by the way I’ve explained what OU students can do and the scale on which they do it.
But I imagine that I’ve left you somewhat puzzled. You know the mystery that Sherlock Holmes solved by noticing that a dog had not barked. There’s a dog that hasn’t barked in my talk and that is the use of online technology in coursework itself.
Is that an omission? Not really. Our conclusion based on our observations so far is that what OU students find most exciting and helpful about online technology is the ability it gives for them to communicate about the course with fellow students and tutors, and the administrative operations that they can carry out themselves. They are much less keen on doing most of their studying online and tell us very firmly that if we want them to read a book then please give them the book, don’t download it onto a screen.
Obviously courses vary. T171 that I took in 1999 had quite lot of web-based work, but then the course itself was about the web. However, it also included two sent books and those were sent to us as paperbacks. My course this year has a lot of reading and no web-work directly related to the course.
Another area that is a good news, bad news scenario is the submission and correction of assignments. Britain has an extraordinarily efficient next day delivery postal system, but we operate in countries in Europe where next day means next week if you are lucky. The good news is that submitting and returning assignments online is a great timesaver in such situations. The bad news is that tutors find that correcting and commenting on essays electronically is strictly a pain. We haven’t really resolved this. It’s an area where fax is better than e-mail. Or if you use e-mail, the best thing is to print out the essay, mark it in the normal way with comments in the margin, etc, and then scan the marked essay to send it back.
We’ve invested a lot a money in electronic marking tools to try to crack this problem but so far our tutors are unimpressed and complain that the technology is making them less productive.
We do have some brilliant examples of interactive multi-media in our courses and I’ll talk about that tomorrow. But the killer application, as far as teaching is concerned, is computer conferencing. Right now we have some 110,000 students involved in around 16,000 computer conferences like this one
T171 CONFERENCE
so this is a massive phenomenon.
Like all massive phenomena it has a degree of inertia that makes it hard to update the technology without upsetting people’s habits. That’s where our United States Open University is doing a super job in integrating conferencing with all other aspects of their courses using the Prometheus open source system developed at George Washington University. We getting some real trans-Atlantic synergy between the two operations.
But that’s enough from me. I hope I’ve shown that online technology is making a huge difference to student affairs and services. It lends itself to operations at scale but not all aspects of the students’ experience lend themselves to online technology.
Thank you.
BLACK
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