October 28 1998
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
United Kingdom
It is a pleasure to be with you this morning in Calgary. I am using one of the techniques of distance education to be with you but I feel close to you for two reasons. First, I lived in Alberta for a number of years when I was Vice-President of Athabasca University in the 1970s when it was based in Edmonton. In June of this year I was greatly honoured to receive an honorary doctorate from Athabasca University, which gave me the opportunity to visit their lovely campus in the Town of Athabasca. So a piece of me is in Alberta. Second, I am listening in to your session as you view this video. You'd be amazed how much you can pick up about people react to a talk by listening to the room over the phone. At the end of the video I look forward to responding to your comments and questions.
My title this morning is Technology for Educational and Competitive Advantage.
Most of you are responsible for managing education and training operations - in schools, in colleges, in universities or in companies. You must meet lots of people who tell you that new technology is going to revolutionise education and training. You are probably here today because you suspect that may be true. But you want to know how new technology is going to help you. You want to know the questions to ask the persuasive people from Xerox Canada - and other less scrupulous suppliers - who may tell you that their product is the answer to all your needs.
My aim this morning is to help you ask some of the right questions. The subtitle of my talk is Technology is the Answer; but what was the Question? The fundamental question is will technology help me do a better job in the education and training of my students and pupils? What advantage will my students get from technology? What advantage will I get from using technology? What is the educational and competitive advantage that the technology gives to me? The two boil down to the same thing. You are managers in educational organisations so competitive advantage means doing education better.
I'm going to put a series of six questions to you and try to answer them. Please try to apply the questions and my answers to your own working environment. You come from a variety of organisations and you must apply what I say to your own circumstances. I shall try to remain at a general level.
Question One is about competitive advantage. What is competitive advantage? We live in a competitive world so this question has attracted plenty of attention. I find that Michael Porter, the Harvard scholar, gives the most straightforward and useful answer to this question. He boils competitive advantage down to two essential ingredients. You can compete by being cheaper or you can compete by being better. He calls these qualities cost advantage and differentiation. Deliver more for less.
In my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education I have applied Porter's thinking to organisations involved in education and training. What are my conclusions? First, it's fairly obvious that technology can, in principle, help us to operate cheaper and better simply because that has been the impact of technology in many other fields of human endeavour. Today's cars cost less, in real terms, for the performance and reliability that they deliver, than the cars of a generation ago. Many people say that the case of computers is even more striking, for we all know that the cost of computing power is dropping all the time. The computer industry tells us that if cars had improved as fast as computers we'd get a Cadillac for ten dollars that would do a thousand miles on a gallon of gas.
But wait a minute. Despite the falling cost of computing power, computers are still pretty off putting for most people. Those who bought the first cars were well advised to be able to mend a puncture themselves because the early tyres often got punctures. Modern personal computers are about at that stage, pretty off putting for a beginner who doesn't have a dedicated youngster to help them. They are still at the stage where you have to be able to mend your own punctures.
However, progress is being made. Computers are gradually becoming more user-friendly. The people at Xerox are helping you to be able to do more with them, more easily. One day, perhaps, they will be as user-friendly as your fridge. You don't require a thick user manual for your fridge and we can look forward to the day when you won't need an instruction manual for your computer. Computers are also becoming cheaper relative to most other goods and certainly to the salaries you have to pay people. Telecommunicating is becoming cheaper too. So Porter's condition for competitiveness that you must get costs down looks like being helped by computers if they help do things that you want to do.
But what about his other condition, differentiation? What about doing things differently in ways that people might value more? That's more complex. Let's turn the question round and ask what are the problems in education that need solving. If technology can solve them we would have a useful difference from existing practice.
So question two is what's wrong with education and training today?
It's hard to give a single answer to that question for all levels of education and training and for all countries. You will know best how the problems look at the level of education and in the locality in which you are engaged. But if you do try to take a global view I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that there is a crisis.
The ingredients of the crisis are access, cost and flexibility and they blend differently around the globe.
