SYLLABUS CONFERENCE

Sonoma, California

26 July 1998

ARE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITIES REAL?

or

How can we scale IT up? Using Knowledge Media at the Open University

by

Sir John Daniel

Vice-Chancellor, The Open University

It is a pleasure to be with you today. Ever since I gave the keynote address at the AAHE conference last year stirring up American academe with provocative speeches has become a stimulating sideline to my day job.

In Britain the post of university chancellor is ceremonial and unremunerated.

The Open University is privileged to have Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons, as its Chancellor.

If you have seen her on television trying to bring 'Order, order' to our unruly mob of British parliamentarians you will understand that she expects me to run the Open University.

She does preside, with great style, at some of our twenty commencement ceremonies and has a wonderful rapport with our students.

So in Britain you don't make jokes about Chancellors - but Vice-Chancellors are fair game.

What is the difference, people ask, between a vice-chancellor and a supermarket trolley? The answer, of course, is that a supermarket trolley has a mind of its own.

What is the difference, you may ask, between a campus president and a supermarket trolley? You've guessed it, you can't push a campus president around.

But what is the difference between the Dean of a business school and a supermarket trolley? You can get more food and drink into a Dean of Business.

But enough of this levity. I was invited to AAHE last year because I had written a book about technology in higher education.

It's title is Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education and I have been flattered by the enthusiasm with which it has been received here in the United States - particularly here in California and within CSU.

Much of my provocation to you today derives from the themes in the book. But there will be new emphases.

Things have moved on since last year. As your former Ambassador to Britain, Admiral Crowe, used to say: "the United States will always do the right thing, after having exhausted all other possibilities".

My aim is to encourage you to exhaust those other possibilities as fast as you can.

I aim to convince you of six propositions.

They start with the obvious but may pose you increasing difficulty thereafter. I shall have to be more and more seductive as I lead you upstairs.

Proposition one is that new technologies may change higher education

Proposition two is that new technologies are always superseded by newer technologies.

The third proposition is that most use of technology in universities lacks clear institutional aims.

Proposition four is that the institutional aims should be to cut costs, leverage learning and transform thinking

Proposition five is that such aims require the establishment of learning systems.

And the final proposition is that the creation of learning systems requires institutional technology strategies.

Let's unpack those statements one by one.

My first proposition, that new technologies may change higher education, is no surprise. You read the hyperbole everywhere. Campuses will disappear, business corporations will take over the function of universities, thousands of faculty will lose their jobs.

Maybe, but take a valium and consider two elements of reality.

First, students have gathered together on campuses since 1088 when the University of Bologna was founded.

Over the 910 intervening years students have attended lectures and libraries, taken examinations, made friends, fallen in love, got drunk, fallen into bed, fought with the townspeople and generally learned about life.

The University of Oxford was founded by rowdy Engish students who were thrown out of the University of Paris 800 years ago.

I made the reverse journey, from undergraduate at Oxford to doctoral student at Paris. I was there in 1968 when the University of Paris was a battlefield again, though I took great care not to get thrown out of the University in the final stages of my doctoral research.

Never underestimate history. Rumours of the death of the campus are exaggerated. Campuses provide a protected environment where young people can find out about life, love, and learning while sparing the rest of the community the sight of these sometimes unsightly processes.

Most campuses will not disappear. But campus study will be a decreasing proportion of a growing higher education enterprise. More and more people are combining work and study in the community.

This trend is expressed eloquently in the inspiring strategic document called Cornerstones that has been produced here at California State University.

Another theme of Cornerstones is that technology is a cornerstone. That is right. But....

The second lesson of history is that the impact of new technology on education has always been exaggerated.

Back in 1841 one Josiah Bumstead proclaimed that the inventor or introducer of the blackboard deserved to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.

Since then each new technology: radio, film, television, programmed learning, computing has been hailed as the harbinger of a revolution in education and compared in importance to the printing press.

But the revolution has not happened. Will today's new technologies be any different?

