Open Eye - August 2000
VC's Column
Global or multi-national?
In early July two OU degree ceremonies took place in Singapore when 569 new graduates were presented. Discussions with the Singapore authorities about an OU degree program only began in 1992 so its subsequent growth, to nearly 6,000 students today, is remarkable. I was pleased that Patricia Cowling, past chair of the Association of Open University Graduates (AOUG), was on hand to help her Singapore colleagues develop an alumni programme.
I continued east across the Pacific to Denver, Colorado, to a meeting of the Board of Governance of the US Open University. That too was a very encouraging event. Our US colleagues are now fully in charge, and having successfully completed a small pilot session we shall offer a larger number of courses in the autumn session and look forward to welcoming the first regular cohort of students. Already the interactions between the OU and the USOU are enriching both sides.
It is vital that both universities share a common value system rooted in the four ‘opens’ of our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther: open to people, open to places, open to methods and open to ideas. The challenge is to interpret these values appropriately in each context. For the OU the elimination of academic prerequisites for undergraduate admission is the most significant measure of its openness. In the USA, however, open entry to degree study was introduced by the community colleges long ago. For that reason the USOU decided to start its programmes where those of the community colleges leave off, so concentrating its offerings on the last two years of undergraduate degrees. It will show openness by offering unrivalled credit transfer, joint admission and partnership arrangements to the big community colleges. We want to help the 30% of adult Americans who have unfinished degrees.
The USOU board has added two more ‘opens’ to the Crowther list : open as to time, and open to the world. This has made the OU think. Already the 24-hour profile of connection times of the 90,000 students who work with the OU online from home this year shows that Open University study does not respect the working evening, still less the working day. That is why hours of service from our UK offices are gradually being extended.
Open as to the world is an even more interesting challenge. Although there are 30,000 people studying OU courses outside the UK we actually do rather little, except in the European Union, to encourage communication and working across national borders. In this respect the presence of the AOUG in Singapore was a welcome development. Our USOU colleagues, however, assumed from the start that their students would enjoy being in contact with OU students in other countries. So we are raising our sights. At a time when there is plenty of loose talk about global universities offering a standard product around the world I believe that the really exciting idea is the multi-national university.
The concept would be that of an open university group. Courses and programmes would be conceived for its national student body by the local open university of the group, sharing a sufficiently common framework for students to work together on projects across borders. They could also take courses from other open universities in the group if they wanted a different academic perspective and style. Maybe this will move us toward is an ‘open source courseware’ movement in the spirit of the open source software movement that has attracted such an enthusiastic following. This would have the added advantage of countering the disturbing and anti-academic trend to make all knowledge proprietary.
From Denver I flew further east to speak at a meeting of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in Toronto. CASE is a professional society for university staff in the advancement, alumni, development and fund-raising functions. The OU’s Kitty Chisholm chairs CASE’s European council and it was good to see her giving an international profile to the OU’s considerable experience of using the internet in development functions.
Another flight east made it a trip around the world. I had spent more than forty hours in the air yet my round-the-world ticket cost only three times as much as a return trip to Germany the following week which involved flying for less than four hours. Strange world !