Open Eye - May 2001
VC's Column
The Global University: Fact or Fantasy?
In the remaining editorials before I take up my new challenge as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Education I am reflecting on the ‘four opens’ of the OU’s mission: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. Last month I addressed the challenge of riding the roller coaster of new technology in order to be open to methods. Today I look at openness to places.
Our founders were determined that adults living anywhere in the United Kingdom should be able to study with the Open University. Lord Perry, the first vice-chancellor, told his colleagues to design the teaching system to serve the keeper of a lighthouse off the Scottish coast.
People did enrol with the OU from all parts of the UK and today some of the highest concentrations of students, pro-rata to population, are in outlying regions such as Shetland. Although automation quickly reduced the clientele of lighthouse keepers, people who began OU study in the UK and then moved overseas soon posed a new challenge to the policy of openness to places.
Arrangements were made to serve these mobile students and today, during the main examination session in October, OU exams are administered in over a hundred countries. Many are for single individuals, but over the years significant concentrations of OU students developed in some international cities. In the mid-1980s the University began providing special arrangements for its many students in Brussels.
In 1990 our criteria for admission were expanded to include all adult residents of the European Union. Today the 6,000 students in continental western Europe and the 3,000 students in Ireland make a splendid contribution to the OU’s cultural and intellectual diversity. Between them they have 100 countries of birth and 60 different first languages. At the same time, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the University began teaching management, in the local language, in Hungary, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These programmes continue to serve some 10,000 students today and may be the most significant contribution that any western university has made to higher education in these countries.
The 30,000 people now studying OU courses outside the UK are one indicator of the success our policy of openness to places. Even more important has been the steady diffusion, throughout the world, of Open University methods, philosophy and values. In the first twenty years of our existence OU people helped directly in the establishment of many of the forty open universities that now operate in other countries. Some of them, such as India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) with its 700,000 students, have grown much bigger than the OU.
Abdul Kahn, the former Vice-Chancellor of IGNOU, has also just been appointed to UNESCO, as Assistant Director-General for Communications and Information. This UN body clearly thinks that the ideas underpinning open universities answer the educational challenges of the 21st century.
Our recent overseas partnerships reflect the view that exporting OU values and learning methods (i.e. supported open learning) can often be a more helpful contribution than taking our courses and materials to another jurisdiction. Although the UK operates the pattern of bachelors, masters and doctors degrees that is becoming the world standard, the internal structures and content of UK taught degrees travel less well than more user-friendly American-style programmes.
The creation of the United States Open University (USOU), which is adapting OU courses for some programmes and recasting American programmes in a supported open learning format for others, is an important development. American public universities seem to have difficulty scaling up their distance learning programmes, thus leaving the field to the for-profit institutions. By combining the scaleable methodology of supported open learning with the values of public education USOU will make a unique contribution.
In places such as the Arab world the OU’s ability to provide an accreditation system alongside distance learning courses and programmes gives us a unique advantage.
Various institutions now claim to be global universities. Most of these claims are fantasies. The Net may ‘deliver’ courses worldwide but most of the courses it carries fail to address the world’s cultural and intellectual diversity. Creating a network of open universities that share a common methodology but offer courses designed for local conditions is a better approach.