Perhaps. Today's technologies emerge from the convergence of computing and telecommunications. Mix in the learning sciences and we may have something qualitatively different from previous media.

There's a term for this convergence of information and communication technologies with cognitive science: the knowledge media.

It's a better term than multi-media or the information superhighway, because it reminds us that these technologies mediate knowledge in new ways.

Universities are aware of that. Faculty sense, almost instinctively, that this time it's different. They suspect that the knowledge media may have radical implications for academic work

That's because the knowledge media are about the capturing, storing, imparting, sharing, accessing, creating, combining, transforming and synthesising of knowledge.

The knowledge media are not just a technical format, such as CD-ROM or computer conferencing, but the whole presentational style, the user interface, the accessibility, the interactivity.

For our ability to transmit and manipulate symbols - which is the core function of universities - the knowledge media are such a quantitative advance that they may herald a qualitative change.

Complacency is not in order. This is going to change universities.

So to my second proposition: technology changes too, and our perceptions of the role of different technologies evolve quickly.

The assumptions that American universities make about teaching technologies have changed sharply in just the last two years. Two years ago videoconferencing was all the rage.

Conferences about it attracted thousands of people and distance learning, meaning videoconferencing, was the flavour of the year.

Two years on videoconferencing is somewhat passé. Fortunately, just as presidents and provosts began to be put off by the cost and complexity of remote classroom technology, faculty have voted with their fingers for a new fad.

In Kenneth Grahame's fable, Wind in the Willows, Toad of Toad Hall instantly forgot his passion for his horsedrawn house trailer when a new technology, the motor car, sounded its horn and roared past, forcing him into the ditch.

"Poop, poop" murmured Toad as he picked himself up and watched the automobile roar off into the distance. "Click, click" murmurs today's faculty member exploring the marvels of the World Wide Web with mouse in hand.

This year distributed learning, meaning Web-based teaching, is the flavour of the year.

Where will we be in two more years? What will distance learning mean then?

Mountaineers say they climb mountains 'because they are there'. Do we engage with new technology simply because it is there? Or do we have a deeper purpose?

Proposition 3

That brings us to proposition three. Most use of technology in universities lacks clear institutional aims. That wasn't always the case.

Back at the turn of this century the president of the University of Wisconsin urged his colleagues to make the boundaries of the campus the boundaries of the state and important developments followed.

Yet today I hear no comparable vision.

In the absence of clear institutional purposes faculty have their individual purposes.

These range from innocent curiosity through megalomania to a desire to decrease teaching load.

Innocent curiosity is fine and important. If the knowledge media really are going to transform the relationship between people and knowledge then the more faculty know about them the better.

Megalomania is also pretty innocent. Most people who go into the academic trade have traces of megalomania - I certainly own up to that - so media that carry a faculty member's message and image to a large audience are attractive.

At the Open University we have no difficulty getting the most distinguished international academics to take part in our broadcast TV programmes because they know they will reach a worldwide audience of millions.

Today the Web gives us all the chance to present our lecture notes and view foils to an expectant world.

The problem, of course, is that most academics are not yet html or xml programmers, so we have what Tony Bates, of the University of British Columbia, calls the Lone Ranger and Tonto approach to Web-based teaching.

The Lone Rangers are the faculty members who think the world would be a better place if their lecture notes were instantly accessible.

The Tontos are the graduate students who have learned Web programming and can load up this timeless academic material for public display.

But criticism is easy. What aims should institutions have for technology-based teaching?

That is my fourth proposition: the key aims should be to cut costs, to leverage learning and to transform thinking. A quick word about each.

In other fields of human endeavour the key contribution of technology is to give higher quality at lower cost. Universities should adopt that goal.

America is a rich country. Much better that you spend your surplus cash on overpriced universities than on drink and drugs. But even in America, an industry whose costs increase by more than inflation year in, year out is headed for trouble.

Elsewhere in the world cost is a crucial issue.

Around the globe we need one large new university to open every week just to keep participation rates in higher education constant. Most of the world can't afford the campus model we know and love. A new approach is needed to avert a crisis.