In the developing countries there is a crisis of access. Some countries have yet to achieve universal access to elementary schools, let alone secondary schools. Universities are also a problem.
Right now one large new campus needs to open every week, somewhere in the world, just to keep participation rates constant.
That is not happening. Population growth is outpacing our capacity to give people access to universities. In some countries the situation is desperate. The World Bank notes that Africa is a disaster area for higher education and sadly, the many wars now going on in Africa are likely to wipe out some of the gains painfully made at other levels of education and training.
If nothing is done many of our world's youngsters will grow up to be unemployed, unconnected and unstable. In a global world that is a global problem. There are many countries where half the population is aged under 20.
Higher education in the emerging countries can't keep pace with the aspirations of growing populations because of the second strand of the crisis, which is cost. That's a particular problem for universities.
The model of the university that we all know and love costs too much. Africa simply can't afford more campuses with more classrooms and more student dormitories. But affordability is not just an African problem.
Here are some figures from that invaluable identifier of trends, USA Today.
For an American family the cost of sending a child to college, adding up tuition, room and board, has now risen to 15% of median family income: up from 9% 15 years ago.
That is for a public university. For private universities the figure is nearly 40% of median family income, up from just over 20% in the same fifteen-year period. For how much longer will Americans see that considerable outlay as value for money? How is the situation evolving in Canada?
Any industry whose costs increase faster than inflation over a long period is heading for trouble: either for complete collapse or for unpleasant upheavals. We must reduce the costs of higher education. The World Bank is clear that the best strategy for Africa is to reduce the costs of higher education and spend the money saved on improving and extending elementary and secondary education. In my view schools will always need plenty of trained adults to help in the key task of socialisation.
In the context of the need to transfer public funds from higher education to the K to 12 levels the good news is that exceptions are now appearing to the traditionally good correlation between the rankings of universities by quality and the resources available to them.
Britain's official nation-wide teaching quality assessments show, as you would expect, that the proportion of 'excellent' ratings a university receives for its programs broadly matches the funds available to it.
But there is an interesting exception. That outlier is the Open University.
Expenditure per student at the Open University is the lowest Britain, yet it ranks number eleven out of the country's hundred plus universities for teaching quality.
It is a member of the elite premier league of universities where most programs are rated as 'excellent'. Indeed, in a recent assessment of the quality of the teaching in Engineering in all English universities the Open University received the top score of 24/24 and did better than well-known universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London.
The significance of this exception is that the Open University is a technology-based learning system.
The Open University also operates on a large scale. For example, our level-one science course, S103 Discovering Science, is being taken by over 4,000 students this year. This is a case of more means better, for I'm sure that it is one of the best university science courses in the world. Publishers tell us that the 11 CD-roms provided with the course, which engage each student in at least 60 hours of work, are the most sophisticated use of CD-ROM for teaching science that they have seen.
And our second-level computing course, which has revolutionised the teaching of computing by introducing the subject through object-oriented computing, is being taken by over 5,000 students.
But let me return briefly to the crisis in education and training.
Let me round out these local crises of access and cost by identifying a crisis of flexibility nearly everywhere. You've all heard the questions.
Are schools, colleges and universities teaching the knowledge and skills that students need?
Do our teaching methods match the habits of today's learners?
Are educators confident about the quality of what they do?
Bluntly, are our traditional approaches to education appropriate in the era of lifelong learning?
So there is a triple crisis of access, cost and flexibility - but do not panic! How does an ancient civilisation view a crisis?
In Chinese the ideogram for crisis is made by combining the sign for danger with the sign for opportunity. That's a profound insight. The dangers are clear but we also face opportunities. New technology is one. What should we do about it?
As I suggested earlier, the recipe for responding to the crisis has only two basic ingredients.
The dish they make is called competitive advantage.
The competitive advantage of an organisation grows out of the value that it creates for its buyers, either in terms of low prices or unique benefits.
Who are our buyers? They are our students and pupils. Governments, parents and employers may be surrogate buyers, but if we focus on value for the students we won't go far wrong.
