UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND – BALTIMORE COUNTY
THE UNITED STATES OPEN UNIVERSITY
Remarks by Sir John Daniel
on the occasion of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding
between the UMBC and the USOU
10 October 2000
Baltimore, Maryland
Open Learning and Universities of the Future
or
e-university, g-university, m-university and g-university:
making sense of distance learning
It is a great pleasure to be here today. I’ve been hearing about the discussions between the OU, the USOU and UMBC for some considerable time now and have often been told what a dynamic university UMBC is. I’m delighted to be on campus and to see and feel for myself the good things you are doing under the energetic and farsighted leadership of your President.
It seems to me that there is a natural affinity between a strongly rooted and growing regional University like UMBC and the institutions of the Open University group, especially our new United States Open University. I am thrilled to be here to express that affinity in the form of an agreement jointly to offer a flexible MS in Information Systems.
I am deeply honored that as well as President Hrabowski, Chancellor Langenberg has chosen to join us on this occasion. The link between the Open University and the University of Maryland goes back to the earliest years of the OU in the 1970s when the UMUC offered some of the OU’s first foundation courses on a trail basis. Informal links have continued over the years and in July it was my pleasure to address UMUC’s annual European faculty development event in Frankfurt.
On that occasion it was a particular pleasure to meet again that great University of Maryland figure, Ben Massey, whom I have known and admired for many years. So I feel to be among old friends here today even though I am meeting most of you for the first time.
You’ve asked me to sing for my supper – or rather my luncheon – and it is a pleasure to do so. However, I have to confess with some embarrassment that two titles of these remarks have been announced. One is very straightforward: Open Learning and Universities of the Future.
The other tries to be more interesting: e-university, g-university, m-university and o-university: making sense of distance learning. I assure you that I’m not going to give two speeches but I shall try to address both titles so that no one is disappointed.
Let me begin by explaining the second title. It’s fashionable these days to hyphenate the letter ‘e’ with all sorts of words. For instance, the UK higher education funding council has a task force working on the idea of an e-university. My second title is meant to imply that these sorts of catchy new idioms can be very transient. Already in Europe, where mobile telephony is even more prevalent than in the United States, people are saying that the e-world is giving way to the m-world, the world of mobile communications.
I’m sure that’s true, although I do keep wondering how I can get any useful academic communication from something the size of my cellphone screen. I suppose the answer lies in the highly compressed language that youngsters have developed for their mobiles. In the mega-decibel nightclubs of the UK I understand that young people now use text messages on their mobile phones to order drinks from the bar. However, it doesn’t yet seem quite suited to the study of Shakespeare – or even information systems.
Then there is the g-university: the global university. With online communication all universities can now be global, or that is the theory. I’d like to come back to that because I suspect the practice may be somewhat different.
Finally my o-university is, of course, an open university. And that brings me to my first important point. I make it by recalling that when the UK Open University began its planning stage in the late sixties, after Prime Minister Wilson had launched the idea, it was called the University of the Air because it was going to make serious use of television and radio broadcasting.
But one of the first decisions of the planning committee was to change that name. They thought that a university should be identified by its purpose, not by the methods it used. The main aim of this new enterprise was not to use broadcasting, although that would be a helpful tool. The driving vision was to open the academy to a much larger number of people and a much wider range of people. So it became the Open University.
Our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, suggested some other ways in which it should be open in his inaugural address. The mission, he declared, was to be open as to people, open as places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. That noble and ambitious mission still motivates and inspires us today.
I see that you share the view that a university should identify itself by its purposes, not by its methods. On your letterhead you call UMBC ‘an honors university in Maryland’. You stress the end not the means.
So I suggest that all universities should be careful about putting adjectives in front of the word ‘university’ that talk only about its methods. Apart from anything else they confuse. In order to illuminate our efforts in setting up the United States Open University we’ve conducted some market research and focus groups. One finding that comes through loud and clear is that the American public is thoroughly confused by the term ‘online university’. If you ask ten people what they understand by it you will get ten different replies.
So my first piece of advice in making sense of distance education and its impact on the future of universities is to remember that we always tend to overestimate the extent of change in the short term while underestimating the change likely to occur in the longer term.
We’ve seen that very clearly in the last twelve months. In the run up to last Christmas – or the run up to the end of the second millennium if you want to be pompous about it – the dot.com frenzy raged. It was very easy to be frightened into believing that the whole of the established order was about to be swept away by the Internet. This was the end of governments, universities, bureaucracies, and nations.
Yet early this year, early in the third millennium, the threats and aspirations of many of the dot.com enterprises began to look hollow. The belief began to spread that while the net was a new language and a new element in civilization, those existing organizations that were already successful and used it intelligently to become even better were more likely to change the world than outfits than knew only the web.
All this is put very well in a book that some of you will have read, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Their basic theme is that it is all too easy to reach the wrong conclusion by letting the logic of information push aside the more practical logic of humanity.