Leverage Learning

The second institutional aim should be leveraging learning. We talk about technology-based teaching - and putting our view foils on the Web is an elementary attempt to do that. But our real purpose should be technology-based learning.

Moving the focus to learning, rather than teaching, is the key to success in the new era. But it's a big paradigm shift, particularly in the United States where classroom teaching is still king.

You must listen to your prophets like Professor Jack Wilson at Rensselaer. He puts the issue starkly: (I quote)

"The current teaching/learning paradigm is one where the faculty are expected to work very hard (preparing for class and lecturing) while the student sits back and listens. I want to reverse that dynamic."

As Jack Wilson says, the times demand the reorganisation of the teaching and learning process. They require students to demonstrate their learning rather than faculty to dazzle with their teaching. They require us to focus on ends, not means.

Behind all this the deeper purpose is to transform thinking.

The key mission of universities is the academic mode of thinking, which, unlike the ideological mode of thinking, starts from evidence and then reasons and argues its way to hypotheses that it can test.

Put another way, the core purpose of the university is to inculcate in its students an attitude of systematic scepticism. That is why true universities will always be safe from take-over by commercial interests.

Systematic scepticism and the academic mode of thinking make corporations and political bodies nervous, although individual business people and politicians may give heroic individual support to these ideals.

If universities feel vulnerable today, it is because they often renege on their mission to transform thinking and are content merely to transmit standard skills and accepted orthodoxy to the next generation. Business can probably do that better.

That leads to my fifth proposition. Those aims require learning systems.

In the traditional campus model individual faculty are given solo responsibility for teaching.

Each has the latitude to plan the curriculum, organise the learning environment, instruct the course and assess the students' achievement. It is a robust model which does not require much organisation on the part of the university.

At its best students are inspired, at its worst they are alienated. Quality is variable and there is little scope for creating economies of scale by increasing quantity.

The times call for a new model which I call the learning system.

Instead of giving individual faculty the responsibility for teaching the university must give the responsibility for student learning to the collectivity of faculty, staff and students.

This is a radical change - but it has already occurred in some places and the evidence of its success is there for all to see.

The best examples of learning systems, and the most important development in higher education in our lifetimes, are the mega-universities.

These are the large open universities that exist in eleven countries of the world. Each has over 100,000 students and they enrol three million students between them. They address the crises of access, cost and flexibility in a telling fashion.

I shall sketch this extraordinary story through the example of the Open University.

Today the Open University is a learning system which successfully combines scale, access, quality and knowledge.

Through its success at combining these key ingredients it has acquired unparalleled expertise in learning.

Scale means 160,000 students in degree credit programs, of which some 1,400 at doctoral level, 30,000 graduate students and over 100,000 undergraduates. And almost another 100,000 people engaged in non-credit and vocational study.

Access means a flexible learning system that has been consistently successful in taking people with weak educational backgrounds through to degree completion. The focus is on outcomes, not processes - but that requires good processes.

Quality means that in national assessments of teaching quality the Open University ranks 10th out of 101 UK universities for the excellence of its programmes.

Our teacher training programme, on which we are working with CSU, is the only teacher training programme that has ever won the Queen's Anniversary Prize, the UK's top award for a university programme.

Knowledge means that, by bringing teams of faculty and specialists together for each course, the academic paradigms are constantly driven forward. I cannot stress too strongly the importance of the team approach.

Universities use the team approach naturally in research. But it's also the key to creating a successful and intellectually exciting learning system.

And that's a general point. Don't think of technology as devices with screens and coloured lights that plug into the wall. Technology means rules, systems, approaches to problems and ways of organising things.

For the learning revolution those process technologies are more important than any devices. The key technology in this category is very simple - it is the approach we call division of labor.

Putting it more directly, the success of the OU rests on four pillars.

First, well-designed multiple media teaching materials;

Teams of our central faculty and staff invest intense intellectual effort and impressive resource into the creation of top quality course materials.

