STM Master Class
Oxford, 11 September 2000
‘Authors author, Publishers publish and Educators educate’
After dinner remarks
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
It is a pleasure to be with you this evening. In the programme this is billed as a keynote speech, which sounds terribly grand. Fortunately Richard Balkwill made it clear that ten to fifteen minutes would be a good time to run for. That reassures me that you are all very sensible people. You have worked hard all day on slippery concepts like change, markets and customers and you do not want your digestion challenged at the end of the date.
So I will speak for 12 minutes. That is the time after which, according to research done long ago, most people listening to speakers will drift off into the fantasy of their choice. I wouldn’t want to interfere with those.
Please time me if you want to. Each year I give an address to the annual conference of the regional representatives of our 7,200 Open University associate lecturers. The tradition is that they run a sweepstake on how long I will speak. People put their guesses in the hat before I start and the person with the nearest estimate takes the pot. That allows me to play all sorts of games. Quite soon into the talk I start to begin every paragraph with ‘and finally’ just to keep up the suspense. I won’t play such games with you so when I say ‘and finally’ I will mean it.
Even an after dinner speech should have a focus, so I have given myself the title Authors author, Publishers publish, and Educators educate. In this time of change in your business and mine that may seem a perverse title. After all, isn’t it a feature of today’s world that everyone is getting into everyone else’s business. Technology and the net allow authors to be their own publishers. Publishers are piling into education. Educators are devoting more attention to tangible products derived from their teaching activities as well as their research activities.
Some of you might say that the Open University is a prime example of mixing and confusing roles. We are a major educator, the largest single education and training provider in the UK, with 180,000 students in degree programmes and another 100,000 studying materials that do not carry assessment. 30,000 of the people studying our courses are overseas.
We are also a major publisher. Last time I heard the figure it was 50,000 new pages of original text every year, plus a growing amount delivered on CD-ROM and online, which sounds a lot to me. We despatch around 50 tons of printed material to our students every week – although that does include administrative material.
The OU is also an author because our concept of the course team means that authoring is a collective process and, indeed, the copyright is vested in the University, not in the individual members of the team.
But if you dig a bit deeper you’ll find that the roles, while mixed, are not confused. We believe in horses for courses and in getting things done by those who do them best. Some of you will have had the experience of co-publishing books with the OU. That’s been a very important development during my decade as Vice-Chancellor and it’s a nice example of creating a win-win situation. We’re very good at producing good material. Indeed, we’re actually good at organising the whole production process right through to printing, but we don’t claim expertise in marketing books – as opposed to marketing education.
You are very good at marketing and also good at organising the production process. Co-publishing consists of sharing the total task, cutting it in two somewhere along the continuum from writing to marketing, in ways that produce a better outcome than either of us could achieve separately. I’m most grateful to those who work with us in this way – and for the large advances you pay us.
By greatly expanding the market for the product you allow us to give our students material with much higher production values than we could afford on our own. I understand that our co-publishers sell some £3 million of OU-created books worldwide so it’s a win-win proposition.
Of course, we don’t author all our own material. I occasionally meet authors in the States who first heard of the OU when there was suddenly a single order for many thousands of copies of their book. Right now I have one course running which is enrolling about 12,000 students every year. I imagine that we have made the authors of the two set books in that course, not to mention their publishers, very happy. That’s because in many cases we buy the books and give them to the students.
Also OU students buy their set books through some 300 bookshops around the UK, so we are pushing academic books into communities outside university cities. Our students spend more than £2m on publishers’ books that we set for our courses. Thank you for giving me dinner this evening.
The next stage in our relationship with publishers, which I begin to see happening, is intermediate between these two cases. In the first case I mentioned we produce the material and you decide to co-publish it. In the second you produce a book and we decide to adopt it. The intermediate approach is for us to talk before either of us starts in order to see how what we want to create, and what you might be able to put together from existing or readily commissionable material can be made to coincide.
We are exploring this approach at our new sister institution, the United States Open University, which, being a greenfield site, has the chance to do things differently. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we established it.
So our roles may become even more intermingled and synergistic. However, for me it is a corollary, rather than a contradiction, that this calls for an even greater respect of each player for the special competence of the other. Authors author, publishers publish and educators educate.
Let me explain what I mean by turning from the books we know and love to the new media of the net. In this arena it has been a fascinating year for all of us. At the end of last year the OU had educational dot.coms buzzing around us like flies round cattle in summer. Last December one particularly aggressive dot.com threatened to buy the Open University outright if we would not play ball. In April the dot.com was redoing it’s business plan for the nth time and seeking a buyer.
It’s funny now but at the height of the dot.com frenzy I found hard not to doubt some of my basic business assumptions. Were we facing world in which anything that was not 100% online would wither and die? Were we about to see the end of university campuses? Was this the end of all institutions other than web portals? Was this the end of government as we know it?
We can now see that the death of all these things, like the death of Mark Twain, was greatly exaggerated. But we must not make the common mistake of underestimating the degree of change in the longer term just because Armageddon has been postponed in the shorter term.
The Open University is, as far as I am aware, the world’s largest e-university. We have some 100,000 students using online technology from home in their OU studies and another 75,000 schoolteachers, also online, who are learning to use computers in teaching their subjects through our Learning Schools programme. I’m not aware of any institution, anywhere, that has our level of experience in e-learning at scale.
What have we learned? We’ve learned – and it’s obvious when you think about it – that the strength of online technology is communication between people. Our students are exchanging tens of thousands of messages a day with each other and with their tutors. They are less interested in having learning material pushed at them.
Yet that is the approach many institutions are taking. My colleague John Naughton, author of the best seller A Brief History of the Future; the Origins of the Internet, calls this shovelware which sums it up nicely.
Our students love to check their student records on the web and use it to reserve courses and residential schools. They do so in their thousands. But when it comes to learning materials they still like things they can drop on the floor. I don’t just mean books but also CD-ROMs. We’ve made some hugely successful CD-ROMs in subjects ranging from geology to history that students love. They wouldn’t work well on the web because most of our students don’t have ADSL lines and Silicon Graphics workstations at home.
But even on an ordinary computer the CD-ROM can sing and dance and provoke some very powerful learning.
My final point is that having started into our use of e-technologies in a holistic way, we are now distinguishing the functions more sharply. We want to co-publish CD-ROMs in order to tap into your marketing expertise. I’m glad to say there is a lot of interest. We are realising once again that authoring and educating are not the same thing. Realising that we are getting skilled at doing each of them well in the world of the web.
So let me leave it there and revisit these issues in discussion if you have the taste for it. We are all caught up in a fascinating world of change and newness and we need to discuss it to understand it.
Thank you.