Open Eye - April 2001
VC's Column
NASDAQ shares down, Internet use up
In my remaining editorials before I leave for my new challenge as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Education I am reviewing the ‘four opens’ of the OU’s mission. Last month I wrote about the challenge of being open to ideas at a time when government policy tends to discourage innovation and make the UK’s universities more homogeneous. Today my subject is openness to methods.
The last eighteen months have been somewhat nerve-wracking for those who guide the development of the OU’s use of learning and teaching technologies. At present, with the NASDAQ index sliding and technology companies laying off thousands of people, our memory of the dot.com frenzy is in danger of fading. I recall with crystal clarity, however, the period in late 1999 when the pundits promised us that the Internet would sweep away all previous approaches to learning at a distance.
Despite a grudging wonderment at our success in serving very large numbers of students, the promoters of the new world of the web tended to dismiss the OU as ‘legacy distance learning’. One aggressive American dot.com, frustrated by my lukewarm response to the suggestion that the OU should throw in its lot with them, actually threatened to buy the University.
By March 2000 that particular dot.com was itself up for sale and assessments of the impact of the Internet on human life began to adopt a more sober tone. Meanwhile the OU was accumulating evidence of the Net’s impact on the behaviour of our students, which is the only evidence that really counts.
OU developments in the use of online technology through 2000 were dramatic. From being patronised as ‘legacy distance learning’ in 1999 we became, by the beginning of 2001, the world’s leading online university. In December 2000 we passed the figure of 100,000 regular OU students online and welcomed the 100,000th online teacher to our Learning Schools Programme.
More interesting than the absolute numbers are the ways in which OU students choose to use the Net. Some OU courses have excellent and exciting multi-media and web-based course materials which are highly appreciated. Nevertheless, the overwhelming volume of online working involves interaction about the course with other students and transactions with the University’s support services. Studying materials online is a minority sport and students tell us to send them the book by mail rather than download it to them as an electronic file.
One of the most popular online services is the facility for students to consult their academic records. Every week 35,000 OU students check their individual records in this way and there have been 109,000 first time users. One student found the service so reassuring that he checked his record over 100 times last year. Transactions that involve booking events where there is a choice of time and place also lend themselves ideally to the web. Students can now review online the full details and timings of residential schools and degree ceremonies and make their bookings. They seem to appreciate the immediate confirmation this provides.
Another service that is proving very popular is our Open Libr@ry. The OU library in Milton Keynes is undergoing a complete transformation from a resource aimed mainly at supporting academic staff in the work of course development to a service dedicated to helping students find documents relevant to their courses. This transformation is being received with enthusiasm. In 1999 OU students consulted some 60,000 articles online. In 2000 that figure rose to 176,000.
Especially popular is ROUTES (Resources for Open University Teachers and Students). This aims to make available, for each course, a set of quality-assured electronic documents and data that are kept up to date. So far there are 2,000 documents linked to over 100 courses. Students appreciate being able to go straight to relevant documents rather than having to grapple with all the ‘noise’ and irrelevancies produced by web searches.
But the killer application of the Net, not surprisingly, is person-to-person communication through computer conferencing. Every day hundreds of thousands of messages are exchanged between students and tutors in some 16,000 conferences. This phenomenon is creating a new sense of community among students and staff.
By being open to online methods the OU has eliminated two of the most tiresome distances in distance learning, distance from the library and distance from other students.