The second key to success is personal academic support to each student;

Here we see division of labour, because the direct support to our students is given by the OU's 7,000 part-time tutors, most of whom are full-time faculty at other universities.

The third key to success is efficient logistics and administration - which is the task of other groups of staff;

and finally, all this is rooted in the intellectual vitality of faculty who also conduct research.

Division of labor may sound mechanistic, but let me assure you that the Open University is highly charged with idealism - much more so than any other university I've worked in.

The OU's inaugural ceremony was held in 1969, in the week that the Apollo astronauts returned from the first landing on the moon.

It was a time when everything seemed possible. The first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, declared that the aims of this new University were to be ‘open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and, finally, open as to ideas’.

The University began operations in 1971 with a first cohort of 25,000 students and a generation later it can claim impressive success in achieving the objectives set by its founders.

Open to people

In order to be open to people the Open University's most radical step was to remove all academic pre-requisites for entry.

Each year those who came in without the normal entry requirements of other British universities account for one-third of the new graduates of the Open University. This shows that with a proper learning system, access to success in higher education can be greatly expanded.

And OU degrees are ranked among the very best. We have achieved quality without exclusiveness. That is a revolution.

Open to places

In following its mission to be open as to places the Open University has become an international institution. More than 25,000 students are today taking Open University courses outside the UK.

The largest concentrations are in the rest of the European Union, the former Soviet bloc (where management courses are available in six local languages), Hong Kong and Singapore. There are growing programmes in Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Africa, and India.

This year the Open University has created a new institution, the Open University of the United States to help progress partnerships with American universities. They include an exciting link with the California State University. The Middle States Commission has begun taking the OU of the US through the accreditation process.

In its overseas operations the Open University has always insisted on reproducing the personal tutorial support for each student that it provides in the UK.

Today electronic mail and computer conferencing, may provide alternative ways of providing local support - but the jury is still out on whether they can be made to suit all tastes. We proceed cautiously.

Openness to methods has caused the OU's use of media and technology steadily to evolve. The TV programmes broadcast on the terrestrial analog channel BBC2 are still the most visible expression of the Open University's openness to methods to the general public.

In 1998 these broadcasts amounted to 800 hours of transmission time. Right now the series Quantum Leaps, which accompanies our level one science course, is attracting an audience of over one million on Friday evenings,

Over the years, as new new media have appeared, such as video cassette recorders and personal computers, the OU has integrated them into its strategy.

Today a growing number of Open University courses require students to have access to a computer at home. This year over 40,000 of these students are networked from home and they exchange around 200,000 messages every day.

24 hours a day, seven days a week, traffic on the OU net is busy.

Open to ideas

Openness to ideas is the raison d’être of any university. The Open University has fulfilled this idea through a commitment to research and through its practice of developing courses in teams.

The course team gives the Open University's courses greater quality and intellectual vitality than you usually get in distance teaching - or in classroom teaching for that matter. My founding predecessor, Lord Perry, argues that the course team is the most important and fundamental of all the OU's innovations.

All faculties of the University house research of international calibre. A notable example is the Interplanetary Sciences Research Unit, which is Europe's major centre for investigating the possibility of life on Mars.

This commitment to research partly explains why the OU ranks 10th for teaching quality and is part of the elite group of British universities that have most of their programs rated as 'excellent'. This includes subjects like Music, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, where distance education would not appear to enjoy a natural advantage.

Using that illustration of a successful academic learning system let me return to my final proposition.

The key lesson that you should derive from the story of the Open University is that we need university-wide technology strategies. Inviting individual faculty and departments do their own thing in the usual way will not deliver the goods.

Why not? Because a laisser-faire approach is likely to increase costs and create confusion among students.

Most universities now admit the need to increase learning productivity and technology can raise productivity. But the first application of technology has to be the re-organisation of the teaching-learning process.

Taking a university-wide approach to the modernisation of the teaching and learning process is a more important technological change than asking the IT centre to choose the perfect computing platform and network facility and impose it on everyone.