What are the two ingredients that students value? To be special and to be inexpensive.
The problem, of course, is that there is little scope for cutting costs and developing difference within today's technology of the classroom. When you try to cut costs and develop difference in this familiar framework quality suffers.
So to my third question. Can technology help us by creating new frameworks?
I shall argue from example and concentrate on higher education.
There is a now a new type of university, based on different technology, that is the most successful answer to the crises of access, cost and flexibility.
It is the mega-university, a term that designates a university that teaches at a distance and has at least one hundred thousand students. There are now eleven of them, but since none is in North America you may not know much about them.
Unlike the big federated US state universities with thousands of faculty and many campuses, the mega-universities are unitary institutions with hundreds of faculty and just one campus that looks more like a business park.
The numbers alone, 3 million students in just eleven universities, suggest that these mega-universities are addressing the crisis of access.
They are also a dramatic response to the crisis of cost, as this table shows.
In the US there are 3,500 colleges and universities with an enrolment of 14 million students and an annual spend on higher education of around $175 billion. That's an average cost of $12,500 per student.
In Britain we have 182 higher education institutions, 1.6 million students, and a spend of some $16 billion. That's around $10,000 per student. In the same ballpark as the USA.
Now group together the eleven mega-universities. They enrol, between them, some 2.8 million students. Their budgets aggregate to a bit less than $1 billion. That's less than $350 per student. There is more than an order of magnitude cost difference from either the US or the UK.
Country by country the per capita student cost at the mega-university is not more than half of the average cost at the other universities in the same country. In two cases it's only 10% of that average. The cost revolution is real.
These mega-universities also address the crisis of flexibility. They allow lifelong learners to study whenever they choose and wherever they are.
The mega-universities owe their success to technology.
They owe it, however, to new applications of technology rather than to applications of new technology. But that brings us to Question Four: what is technology anyway?
Here's how we define it for our students at the Open University:
"Technology is the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines."
Let's unpack that. First: technology is more than applied science. Non-scientific knowledge, such as crafts, design, tacit knowledge and managerial skills are involved.
Second, technology always involves people and their social systems. So when we use technology in education, let's remember that processes, approaches, rules and ways of organising things are just as important as electronic devices.
The key technology for the mega-universities is not any particular device. It is the body of knowledge called distance education.
So, to Question Five: What is distance education?
The answer to that question is evolving steadily. Until recently many people, especially in North America, took distance education to mean simultaneous audio- or video-conferencing to a set of remote classrooms.
But now I am delighted to observe that the North American concept of distance education is evolving rapidly from a fixation on synchronous videoconferences to a new understanding that sees asynchronous communication as inherently more powerful.
Why have views on distance education evolved so fast? There are two reasons. One is the Internet. The other is the Web. You can use these two media synchronously but they are inherently asynchronous means of communication. The world is suddenly appreciating - or perhaps re-appreciating - the power of asynchronous communication.
There is now a massive infatuation with the Net and the Web as the answer to all the problems of higher education.
Here, finally is the answer. Never mind what the question was.
Maybe this technology is the answer. But what was the question?
Three years ago a new term appeared simultaneously and independently in Canada and the UK. The term is knowledge media and it denotes the convergence of computing, telecommunications and the cognitive sciences.
Others talk about new technologies, telematics, the information superhighway, and multi-media.
But the expression knowledge media challenges us as educators because it suggests that the combination of present technologies with what we know about learning may change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge.
Knowledge media are about the capturing, storing, imparting, sharing, accessing, creating, combining and synthesising of knowledge.
The knowledge media are not just a technical format, such as CD-ROM, the Web or computer conferencing, but the whole presentational style, the user interface, the accessibility, the interactivity. If the knowledge media do change the relationship between people and knowledge it will have massive implications for all of us.
So all universities are asking themselves what the knowledge media mean for them. Academics are effervescing with individual projects. State governors in the USA dream of merging higher education into a great collective virtual university. Will it ever be real? Will the knowledge media change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge?
