WORLD EDUCATION MARKET
Vancouver, Canada
23 May 2000
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
A. Introduction
At the inaugural ceremony of the Open University (OU) in 1969 the first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, articulated its mission as being open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. The OU has since developed rather successfully and I have explored, in various speeches (http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/), what has been achieved under each of the four elements of the mission.
Today the OU enrols 180,000 people in degree-credit programmes and around a further 100,000 in various continuing professional development courses. Students are served in more than forty countries and examinations are held in over a hundred countries. The OU's multiple-media distance learning system uses an array of methods from print to full-duplex synchronous web conferences. One facet of its openness to ideas is a dynamic research programme with work of international excellence in a range of disciplines.
This short presentation, which I have titled The Open University Going Global, will focus on some of the OU's international teaching activities. With some 30,000 people taking its courses outside the UK the OU is a now has a world-wide constituency. The conference organisers have asked me to focus particularly on the establishment of the United States Open University but I start with some background.
In his inaugural address in 1969 the OU's founding Chancellor evoked the prospect of taking the OU outside the UK in the following words:
But it is already clear that the University will rapidly become one of the most potent and persuasive, and profitable, or our invisible exports. Wherever the English language is spoken or understood, or used as a medium of study, and wherever there are men and women seeking to develop their individual potentialities beyond the limits of the local provision (and I have defined a large part of the world), there we can offer our help. This may well prove to be the most potent form of external aid that this country can offer in the years to come. The interest of those all over the world who are wrestling with the problem of making educational bricks without straw has already been aroused, and before long the Open University and its courses, electronically recorded and reproduced, will be for many millions of people their introduction to the riches of the English language and of Britain's heritage of culture.
There are no boundaries of space.
The model of the Open University did indeed prove to be potent and persuasive. During the 1970s and 1980s many governments created similar institutions for their own countries with some drawing on the OU's experience through long-term consultancy arrangements (e.g. India's Indira Gandhi National Open University). Today at least twelve of these open universities enrol over 100,000 students annually (Daniel, 1996).
From its earliest days the OU allowed students who moved overseas after initially registering in the UK to continue their studies and take their exams in other countries. However, it was not until the 1990s that the University developed policies for admitting students without a link to the UK.
B. Categories of overseas students
Today OU students overseas fall into five main categories:
1. Students in the rest of western Europe. Some 3,000 students in the Republic of Ireland and 5,000 on the European continent are in this category. For the purposes of teaching and student services these students are fully integrated into the OU's main operations, although they pay higher fees because there is no UK government subsidy for them.
2. Students taking OU courses for the credit and awards of other institutions known as whole course users. Several thousand students of the Hong Kong Open University are in this category and there is a similar scheme in Ethiopia.
3. Students taking courses for OU credit and awards through a partnership, called an institution as tutor arrangement, that provides tutorial and infrastructure services. Examples are the 6,000 OU students in the OU Degree Programme at the Singapore Institute of Management and some 10,000 students in partnerships in Russia and Central Europe where students are taking OU courses in six local languages.
4. Students anywhere in the world taking OU courses and awards that are offered primarily online. The main example so far is the Master's award in Open and Distance Education.
5. Students working towards OU awards in institutions that are accredited by OU Validation Services (the successor organisation to the former Council for National Academic Awards).
C. The United States Open University
One of the OU's newer partnerships is with the United States Open University (USOU) which began teaching its first students in February 2000. In terms of the categories above the USOU is a whole course user. Although the OU has been closely involved in its establishment, the USOU is an American university with its own degree awarding powers. While it is expected that the USOU will make extensive use of OU courseware, adapted appropriately, it is also offering programmes in association with US and Canadian universities.
An important difference between the USOU and the OU's other partners is that creating it was an OU initiative. Previous partners mostly approached the OU themselves, sometimes at the instigation of government (Singapore, Ethiopia) or through an existing organisation (Hungary, Slovakia) or as a private initiative that later acquired a formal structure (Russia, Romania).
The OU took the initiative in creating the USOU because the OU was being actively sought as a partner by a number of US universities. In the late 1990s distance education belatedly became fashionable and acceptable in US higher education. A variety of US universities thought they could gain competitive advantage by linking with the OU because it was perceived as a successful large-scale provider with a high reputation for quality. In particular, these American institutions thought that the OU could help them to make the changes in working practices required by distance teaching at scale.
Good things happened as a result of some of these partnership discussions, notably the use of the OU's programme model for a part-time initial teacher training programme by the California State University. However, the OU concluded that such partnerships were too unequal to be productive as long as only the US partner had degree-awarding powers in the USA.
The OU also explored the possibility of partnership with an American start-up, the Western Governors University (WGU), which offers degrees by assessing competencies rather than through direct teaching. While these discussions revealed some promising areas of synergy, the plans of both WGU and the OU in the USA proved too embryonic to provide the basis for an effective alliance.