Let's take an example. I presume you agree that, except in some highly specialised areas like computer aided-design, undergraduate computer labs. are yesterday's answer.

Faculty no longer put up with sharing workstations - why should students? But once students have their own laptops you owe it to them to maximise their usefulness.

That means organising network access from on and off campus - remembering that wireless technology may soon take over. It means creating some commonality between the computing environments that students will meet as they progress from course to course.

These are not simple issues. At the Open University we have already gone through several generations of computer conferencing software.

To discover the best systems for students, course teams must have latitude to try new ones. But there must be a pan-university mechanism to compare results and generalise the best solutions as each technology becomes routine.

The University itself has to become a learning organisation. Technology transfer across the university becomes a vital process.

This strategic approach is also essential to carry the students. They are, in the mass, a conservative lot who are sceptical of new approaches.

Listening to lectures is less work - and requires less initiative - than participating in a team on a studio course or working through distance learning materials. So a university-wide approach to selling the new methods to students is helpful.

In my book I summarise the experience of business and industry with the technology adoption life cycle to suggest how technology-based teaching can be made attractive to the mass of students.

The purpose of using technology in teaching is to give better value to students. Choices must be pragmatic because technologies change rapidly.

A commitment to a particular technology for its own sake is unlikely to yield sustainable competitive advantage. So we must assess the potential of technology in a holistic manner. A key area of assessment is distance education.

There are two very different traditions of distance learning and America is in rapid transit between them. Until recently you took distance education to mean remote classroom teaching - audio- or videoconferencing to groups at a network of sites.

Today more and more of you think of distance education as distributed learning, where the purpose is to reach the individual at home or in the workplace.

This radical change means that the focus of attention is switching from teaching to learning; from the professor to the student; from the process to the outcomes.

In brief, the action is moving from my place to your place and my time to your time - where I am the professor teaching scheduled classes and you are the student learning at home.

To summarize this let me end by commenting on the current technology strategy of the Open University. We have to have a techology strategy because we are a technology-based learning system and technology changes constantly. We must evolve with it.

What is strategy? Webster defines it as 'the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems towards a goal' and the Oxford dictionary says it is 'the art of projecting and directing the larger movements and operations of a campaign'.

So what is the goal? What is the purpose of the campaign we are directing? What are the strategic challenges facing the Open University?

In fact they are similar the challenges that all universities face:

First: to increase teaching effectiveness and learning productivity;

Second: to reinforce the sense of academic community;

Third: to produce and deliver courses and intellectual assets;

Fourth: Both to scale up and personalize the logistics that underpin the learning system. Call it mass customization.

As it aims for these goals five developments are particularly important for the Open University right now:

I start with CD-ROM. The new version of the our first year Science course, S103 Discovering Science, uses the full multimedia capabilities of CD-ROM on a large scale. This course includes eleven CD-ROMs which engage each of the 4,000 students on the course in some 60 hours of work. The course team estimated 40 hours, the students say 80 hours, so I've split the difference.

We judge that for the foreseeable future CD-ROM is the only technology that can bring the full advantages of interactive multimedia into students' homes.

These CD-ROMs are proving enormously popular with students, who seem convinced that the highly interactive nature of the medium increases their learning productivity and challenges them to think by forcing them to answer questions.

That is another key principle of CSU's Cornerstones report which is absolutely important. Learning productivity means obliging students to take greater responsibility for their own learning.

I conclude that CD-ROM is a notable advance. But note that no individual faculty member could have produced these CD-ROMs. They require a team approach and a large investment - but the team approach makes the result intellectually exciting and the big investment has a big payoff if you operate at scale.

Second, I turn to computer conferencing, which has been the most successful large-scale use of the knowledge media in the Open University so far. This is a killer application! Students enjoy being able to communicate with each other.

They also like the ease of communication with their tutors and with the University generally.

In 1998 some 40,000 students are active in 6,000 computer conferences, posting around 20,000 messages per day and reading about 200,000. I do not claim that all these messages are of lasting intellectual significance, but they are a powerful expression of academic community.

