Questions: a Unifying Force
Open University courses take a life of their own for several reasons. First, they are developed by teams rather by by individuals, so many colleagues share the agony and the ecstasy of deciding how to help students come to grips with the subject. Second, OU courses have tangible existence through their learning materials – unlike ephemeral classroom lectures. Third, each course usually involves large numbers of students and associate lecturers, thus creating a broad community of people across the UK and Europe who have invested their intellectual energy in a shared experience.
This is especially true of our level one courses. Last month we broke a metaphorical bottle of champagne over the new DD100 An Introduction to the Social Sciences: Understanding Social Change. We also marked, with both sadness and pride, the passing of its predecessor, D103, which has been taken by 59,629 people since 1991. It’s interesting to recall that in 1963, when Harold Wilson launched the idea of the OU into our political discourse, there were only 130,000 students in all UK universities combined. Today there are more students than that in the OU alone.
DD100, with 10,100 students registered this year, has set an OU record for the largest number of students enrolled in a single course. Another course that has attracted almost as many applicants is T171, You, Your Computer and the Net. Because T171 is a new web-based course that could not draw on a large pool of existing associate lecturers we have capped enrollments at 8,500 and will offer another session in May.
Why have these courses proved so attractive? At first sight the they appear very different. T171 aims to give you the skills to use a computer confidently and also to understand how personal computers and the net developed. The goal of DD100 is to help you understand social change. The common element is, of course, understanding. People want to understand the world around them because that is what gives them greater confidence in their day-to-day lives. We live in a time of rapid change - partly driven by the new opportunities and approaches that computers make possible. It is therefore hardly surprising that a course on social change and a course on computing and the net are both very appealing.
I took T171 as a student last year in pilot form and I have just finished browsing through the first part of DD100. Both courses work by making you ask yourself questions. They make you doubt things that you took for granted. You come to understanding by approaching issues from several perspectives. I was interested to follow the different strands in the development of the personal computer in T171 and I enjoyed questioning my own identity in DD100. It’s easy to slip into thinking about the knowledge age as a society where everyone has to be given the right answers. Yet the challenge for universities is to alter our civilisation from one of answers to one that feels satisfaction, not anxiety, when doubt is established.
In this context I was struck by the explicit statement in the introduction to DD100 that it ‘seeks to maintain and extend the OU’s democratic educational mission: to reach and enthuse an enormously diverse student population; to insist that critical, informed, reflexive engagement with the direction of social change is not a matter for elites or professional social scientists alone.’
I find that statement particularly inspiring at a time when universities are sometimes enjoined to concentrate on the much more limited mission of transmitting knowledge to students for highly instrumental and utilitarian purposes. No one should ever suggest suggest that courses like DD100 are not useful. What could be a more practical contribution to the economy of the UK in the 21st century than to develop mature, autonomous adult learners who understand the forces changing the world they live in?
I enjoy the work of the Canadian political thinker John Ralston Saul. In the very last sentence of his magesterial book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West he deplores ‘the narrowing effect of a civilisation which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions.’ I like to think that the Open University is helping to unify thousands of people through questions.