Open Eye - April 2000
VC's Column
From the Wall to the Web
The Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989. Next month there is a conference in Milton Keynes to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the OU programmes in Central Europe and Russia that were launched when the Wall fell. How has the world changed as we look back a decade later and what impact has the OU had?
Division between East and West was the central fact of the Cold War period. The Wall symbolised our separation into two blocs operating with fundamentally different assumptions about economics and politics. Today our world is increasingly integrated by instantaneous multidirectional communication on the World Wide Web and economic and political assumptions are converging.
The crumbling of the Wall and the spreading of the Web accelerated a multi-track process of democratisation which has created attitudes very different from those of the Cold War years. There is the democratisation of finance. As barriers between countries disappear capital flows in ever increasing volume around the world. Individuals in all countries are freer to invest as they choose. Consumer markets create a democracy of money.
There is the democratisation of technology, a long-term trend that creates technologies that the individual can control. Trains allow us to travel in groups, cars let us drive ourselves. Cinemas select films for us, with television we choose our own viewing. Computers were once expensive machines that only big organisations could afford. Today individuals can own and use them.
Technology helps with the democratisation of information. It is harder for the powerful to control what ordinary people can know. Newspapers, radio and television increased our freedom to receive information. Today the Internet makes us all world-wide publishers.
These three processes of democratisation converge in the democratisation of higher education. The purpose of universities is to help people – all people – maintain an independent understanding of their world. Today help in understanding the world can come from many sources but most, such as governments and the media, cannot be independent of commercial and political interests. The individualistic and disinterested nature of the true university is unique.
Understanding means going beyond information and knowledge. It means knowledge acquired with the sense of responsibility for how it comes to be known that can make it the foundation for action. Universities help people to understand a world that includes the local community, the nation and the earth as a whole. In a changing world our understanding needs to be constantly renewed.
When the Berlin Wall fell life changed dramatically for the people of Central Europe so some of them went looking for help in understanding their new world. A group of Hungarian leaders concluded that the mission, methods and materials of the Open University would be of the greatest assistance and so began a historic collaborative venture. In the space of only a few years, in the early 1990s, the OU developed partnerships in Hungary, Slovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic in order to make available, in the local languages, the OU Business School’s certificate and diploma programmes for junior and middle managers. The financial support of the government’s Know-How Fund was invaluable in getting things started, as was the enthusiastic moral support of the British embassies in the region.
Ten years on these programmes are helping large numbers of people both to understand their new world and to operate successfully within it. Over the decade of the 1990s the OU recorded some 66,000 student-courses in these partnerships and there are over 10,000 registrations this year. I have heard directly from many students whose lives have benefited immensely from these OU courses and the staff of our partner organisations have adopted OU teaching methods with great enthusiasm. The performance of some of the associate lecturers in the region ranks with the very best OU practice in the rest of the world.
An emerging democracy cannot achieve success simply by adopting the hardware of elections and markets. It also requires the operating system of a civil society and the software of open, transparent and uncorrupt practices. Our partners say that the OU’s values, mission and methods are an inspiring manifestation of the kind of democratic society they want to build. That’s why we celebrate ten years of OU activity in the former Soviet bloc with such pride.