Apart from allowing tutors to assemble conference groups on the network, computer conferencing also allows students to create their own groups for various social and professional purposes.

The Open University Student Association plays a very helpful role in moderating these conferences.

Note that this activity could not have been achieved on the old classroom model. It is based on Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of other users.

The wonderful news is that where OU course materials benefit from economies of scale, OU networking benefits from qualities of scale.

Tutoring

Third, the tutorial support system, especially the care given to commenting on student assignments, is a key element in the Open University's success. Pilot projects of increasing scale are being conducted to test newly developed techniques for handling the electronic submission of student assignments.

Each year the University handles over one million student assignments and has sophisticated monitoring and quality assurance arrangements for this purpose.

The assignment handling process is so central to the quality of the University's teaching that it simply cannot afford to introduce new methods in this area until they have been proven to be reliable to operate at scale and popular with students.

This key activity is a complex example of the virtues of division of labor.

Fourth, let me comment on the World Wide Web.

The Open University is sceptical of claims that the World Wide Web now provides the complete answer to the challenge of quality distance learning.

Twenty-five years of successful teaching have taught the University that there is no magic learning medium. Its plan is therefore to integrate the use of the Web into the University's broadly based multiple media learning system, not to move all teaching and learning activities onto the Web.

However, the University sees very exciting opportunities for combining the use of the Web with broadcast television.

Broadcast television remains a core element of the Open University's academic strategy.

It is the primary vehicle through which it achieves its charter goal of 'promoting the educational well-being of the community generally'. The University is increasingly designing its TV programmes, which have millions of regular viewers, with this wider general audience in mind.

Broadcast television is about to undergo a digital revolution that will increase the number of channels and offer possibilities for interactive programming.

Together the Open University and the British Broadcasting Corporation see exciting possibilities of combining the strength of broadcast television, which is the ability to reach large audiences and create interest in a topic, with the advantage of the Web, which is to allow individuals to explore topics interactively in greater depth.

Note that this too is a long way from the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Finally, a word about administration and logistics. The Open University operates on a large scale and relies crucially on the efficiency and effectiveness of its logistic and administrative systems.

This is an area where new technology can help to improve service levels by giving staff and students up-to-date information wherever they are.

The University has just spent over $15 million in a five-year programme to redevelop its record and logistic support systems and has taken advantage of this project to modernise many of its business processes.

It has been remarkably successfully and staff now make 100,000 transactions per day on the new system. In the next stage the benefits of access to these systems will be made directly available to students and tutors.

The Knowledge Media Institute

In all these developments the University is greatly assisted by its Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). It was set up in 1995 with a mandate to conduct leading edge development of the Web, the Internet and on-line communication generally and to scale up of the resultant technologies to reach large numbers of students.

The KMi has a special commitment to the development of enabling technologies for students with disabilities, of which there are 6,000 in the OU.

In a short time the KMi has become a focus for the collaborative development of teaching and learning technologies by all faculties of the Open University. It's success in this crucial respect has exceeded my fondest expectations.

Those are my six propositions. In expounding them I have tried to show you how to make virtual universities real and to share some of the lessons of the Open University's success.

It has been a pleasure to address you because we are all engaged in the same campaign. The world's universities are assailed by challenges of access, cost and flexibility. The United States has the world's strongest university system and the world looks to it for leadership.

Yet your system is wedded to methods that make it difficult for you to respond successfully to the challenge.

I beg you not to confuse means with ends. The traditional classroom of the campus university has had a long run as the normal means for achieving the ultimate goals of the university.

But the classroom model is approaching its 'sell-by' date. It is not the means that are important, but the ends to which the university aspires.

They are the appeal to reason and evidence, the link between conversation and community, the synergy between research and learning - in short the academic mode of thinking and working.

Thanks to today's technologies those ends can now be better achieved by reorganising the university as a learning system.

I wish you well as you develop the technology strategies that will enable you to implement our shared academic ideal in a new millennium.

Thank you

Daniel, John S. (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, London, Kogan Page

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