American Association of Higher Education
Annual Conference
March 22, 1999
Washington, DC
Session:
Open University – United States: Collaboration or Competition
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University (UK)
President, The Open University of the United States
for related material see
http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/
I am most grateful to Alfredo de los Santos for having the idea of this session, selling it to AAHE and then organising it. It is a real pleasure to be with Sandy D’Alemberte and Charlie Reed on this panel. We have spent many pleasant hours together developing collaborative ventures between our universities and I value today’s opportunity to stand back from these initiatives and to draw some general lessons.
Alfredo, whom I have known for some years as a fellow trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, is an ideal chairperson for this session. He comes from a highly successful and competitive institution, Maricopa County Community Colleges System; he is personally collaborative by nature; and he is a member of the Board of the Open University of the United States.
The title of this session is well constructed: Open University – United States: Collaboration or Competition. My own contribution is in three parts. First, I shall say a little about how the Open University comes to have activity in the United States. Second I shall comment on the creation of the Open University of the United States, which itself is an expression of the tension between collaboration and competition; third I shall try to draw some lessons from three collaborative projects involving the Open University and United States universities. The first two are between The Open University of the UK and Florida State University and California State University respectively. The other is between the Open University of the United States and Western Governors University.
Why is the Open University active in the United States?
No-one planned or foresaw the global reach that the OU has today. The international activities in the early days of the OU focused on consultancy support of the many new open universities that were created in various countries in the 1970s and 1980s. We are proud of the subsequent development of those institutions. The OU had an office in the USA for a number of years and developed a relationship with the University of Maryland in particular.
However the OU’s international work today is different in scope, scale and style from those early initiatives. I illustrate this with a few figures. In the 1998 final examination session Open University students wrote their examinations in 111 countries. In 1999 there are about 140,000 students taking OU degree-credit courses in the UK and about 30,000 students taking such courses outside the UK. We teach directly in the other countries of the European Union, Norway and Switzerland and through partnerships in 23 other jurisdictions. Governments in 19 of those jurisdictions are providing some financial support to the ventures. How did this happen?
When the Open University began operations in 1971 admission was limited to people over the age of 21 resident in the United Kingdom. However, OU students turned out to be mobile people who asked to continue their studies when posted overseas. We agreed to provide a basic service and that is how we come to have students writing exams in over a hundred countries today. The numbers of OU students in the rest of Europe grew steadily and in the early 1990s we decided to extend eligibility for admission for individuals to the whole of the European Union.
About the same time, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were approached by groups in eastern and central Europe who had concluded that open university methods were the best answer to the challenge of education and training that they faced in adapting to a new world. So we developed partnerships in various countries and translated a range of courses into Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and Romanian. Today there are over 10,000 students taking those courses for OU credit. We also have significant partnerships in Hong Kong and Singapore, which account for another 10,000 students, and have developed links in various other countries through which students are enrolled and taught.
More recently still we have developed partnerships with corporations, notably with the European headquarters of various multi-nationals, some of which enrol hundreds of their staff in our programs.
In recent years these trends have brought the Open University into the United States. First there are some mobile individual students who write their exams here. Second, some students who first came to the OU in Europe through their multi-national employers are later posted to the USA. The US end of the company not only wants them to continue their studies, but also to enrol other US employees on these high-quality courses. Third, various American universities have expressed interest in working with us and these approaches have led to the partnerships that we are talking about today.
Why create the Open University of the United States?
These trends exist in other countries: mobile individuals, corporate enrolments and partner institutions. However, it is only in the USA that we have set up a sister institution, the Open University of the United States. Why have we done that?
The key reason for setting up USOU is our belief that in the highly developed and sophisticated US higher education system we can make our most effective contribution through the establishment of an independent American university that shares the goals and values of the UK Open University. Three other factors reinforced this approach.
First, when US corporations seek to enrol staff in OU courses they often find that their personnel department will only allow them pay tuition for courses and institutions that are US accredited. Second, the rest of the world, rightly or wrongly, perceives the USA as excessively litigious and the US courts as instinctively hostile to foreign organizations. Third, much as we like the UKOU’s US partner universities, we do not wish to be entirely dependent on them for our presence here.
So the Council of the Open University decided to set up the Open University of the United States as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation registered in Delaware and licensed as an institution of higher education in that state. It has a Board of Governance largely made up of distinguished Americans from various walks of life. Last month that new university achieved candidacy for accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges.
I should also add, for completeness, that we also set up another non-profit corporation, Open University Worldwide (USA) Inc., to look after the business affairs of the Open University in the USA so that USOU can concentrate on academic matters.
Profile of partnerships
With that as background let me comment on our partnerships in the USA. I should stress that our two major partnerships, with FSU and CSU, predated the creation of USOU. Those partnerships are with the UKOU. OUWorldwide (USA), Inc. looks after the business end of things. My colleagues President D’Alemberte and Chancellor Reed can comment on their aims in partnering with the Open University. From our perspective it was natural that the US universities most interested in working with us should be the public universities in states with rapidly growing populations.
When he was Canada’s prime minister Pierre Trudeau used to say that working with the United States is like being in bed with an elephant. However tender and gentle the elephant you have to be alert in case it decides to turn over. These partnerships involved elephants. You only have to look at FSU’s football stadium to know that it is an elephant; CSU with 350,000 students on 24 campuses is clearly an elephant; the OU, from the figures I’ve given, is also an elephant in its own environment.