Which brings me to question six. Why does all this marvellous technology seem to make so little difference to the real world of education?
Why?
Because our educational systems are driven by teaching rather than learning, by the needs of teachers rather than students.
I must justify that statement. That means going back to the essentials of technology-based education.
Point 1. There are basically only two approaches to technology-based education: one targets individual learning; the other focuses on group teaching.
Point 2. Group teaching is based on synchronous communication. Teachers and students must communicate in real time. This is a teacher-centred form of education.
Point 3. Individual learning thrives on asynchronous communication. You create the school or the university where and when the student wants it. This has to be a student-centred approach.
Those three points are all you need to know in order to use technology strategically. They reveal that the individual learning tradition of technology-based education has much more to offer, in terms of wider access, lower cost and greater flexibility, than remote-group teaching.
The mega-universities focus on individual students and the success of their pioneer, the Open University, has already had a global impact on higher education.
Why?
There are four keys to the success of the Open University:
- One: high quality multiple media learning materials produced by multi-skilled academic teams.
- Two: dedicated personal academic support. Each Open University student is allocated to one of the OU's 7,500 adjunct faculty who comment on and mark the student's assignments, hold group meetings, moderate computer conferences and give support by phone and e-mail.
- Three: superb logistics. Each individual student and faculty member must receive the right materials and the right information at the right time. With over 150,000 students spread around the world that requires care.
- Four: a strong research base. When thousands of students use the materials for each course and millions of people view the associated TV programs the content must be academically unassailable. Big economies of scale give the Open University the academic horsepower to move intellectual paradigms forward.
I realise that to focus on individual learning, rather than group teaching, may be a difficult paradigm shift. Teachers are important. But teachers are there for the learners.
In a world seeking better access, lower costs and greater flexibility, learning productivity is what counts.
Things are changing. In only two years an infatuation with videoconferencing has been superseded by a love affair with Web-based teaching. But the focus is still on teaching rather than learning.
There's too much of what Tony Bates, of the University of British Columbia, calls the Lone Ranger and Tonto approach.
The Lone Ranger is the faculty member who thinks the world would be a better place if everyone had instant access to his lecture notes.
Tonto is the graduate student who actually puts this timeless academic material onto the Web because the faculty member doesn't have the requisite multi-media programming skills.
But will the end product of this idiosyncratic process help students or enhance the reputation of the institution that does it.
Dare I point out that the Web is not in fact a very interactive medium.
That is the conclusion of those who spend their lives programming for the Web. Here is what they say:
"It is very difficult to build interaction into an Internet application. Most of the applications that have been developed tend to give the impression of being interactive. However, what they usually involve is just the user moving through a series of text and visual images following points to other sections of the text and visual images."
I've asked a number of questions. How do we start to answer them? I suggest that an important first step is for educational institutions to develop technology strategies.
Why? Because a laisser-faire approach, far from enhancing cost advantage and valuable distinctiveness, is likely to increase costs, create excessive differentiation that students will find burdensome, and clog the Web with garbage.
It is because of the importance of institutional technology strategies that I am delighted to be speaking at this Xerox event. It seems to me that the technologies that Xerox are now offering can be a powerful support to an institutional technology strategy.
I particularly like the emphasis that Xerox places on the term 'document'. That is a very comfortable term for educators. Documents are fundamental to the transmission of culture between the generations that is fundamental to education at all levels. Documents are fundamental to the manipulation of written and numerical symbols and graphic representations that is the basis of university study.
The essence of documents is the symbols they transmit. Those symbols may be carved in stone, printed on paper or projected on a screen. Different media are suitable for different purposes. At the Open University we provide parts of our courses on CD-ROMs which we give to the students to keep. We find that many students print out large amounts of text from these CD-ROMs.
Is that because they feel secure with paper? Will people gradually feel less need to have paper? Possibly. But the point is that we must deal with people as they are and the Xerox approach does that by bridging the paper and digital worlds.