Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
It is a great pleasure to be here with you today to sign this Memorandum of Agreement between an Open Polytechnic on one side of the world and an Open University on the opposite side. It is said that opposites attract and I believe that what we are creating here is a marriage made in heaven.
Opposites attract, but compatibility is also important for a successful relationship and we have that too. What you see today is an alliance between two extraordinarily successful institutions. The development of the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand is a remarkable story. It happens to be ten years to the day since Shona Butterfield took over the leadership of the OPNZ. In that decade the Open Polytechnic has been transformed.
In 1989 it was a correspondence trade school run as part of the Department of Education. Today it is a distinct institution guiding its own destiny. It has expanded its programming dramatically in both subject matter and level. It has seized the advantage of combining all levels of postsecondary education - from National Certificates through National Diplomas to Degrees - in order to come up with a coherent framework with multiple entry and exit points that is a model not just for New Zealand but for the world.
I can tell you that the quality of the Open Polytechnic’s distance education courses are acclaimed around the world and New Zealanders tell me that the institution is nationally acclaimed for the effectiveness of its management and the success of its strategy for development in a changing environment.
I am here to assure you that the Open University of the UK is a worthy partner for this jewel in the crown of New Zealand’s postsecondary system. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has praised the quality of our management and planning as we have become Britain’s largest and most cost-effective university. National assessments of teaching quality rank the Open University in eleventh place among the hundred plus UK universities and I take particular pride in the latest result of that assessment program. In the results announced at the end of last year for the quality of teaching of General Engineering the Open University gained the maximum score of 24/24 whereas Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College, London had to lick their wounds with only 23/24.
Thirty years ago most members of Britain’s educational establishment said that the Open University would never work and that it certainly wouldn’t be able to teach scientific and practical subjects. Yet today, in subjects as diverse as Engineering, Earth Science, Music, Chemistry and Social Policy the Open University accounts for the majority of all English students taking degree courses that are rated as excellent.
This means that the Open Polytechnic and the Open University are both international leaders in the distance learning revolution that is reshaping education and training around the world. But why are we creating the alliance that you are celebrating with us today?
We are launching a two-way partnership – which is the best kind of partnership. By working with the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand the Open University will be empowered to expand its services to the people of the UK. The Open Polytechnic believes that by working with the Open University it will be able to do more for the people of New Zealand. Furthermore, in this increasingly interconnected world we hope that what we do together may benefit people in other countries as well.
What are the services and benefits of which I speak? Let me speak first for the UK. In Britain the Open University has had a huge impact. Thirty-five years ago, when the idea was launched, there were 130,000 degree students in all UK universities put together. This year there are 160,000 in the Open University alone. Curiously, however, Britain has never created a large and successful open learning operation at the sub-degree level. That is the lacuna that we now wish to fill.
A key policy of the current UK government is what it calls the University for Industry. This is not a new provider of education and, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, it is not really a university and not mainly for industry. Its aim is to encourage the whole British education and training system better to serve those people who left school without proper qualifications or who find themselves struggling to adapt their skills to a changing world of work.
The Open University and the Open Polytechnic intend to respond to that encouragement by creating, jointly with the National Extension College, a new body that we are calling Open Opportunities. A key activity of this new body will be to offer in the UK, with whatever adaptation and development is necessary, some of the excellent courses and programmes of your Open Polytechnic. I do not imagine that the adaptation of these New Zealand programmes will be extensive because it has been part of the Open Polytechnic’s quality approach to map its courses onto the competencies required in the contemporary world and to remain fully attuned to international trends.
Shona Butterfield has described how this alliance will serve to the people of New Zealand. I said that in Britain we plan to create jointly an enterprise called Open Opportunities. Here in New Zealand the Open Polytechnic has for some time registered the trademark The Open University of New Zealand. You might say that the purpose of our alliance is to give effect to that concept and we at the UK Open University are proud to make two contributions to that endeavour.
The first is in the area of accreditation. Seven years ago the Open University was asked by the British government to continue the work of the Council for National Academic Awards (the CNAA) when that agency was wound up as part of the 1992 higher education reforms. Today Open University Validation Services validates and accredits taught degree programmes in fifty institutions and counts over 500 research doctoral students in 100 sponsoring institutions, many of them medical research laboratories. We believe, and Britain’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education supports our belief, that we have built further on the great traditions of the CNAA to create one of the world’s most credible accrediting bodies. We are proud to have been invited to accredit, under the Royal Charter of the Open University, the degree programmes of the Open Polytechnic.
I said earlier that we are looking to our alliance with the Open Polytechnic to expand dramatically the availability in the UK of quality open learning courses in vocational areas at sub-degree level. The obverse of that coin is that here in New Zealand we shall be helping the Open Polytechnic to expand the scope of its BA degree programme by contributing some of our own distance learning humanities courses.
We think that the Agreement we have signed today is the beginning of a very effective partnership between successful institutions in Commonwealth countries on opposite sides of the globe. Both Shona Butterfield and I have come here from the tenth anniversary forum of the Commonwealth of Learning that was held in Brunei Darussalam last week. Shona is a Governor of the Commonwealth of Learning. I was the chair of its Planning Committee where I first met a great New Zealander, Bill Renwick.
Both Shona and I are proud of the way that the Commonwealth of Learning has developed. Its basic concept is that instead of moving students around the world to courses in other countries you can move the courses to the students and thus enrich education and training for all. We believe that the Agreement we have just signed will be a splendid example of that principle and I thank you all for being here to launch it with us.