Sesame - March 2000
VC’s Column
Customers, Students or Members?
How do you think of your relationship with the OU? How do the staff of the University talk about you? What we mean by the words we use is significant.
Arguments can start when the word customer is used. Fashion encourages us all to think of ourselves as customers of many organisations, not just our nearby supermarket but also our government and our local medical practice. Seeing ourselves as customers does remind us that we are involved in transactions in which, even if it comes from our taxes, money is changing hands in return for something we want. For those providing the service the word customer emphasises the obligation to provide people what they want – as far as possible in the way they want it. The adage that ‘the customer is always right’ comes to mind.
This emphasis on quality of service is as healthy for the OU as for any organisation, provided we remember that any University has two main customers. First, there are people studying for an award or conducting research. Their wish is to obtain a qualification or publish their results. Second, there is the wider society that wants to be confident that people holding qualifications do have the knowledge and skills to go with them and that research papers are methodologically sound. When there is tension between the interests of these two customers a reputable university gives primacy to safeguarding the trust that society places in its standards.
This is why many OU colleagues prefer to talk about students. The word implies that people have come to the OU believing they can learn from it and accepting that the University will make judgements about the extent of their learning and the quality of their understanding. In most learning situations the student is younger and less experienced than the teacher but this is not the case at the OU. Students and staff are of all ages and, as all associate lecturers know well, OU students sometimes have greater knowledge about certain aspects of a course than they do.
That is why I think of all those studying with the OU as members of the University. This is an ancient term, reflecting the fact that the medieval universities were created by the students and the word university referred simply to the student body. The OU is one of the largest academic communities the world has ever seen and I hope that you all have some sense of being members of a unique body.
More and more of you are now on-line. 22,000 have registered using the Net and 60,000 of you have used it to check your OU record. As a vehicle for e-commerce the Net can reinforce the notion of customer. As a means of dumping information on your computer it can promote a rather subservient concept of student. My preference is to see the Net as an extraordinary forum for communication which allows each of us to be a more active member of the Open University.