SKILL: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities
Annual Conference, 25-26 February 2000 at Milton Keynes
Serving Students with Disabilities
Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
It is a great pleasure for the Open University to host this reception for Skill and I am delighted to welcome you. This is Skill’s 25th anniversary and the OU, which was a founder member of Skill, is celebrating its 30th anniversary. For that reason it gives us special pleasure that you are holding your conference here in Milton Keynes next to our main campus. We are very proud of our campus at Walton Hall, just across the road from here, which provides a most pleasant working environment. Some cynical visitors have been heard to remark that the reason it’s such a nice campus is that there are no students there.
Actually that is not true. There are several hundred research students doing their work on campus. Nevertheless, those research students are only a tiny fraction of the 170,000 students taking degree courses with the OU this year. Most of those 170,000 have no occasion to come to our campus here although we do organise an Open Day in the summer when students can come with their families and see the institution that is having such a big impact on their lives. Those Open Days attract close to 10,000 people and are very happy occasions – somewhat like an academic village fete.
However, since the OU is not equipped either with student residences, or with the lecture theatres that other universities take for granted, we are not able to hold conferences as often as we would like. That’s why we were delighted when BT set up it’s Training and Conference Centre here because it does allow us to feel that we are hosting groups like yourselves at the Open University.
I am particularly pleased that we are hosting this Skill meeting because creating good working and study conditions for student with disabilities has been a major aim of the Open University from the very early days. We also try to create a supportive and productive environment for the staff. I think I’m right in saying that we are the only University that has set aside a special dog run on campus for the guide dogs. We also have a speaking beacon system so that visually impaired colleagues can orient themselves. Staff registered as disabled number around 60 and we hope to increase that by taking advantage of the Fast-track work experience scheme.
So much for the campus but let me give you just a little general history. The Open University celebrated its thirtieth birthday last year. It was in 1969, in the week that the Apollo astronauts returned from the first landing on the moon, that the inaugural ceremony for the Open University was held at the Royal Society.
It was a time when everything seemed possible and our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther gave the new University an ambitious and inspiring mission: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. Two years later the first group of students, 25,000 of them, began study and the OU instantly became the UK’s largest university.
Enormous hopes were vested in this new Open University by thousands of people who, for all sorts of reasons, had not had a chance to study at university. They included many disabled students. The OU realised, right from the start, that not only could it be a very significant resource for disabled students but also that it would have the resources, because of its large scale, to deliver on this aspect of its mission.
That mission to disabled students has become a reality both because it fits so well with the value system of the Open University and because many people have devoted their careers to developing that reality. In this context I must mention in particular your Chair, Derek Child. You know how much Derek has done for Skill. I can tell you that in his day job at the OU he represents the interests of disabled students in a superbly effective manner and we are most grateful to him for his careful and courteous consistency in putting their case.
At the OU disabled students are a very significant constituency. This year OU students with disabilities number 7,073, which is a considerable increase on last year. But inclusiveness, of course, is not just an issue of numbers. What counts is not how many disabled students come to the OU but how well we serve them and how well our disability services are integrated into the mainstream of the University’s activities. I feel that we continue to make progress.
As you know, one of the great strengths of the OU is its use of educational technology. Today we have 90,000 OU students online from home. The development of technology-based aids for disabled students has a long history here, thanks, in particular, to the devoted pioneering work of Professor Tom Vincent. Quite often technologies which his team has developed for students with disabilities, such as the virtual microscope and the virtual field trip, are then sought after by all students.
At the moment, for instance, we are working on a project called DREAM, which stands for Digital Recall of Educational and Administrative Materials. The idea is to use CD-ROM and PCs fitted with enabling devices and navigation software to allow students to access material is easily. For a long time we have been proud of the fact that OU courses are available on cassettes. My wife and I are just two of the many volunteers who read the course materials for this purpose in our special recording studio.
But just as audio-cassettes were a big advance on reel-to-reel tape recorders, so CD-ROM is a huge advance on cassettes. Where previously a visually impaired student would have to search painstakingly through 100 audio-cassettes to find a particular part of a course, now only eight easily searchable CD-ROMs are required.
This is just one example of the projects being carried out by our Centre for Assistive Technologies and Enabling Research, whose work makes me very proud.
You are meeting at a very important time in the evolution of policy and practice for disabled students – the title of your conference. I know that you are discussing issues of legislation and implementation in your conference sessions. All I will say is that the OU looks forward to seeing part-time students benefiting from all the developments now under way. We expect that the effect will be to increase further the numbers of disabled students coming to the OU and we look forward to welcoming them and serving them.
Meanwhile, let me thank you once again for holding this important conference in Milton Keynes and bring you the warm greetings of all my OU colleagues.