THE OPEN UNIVERSITY IN SCOTLAND
More Local and More Global
Remarks by Sir John Daniel, Vice-Chancellor of the Open
University,
at an event to mark the transfer to the Scottish Parliament of the
responsibility for the
funding for OU teaching in Scotland.
26 April 2000
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is a great pleasure for me to thank Sir David, Dr Winnie Ewing and Dr Elaine Murray for their inspiring remarks to us this evening. This is a very significant day for the Open University. As you have heard, our roots in Scotland go deep and we are proud of the thirty years of service that has made us the largest provider of part-time higher education in Scotland. Today there is scarcely a postcode in Scotland that does not have OU students as residents.
Today, it is natural that we celebrate the efforts of the OU to be increasingly local. To be, in Sir David’s words, more and more open, more and more responsive, and more and more accessible.
As I watch the Open University becoming more local I observe that at the same time it is becoming increasingly global. Indeed, the first trend drives the second. We are starting the new millennium with the transfer of funding responsibility for the OU in Scotland to Scotland. Let me mention two other current developments that are also changing the nature of the Open University.
Two months ago the United States Open University, the sister institution we created last year, admitted its first students. Meanwhile our partner institutions in Russia and central Europe, who help us to teach thousands of students in those countries in their own languages, are moving to a new relationship with the University. For ten years their students have been registered with the OU directly but now we are recognising our partners institutions’ growing maturity by moving them to an accreditation relationship - like the one we have here with the University of the Highlands and Islands Project. The City University of Bratislava in Slovakia will gain that status this year.
The link between our event here in Scotland and these developments in the United States and Central Europe is that all of them are changing the nature of the Open University in an exciting way. Somewhat like the UK as a whole, the OU is moving away from a unitary structure to become more of a confederation of partners.
This does not merely mean the devolution of power, in the spirit of subsidiarity, to places where it can be exercised better. It also means creating a network of partnerships that will foster the multi-directional flow of teaching, learning and ideas.
Here in Scotland that will mean creating more courses and qualifications, through partnerships with local institutions, to reflect the Scottish reality. We already have the example of the course in Scottish history that the OU developed in collaboration with the University of Dundee and the SVQ in Engineering Management that we created with Scottish Power. But the OU’s increasingly global reach means that these expressions of Scottish intellect can also be offered in the many other countries where the OU now teaches.
In the same way students in Scotland will benefit from courses developed by the United States Open University, just as they already benefit from courses adapted by the Singapore Institute of Management, one of our partners in Asia.
Today there are 30,000 people studying OU courses outside the UK. That is the consequence of the transformation of the idea of what a university is that Walter Perry began when he left the vice-principalship of the University of Edinburgh thirty years ago to take on the risky job of founding Vice-Chancellor of the Open University.
As we develop the OU as a global confederation of partners we shall once again be pioneers. If we get it right the Open University could become the first genuinely multi-national university while holding fast to its ideals of openness, responsiveness and accessibility.
That is why the transfer of funding to Scotland is such a significant step. That is why our interest in the Scottish Parliament will not be limited to the funds that you vote to us but will extend to the theory and practice of the devolution of power and initiative in today’s world.
Thank you again, Sir David, Winnie and Elaine, and thank you all for being with us. Today the Open University begins a new chapter in its academic life just as Scotland has begun a new era in its national life.