Sesame - October 2000
VC’s Column
Mass customisation
One of today’s buzzwords is mass customisation. The mass production of standard products is now passé. Henry Ford famously said that customers could have any colour of car provided it was black. Today we can custom design our own car and vary the basic model with a range of colours, features and accessories. But low prices are still dependent on economies of scale. The standardisation of basic automotive components such as chassis and engine parts across models is actually increasing.
Critics sometimes accuse the OU of being an industrial model of education based on highly standardised courses. Most OU people would respond that considerable customisation is built into the learning process, especially by the way that students personalise the course through their TMAs and tutors then comments on those assignments in an individualised manner.
Most of the new awards and programmes of study now being developed by the University take customisation considerably further. In some cases this is because they have an overtly professional focus requiring work placements and assessment in the workplace. At the moment we are creating a new programme for the initial training of secondary teachers. This incorporates the most individually tailored learning process that the OU has ever attempted. Start dates are highly flexible, the curriculum is adapted to the starting point of each student, there is a very close relationship with the schools, and support is provided from a multitude of sources.
Such approaches are inherently more expensive because they require more labour-intensive forms of student support. Nevertheless, the overall economics of the programme can still benefit from economies of scale. Compared to traditional classroom teaching the unusual feature of the OU approach is that as student numbers increase the learning opportunities available to each student also improve. More money can be invested in preparing course materials and support services can be more local.
This means that the OU always seeks to serve all students who are attracted to its programmes, not simply in order to be true to its mission of openness, but also to improve the economics of the teaching system. Areas like teacher training, where government controls the numbers allowed to enter the programme, pose a special challenge.
The OU is now examining whether it can help with the training of medical doctors, a profession where training numbers are very tightly regulated. In early October, following discussions with nine English medical schools, the Academic Board recommended the addition of medicine as a new academic area. The OU has declared its intention to bid, in conjunction with these partner medical schools, to take students into a new programme that would cover equivalent of the first two years of the five-year medical programme.
We believe that such a programme will help to widen access to the medical profession. Designing it so that the sums add up is the challenge. The higher the numbers we can serve the more likely it is that the programme will go ahead.