They comment on the tremendously impoverished notion of education that people who are transfixed by the logic of information bring to their discussion of learning. This is something we should bear in mind as we develop together an MS in Information Systems. Can we blend the logic of information and the practical logic of humanity better than anyone has done before? It’s a nice goal to strive for.
To make sense of distance education, therefore, our first principle must be to focus on the student, not on the various surrogates that always seem easier to use such as our research record, our reputation, our relations with the community, or the quality of our campus. Students are, more and more, what will count.
And if we focus on the student I see no reason to believe that students are going to desert university campuses in favor of a virtual world unless we chase them away. Campuses serve a very important function. They allow young people to come to terms with life, with love, with liquor and with a little learning. Having these processes take place on campus means that the community is spared the sight of these sometimes unsightly processes.
The death of the university campus, like that of Mark Twain, is greatly exaggerated. But older, working students who have more experience of life, love and liquor – and who come to the university primarily to learn, do not always find the campus convenient. That is why we are jointly preparing this program that can be studied anywhere.
Because these older students are highly motivated we should expect that the distance education courses that they take will give results of higher quality than you expect on campus. But we should not assume that.
The Open University is lucky that it does not have to be satisfied with the assumption of quality. Britain now has a ferocious quality assessment system that sends groups of peers, under state supervision, to judge the quality of teaching of each discipline in each university, against six criteria:
To focus their efforts the team is asked to grade the university out of four under each heading. So the maximum score you can get is four points under each heading for a total of 24. When all universities teaching a particular subject have been assessed the results are published and the press takes a keen interest. By convention a score of 22 out of 24 or above is considered excellent.
The newspapers love this, of course, and eagerly construct league tables from this objective data. The year 2000 league table that ranks by quality of teaching the 99 UK universities that award doctorates has just been published. The criterion is the proportion of subjects assessed in which a particular university has received an ‘excellent’ rating. I am pleased to say that the Open University is now in tenth place out of 99.
We are particularly proud that in two very different subjects, General Engineering and Sociology, we achieved the maximum score of 24/24. Indeed, in General Engineering we were the only University to get 24/24. Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, who have very respectable Engineering Schools, had to be content with 23/24.
It is when you put the student numbers against these quality rankings that you really see the power of distance education to change the higher educational paradigm.
This year the OU is teaching General Engineering to some 15,000 students who boil down to 4331 full-time equivalents. The total number of full-time equivalent students in General Engineering in the other seven excellent-rated schools – Oxford, Cambridge and company – taken together is 4687.
So you have the interesting result that 48% of all students studying excellent-rated General Engineering programs in the UK are at the Open University. There are similar results in other disciplines. We actually account for a majority of the UK’s excellently taught students in subjects as diverse as Music, Earth Sciences and Chemistry.
What is the secret of this unique combination of quality and quantity? It’s really very simple. There are four ingredients:
First, excellent course materials prepared by academics and other professionals working in teams. What matters is not the media that you use for the course materials, whether the web, printed paper, audiocassettes, DVD, CD-ROM or software. The key is the team approach. That is what makes OU courses academically sharp and OU students happy to learn.
Second, close personal academic support to each student. In one way the OU is a very large organization, with over 160,000 degree-credit students. But for the student it seems like a very small organization because no student group is larger than 25. Each of our 8,000 associate faculty members is responsible for mediating the course with less than 25 students. Their task is to mark and provide feedback on the assignments of each student and generally to support the student through communication by phone, fax, e-mail or post.
The United States Open University is helping to develop and refine the techniques for doing this online. The USOU already has students in 28 states so the optional face-to-face meetings that associate faculty offer in the UK are not possible here. But our excellent associate faculty here are finding that asynchronous online tutoring can be more effective than traditional class interaction. The reason is a nice example of things not always being what they seem.
Ask most people what is special about the online world and they will talk about the instantaneous response it provides. But for our associate faculty it is actually the period of reflection that asynchronous communication allows that makes this a superior form of academic discourse. The students pose their questions and problems more clearly and the faculty member can provide a more considered and comprehensive response.
The online world also allows students to support each other in a new way. Until recently I would have identified two major shortcomings in distance education. One was the difficulty of providing opportunities for regular student-to-student communication, the other was the challenge of providing access to library resources. The net is solving both problems.
I mentioned earlier that the revolutionary feature of the OU approach to distance learning is that quality improves with quantity. The more students there are, the better the experience you can provide to each. The net reinforces that thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, which holds that the value of a computer network is proportional to the square of the number of users.
At the moment the OU has around 100,000 students online. This means that the communicative experience of each student is potentially one million times richer than if we had only 100 students online. I can’t claim that we reach that millionfold potential but it has made a huge difference. Right now OU students are interacting in some 16,000 computer conferences and exchanging over 150,000 messages per day. I don’t claim that every one of those messages is of lasting academic significance but the phenomenon is powerful all the same.