This experience of exploring partnership possibilities influenced the OU's decision to set up a free-standing partner institution, the USOU. This was duly established as a 501c.3 non-profit membership corporation registered in Delaware and licensed initially in that state. At its first meeting the USOU board, which has a largely American membership, took the 'four opens' of the OU mission (people, places, methods and ideas) and added open as to time and open to the world.
The start-up of the USOU is being financed with a loan from the OU which is a more considerable financial investment than the OU has made in other overseas partners. The USOU applied for accreditation to the Middle States Association and achieved Candidacy status in 1999. Real operations began with the arrival of the founding Chancellor, Dr Richard Jarvis, in September 1999.
The OU expects that after repayment of the loan it will receive revenues from the use of its courseware by the USOU. However, the OU also hopes that the experience of preparing and adapting courses for the US market will help it address successfully some of the new opportunities in the UK and elsewhere. In particular, as the USOU starts developing its own courses, the OU hopes to offer some of them in the UK.
In planning the curriculum of the USOU, before the appointment of US-based USOU staff, the OU conducted some formal market research and engaged in intensive discussions with institutions and individuals across the whole range of American higher education. This led to a number of conclusions:
1. While the USOU operates across the whole territory of the USA it is necessary to target the limited advertising budget. The initial focus is on a few geographic areas (e.g. Metro Washington, DC; Denver, CO and Phoenix, AZ) and interest groups (e.g. political campaign workers, cultural associations).
2. The USOU will begin by offering upper division (junior and senior year) undergraduate courses and graduate programmes in order to gain experience before trying to adapt OU courses for the lower division.
3. The focus on the upper division also supports a strategy of seeking partnerships with major community colleges in order to offer their students defined routes to BA and BS degrees drawing on the curricula of the colleges and the USOU.
4. It would be desirable to make offerings, both graduate and undergraduate, in the high demand areas of business, management and IT.
5. The USOU should aim to develop a full academic curriculum across a range of disciplines and not limit itself to the high demand professional areas.
6. The USOU will assume that all students are online and will conduct part of their interaction with faculty, fellow students and the university administration by that means. The OU does not yet make this assumption for all its students in the rest of the world.
D. The USOU: Experience to date
What have we learned through our experience with the USOU so far? I stress that these are early days. We are just completing our first session during which we offered four courses and enrolled less than a hundred students. Given that the USOU is still unknown and is not yet regionally accredited we are pleased that we achieved a section in each course.
We must not leap to conclusions from enrolment patterns in those first courses. However, we were disappointed that the course in The Art of (political) Campaign Management that USOU prepared in collaboration with the American University of Washington DC did not attract more takers. I suspect that it was simply bad timing. In this election year campaign professionals are too busy campaigning to find time for study. Conversely we were pleased by the interest our Shakespeare course has attracted. People are not just interested in business management and IT.
Our general conclusion is a confirmation of our initial hypothesis that USOU will grow slowly. When the OU began in the UK in 1970 it placed just two advertisements in Britain's Radio Times magazine and received 40,000 student applications. The USA of the year 2000 is not the UK of 1970. Slow growth seems to be a feature of new US institutions, even the University of Phoenix which was first accredited in 1978.
The most interesting aspect of the launch of the USOU has been the way that our American USOU colleagues perceive its relationship to the OU. The OU designed the USOU as a separate entity with its own board, staff, and curriculum. This was partly to avoid confusion between the two legal entities but mainly to avoid any suggestion of academic neo-colonialism on the OU's part.
Our American colleagues are much less interested in separateness. They see the USOU's link with the OU as its most valuable asset and are eager to stress - rather than downplay - the relationship, for example by double badging some courses as both USOU and OU.
This unexpected attitude, coupled with the USOU's greater awareness of the value of the international nature of their institution (expressed by adding open to the world to its mission) is changing the OU's perception of itself. Until the creation of the USOU the OU tended to keep its various international partnerships in separate compartments. Encouraging contact between the students in the various partnership schemes had not occurred to anyone.
E. The next frontier
Thanks to the USOU the OU is now thinking of itself much more as a confederation of partner institutions that could, between them, develop into a genuinely multi-national university. That development will be challenged by the growth of online teaching and learning by the OU and its partners (the fourth category of student listed in section A). At the moment each partner assumes that it has sole rights to in offer the other partners' courses in its territory so we shall need to develop protocols about offering online courses directly into each others' jurisdictions. However, since the main purpose of these partnerships is to give students physical access to tutors and services in their own country I am sure we shall rise to this challenge. A global confederation for distance learning backed by people and infrastructure in many countries is an exciting prospect.