Open Eye - May 2000
VC's Column
Virtual ceremonies - Real communities
This year’s degree ceremonies began with the OU’s – and the world’s – first virtual degree ceremony. It marked the graduation of the first cohort to complete our Master’s degree in Open and Distance Education in which all communication is online and students are located around the world. Making the graduates come together physically to receive their degrees seemed wrong so we organised a ceremony on the web. Coincidentally, one of our honorary graduates, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, found himself unable to attend any of our traditional ceremonies. Honouring him in a ceremony on the web seemed rather appropriate so the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute designed and engineered a virtual ceremony.
It was a strange sensation to face an empty hall - in full academic dress - knowing that around the world graduates and their guests were with us on the web. Tim Berners-Lee spoke to us from a studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and appeared on video in the corner of each participant’s computer screen. For the presentation of the graduates the presiding the OU officers appeared on the video while the image of each graduate’s degree certificate appeared at centre screen. I normally talk to all graduating students and these conversations were carried as audio on the web. Naturally I asked several graduates whether they felt that interacting with their tutors and fellow students on the net had limited their ability to make friends. All denied that it had, some waxing eloquent about the friendships and contacts they had made.
The day after this virtual degree ceremony we held our first real degree day of the season in Birmingham’s magnificent symphony hall with the OU’s Chancellor, Betty Boothroyd, presiding. She has a wonderful rapport with the graduates and the atmosphere was emotional as the graduates were applauded by hundreds of relatives, friends and guests. At the same moment my colleagues were holding a similar ceremony in Torquay and since then I have presided at degree days in Harrogate, Cheltenham and Portsmouth. Twenty-one ceremonies are still to come and those events, in Edinburgh, Brighton, Cardiff, Dublin, Derby, London, Belfast, Ely, Manchester, Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Singapore and Croydon, will enable most of the 14,000 OU students who graduated this year to be presented for their degrees in person.
After almost every one of these events the Chancellor and I receive touching letters from graduates thanking us in general for the opportunity that the OU has given them and in particular for the experience of the degree ceremony. Some tell me what they would have said, had I given them longer to think, in response to the question or comment that I put to them on stage. It is natural that students who have often had to work in isolation, trading on the goodwill of their families and friends to give them the time and space that they needed, should enjoy celebrating the successful outcome of their studies as a community.
Although OU study does involve hours of studying alone I am struck by how many graduates report that the OU gave them more support and a greater sense of being part of a learning community than being taught in a traditional classroom. As a member of the OU’s winning team in the 1999 University Challenge put it : "It was easier to study with the OU because, contrary to what many people believe, you get much better support with their system of learning".
Continuing to achieve an effective blend of the real and the virtual is the central challenge for the OU as it leads higher education into the modern world of e-learning. Some of the more extreme enthusiasts believe that the net’s ability to deliver information directly to individuals will eliminate students’ needs for intermediaries like the OU’s tutors and take away their desire to be part of a learning community. However, as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, authors with impeccable technological credentials, put it in their recent book The Social Life of Information: "It can be easy for the logic of information to push aside the more practical logic of humanity". The OU will strive to ensure that the development of its learning system continues to reflect the practical logic of humanity.