The USOU is surfing this wave. We have been able to distil all our experience of online tutoring and of moderating student computer conferences into the training we give to our associate faculty. Very soon we shall provide all USOU students with an induction package on e-learning which will be the most advanced training of its kind anywhere.
So the first two ingredients of success in distance education are good learning materials and good student support.
The third is effective logistics. If you operate at scale on a national or worldwide basis you can’t leave things to chance.
However good your materials and your faculty, if the right materials, people and information are not in the right places at the right times you will not have an effective learning system.
For example, October happens to the UKOU’s main exam period. We are about to arrange for the proctoring of 120,000 exams. in hundreds of exam centers in over one hundred countries and bring the scripts back to headquarters. They will then be sent out to markers and we shall get together meetings of markers and exam boards for the processes of standardization and moderation.
Last year the number of scripts we lost was in single figures and I hope we do as well this year.
Electronic technologies are wonderfully helpful for aspects of logistics and student services and students love them. Some 20,000 students a week visit their student record online. One student has looked at his record over a hundred times since we started the service a year ago, clearly it’s a useful form of reassurance for him.
But the quality standards of the conventional approaches to logistics give us some standards to aim for in the e-world. Could we conduct examinations electronically in over 100 countries and have less than one in ten thousand go astray. Not yet, I think, but the time will come. The USOU, which has the advantage of starting from scratch in a more e-savvy society, will be able to pioneer some new approaches.
The final element of quality, from our point of view, is that our faculty are research active. The OU ranks in the top third of UK universities for the quality and quantity of its research. That quality is also broadly based. In Technology our research in design receives the top grade. Across the university research in areas as diverse as Music, Earth Sciences and Educational Technology also receives the top grade, meaning internationally recognized excellence.
We think that research is vital to the maintenance of a vibrant academic community. We are sure that it makes our teaching better, which is important when we teach on such a large scale. Furthermore, our style of teaching also makes our research better. Because they develop courses in teams our faculty regularly come across areas where clarity of teaching is hampered by confusion in the discipline itself about a particular concept or phenomenon. This often leads them to initiate research to move things forward.
I hope that these remarks about the quality of what the Open University does and how that quality is achieved have been helpful. On this day when our two institutions sign an agreement to work together on a new program I wanted to assure you than we bring something good to the party. Above all, I think it is the steadying influence of people who can already say, about distance learning, ‘been there, done that’.
At the moment there is a tremendously exciting effervescence in American higher education as universities jump on their spider and ride off on the web in all directions. It reminds me of Churchill’s famous remark about this country when he said: ‘the United States will always do the right thing, after having exhausted all other possibilities’.
I hope that the USOU will help UMBC to exhaust some of the less promising possibilities more quickly than you could do without us.
Let me conclude with a few remarks about g-university, the global university. My first comment is that we should not get too carried away about this whole phenomenon of globalization. I won’t bore you with an exposition on globalization but do let us keep a sense of proportion. You could argue that the world was more globalized in 1900 than it is in 2000. In those days you did not need a passport to travel around the world and you did not need to change your money everywhere. A bag of gold sovereigns would take you almost anywhere.
If you react by saying that only an elite could take advantage of these opportunities I would reply that only an elite can take advantage of globalization today. Capital moves around the world without friction but try sailing into Baltimore from another country and saying you’ve come to take advantage of globalization and have made a spontaneous decision to move here.
In much the same way I’m pretty skeptical of this talk of global universities. I talk from experience because the Open University now has some 30,000 students taking its courses overseas with significant numbers in around 40 countries and partnerships in around 20. That has taught us that most people live pretty local lives and I rejoice that they do.
We have 8,000 students taking OU courses in Russia. That’s not just because they are good courses. It’s because we offer them in Russian and provide, in that language, the quality materials, support and logistics that I’ve identified as essential.
We have 6,000 students in Singapore. They study in English, but they and more importantly their government, want the programs of study to be different from those in the UK.
So we’ve become strong believers in local partnerships because they make the impact of OU methods and materials more authentic and more effective.
That’s why we have set up the USOU as a distinct member of the OU family rather than as a branch office of the UKOU. We want this to be a genuinely American university that will bring to the basic OU philosophy and approach a distinctively American style based on the needs of American students. I’m delighted to say that we have an outstanding American staff, under the leadership of Richard Jarvis, who are making those transformations.
They too believe that partnerships are a key to good service and good programs and that is why we are here today. Local needs require local responses. That’s why I don’t believe in the idea of a single university serving students all over the world with a standard product delivered over the web.
Even McDonald’s tweaks its product overseas and the human mind is much more diverse than the human mouth. It is by creating a worldwide network of institutions that share a common set of values and a common approach to quality that we can bring distance learning to a wider world. Courses, programs and languages will vary. We should want to see honors universities all over the world united in a spirit of openness and a commitment to the student.
That, for me, is the significance of what we are doing today in signing an agreement between the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the United States Open University.