In a recent speech Secretary of State David Blunkett announced two initiatives: the creation of a Foundation Degree and a venture called e-universities. Both ideas are of great interest to the OU.
One reason so many Americans have experience of higher education is that their community colleges offer Associate Degrees: two year qualifications that can lead either to employment or on to a four-year Bachelor’s Degree. Only half the Americans who enter higher education get a Bachelor’s degree within five years but the other half, whom we in the UK would call drop-outs, clearly gain valuable experience. Each year of higher education adds, on average, 16% to a person’s salary. Some exposure to higher education also helps break down social barriers by providing a shared experience and demystifying universities. In the UK census the question about higher education simply asks whether you have a degree, whereas censuses in North America allow you to indicate that you did some university study even if you did not get a full degree. The common British view that university is wasted on people who do not complete full degrees is shortsighted.
I welcome the Foundation Degree because it will help to break down this ‘honours-degree-or-nothing’ view of university education. It will also give us the opportunity to combine training and education in new ways. For over a year the OU has been in discussion with the major further education colleges about designing a qualification which would combine vocational work and academic study in more effective ways. The Foundation Degree seems designed to do just that. It will be a 240 point award (the equivalent of two years of full-time study) aimed primarily at part-time students in employment. The curriculum will be vocational, will build up key skills and will emphasise work experience. The government hopes that it will quickly become an attractive qualification to employers and that English universities will define clear routes from the Foundation Degree into the the third (final) year of Honours Degree programs. People will then have a choice of options.
The OU is now designing a suite of Foundation Degrees that can be offered either through validation or through supported open learning. We are linking up with employers and national training organisations to ensure that these awards target major training needs in a defined manner.
Mr Blunkett’s announcement of a collaborative venture between universities and private sector partners, under the working title e-universities, is also very interesting – not least because the working title e-university is being used by the Higher Education Funding Council for England which is setting the project up. This ambiguity between the singular and the plural may only have been a communication error between the funding council and the government but it does go to the heart of the difficulty of establishing such a venture.
E-universities imply a body that brings together the electronic offerings of a range of universities and coordinates a global marketing effort than no institution could afford by itself. So far the history of such ventures is not encouraging. The California Virtual University, for example, closed down last year because its major stakeholder universities did not feel that it was adding value. The Western Governors University continues to develop but looks less like a consortium and more like a separate institution than it did in the early days.
E-university implies a more structured approach with a coherent curriculum, common academic regulations and easy progression for students between the courses from different suppliers. The difficulty here is that each contributing university is usually extremely reluctant to relinquish much control over just those areas, simply because they relate directly to its degree-awarding powers. To the extent that some versions of the e-university involve spreading the brand of the best known universities over those that are not household names the problem will be exacerbated.
I am honoured to have been invited to be a special advisor to the e-university steering group and will try to give it the benefit of OU experience. With 90,000 OU students online from home and 30,000 students studying OU courses outside the UK the Open University is already Britain’s global e-university. The Secretary of State’s welcome announcement encourages us to develop that role even more strongly.