The interesting point, however, is that while each of us sees the other partner as an elephant we probably see ourselves more like a monkey trying to stay on the elephant’s back. The OU doesn’t feel like an elephant in these partnerships because they involve small teams a long way from home. I suspect that FSU and CSU didn’t feel like elephants because their partnerships with the OU addressed new programmes that were not yet part of the institutional bloodstream. What was the purpose of these programs?
In both Florida and California the state universities are expected to expand numbers significantly over the coming years without a commensurate increase in state funding. This led them naturally to look at the open university model which, as shown by the examples of distance-teaching mega-universities in various countries, is a route to mass access, low costs and high quality.
At FSU the purpose of the partnership is to develop upper division programs in computer science, information studies, and liberal arts in order to offer community college students a convenient way of continuing to the baccalaureate. At CSU the purpose is to introduce a new model for conducting teacher training at scale in order to address the state’s dire shortage of qualified teachers.
I date the beginning of the Florida partnership from summer 1996 when I was invited to address the FSU commencement. The OU has been in discussions with various parts of CSU for most of the same period, but this only turned into a real partnership in 1998 when Charlie Reed moved from being chancellor of the Florida State system to the chancellorship of CSU. In an academic context these are short periods so we are talking about work in progress rather than completed collaborative ventures.
What have we learned about partnerships?
What have we learned about how to make effective a partnership between a campus university or system and the Open University? Put another way, how do you sleep comfortably with an elephant? Sensible people and, no doubt, sensible elephants do not discuss with third parties the intimate qualities displayed by their spouses in the conjugal bed. You will understand, therefore, if I distil our experience of these collaborative ventures into some general and somewhat abstract conclusions.
I’m afraid they may seem blindingly obvious once articulated. All I can say is that since we live in an era of partnerships, and since partnerships frequently go awry, they bear repeating. I hope I will also furnish some insights into the particular challenge of dealing with the Open University. To enable you to keep track I shall identify seven conclusions and two open questions.
Conclusions:
1) The first conclusion is that commitment from the top is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We would not have made the progress we have if President D’Alemberte, Chancellor Reed and I had not urged colleagues on, kept in touch with each other and occasionally banged heads together. Commitment, however, is not enough. Each of us had consciously to create the proper structures and incentives at the operational level. That is a slow process in a university.
2) Second, the most secure incentive for commitment from the top is the prospect of clear benefits to the institution if the venture succeeds. It is important that the perception of those benefits be widely shared in the institution. If it’s merely the president’s hobby horse it won’t work. It is also important that the benefits are seen to be reciprocal between the partners.
I observe that CSU was able to articulate the benefits most clearly since teacher training is a gut political issue in California and CSU is under pressure to deliver something new and significant. In FSU the benefit was clear at the top but the rest of the University needed persuading that distance learning was a valid part of their future. The OU was clear about the benefits it hoped for but, with hindsight, I believe we communicated them poorly.
We had two key aims and an additional hope. First, with distance learning becoming fashionable in the USA, we wanted to help the serious players deliver programs of quality. Having invested thirty years in giving credibility to this form of education we do not want those gains to be lost. There is a real danger that the present multiplication of shoddy online courses could return distance learning to the poor reputation of commercial correspondence education several decades ago.
Second, we wanted appropriate financial recompense for the transfer of know-how and intellectual property to our partners. In retrospect I see that we assumed too readily that our partners understood that imperative. Put another way, the benefits to the OU and the benefits to the partners in the USA were expressed in different terms – primarily political and academic benefits on the one hand and primarily financial benefits on the other - and this lead to misunderstandings. It took us time to realise that American public universities are more used to cashing checks than writing them - especially to another university. Lastly, we also hoped that we ourselves could use some of the courses developed through these partnerships in the UK and elsewhere, including, through USOU, other states of the Union.
3) Conclusion three is that it is best to begin by setting down the objectives and benefits of the venture in writing and translating them into contracts between the institutions. This sounds elementary but is difficult to achieve because lengthy discussions are often necessary before the objectives and the nature of the collaboration become clear enough to be translated into contract terms. In the event we slid into beginning the work before roles and aims were clear. This meant that OU people felt they were sharing valuable know-how with only a vague promise of financial recompense. I take the blame for this. We should have insisted on clarity earlier and our own glacial process for developing legal agreements was part of the problem. Moving our legal work to the USA has begun to remove these delays and we find American lawyers excellent. We have found that negotiations on aims and deliverables are best conducted on neutral territory, such as hotel rooms, rather than on campus.
In that context it is very helpful if the project is under some real time pressure to deliver outcomes. This is clearly the case in California, less so in Florida.
4) Conclusion four is that it is vital for the OU to go into a US university through the right door. For example, the OU had been talking to various bits of CSU for several years to little effect because those bits couldn’t deliver a program into the system. It was only when Chancellor Reed drove the program from the System office that things started to happen. I conclude that if you want to deliver an academic program you must deal with the operating hierarchy and the academic mainstream, not with ancillary units - however well intentioned. I am confident that we have solved the entry-point issue for organizations that want to work with the OU. OU Worldwide acts as the ‘front end’ and knows how to take potential partners immediately to the right place and people in the OU structure.
5) Conclusion five is that distance learning projects need project management. So do collaborative ventures. When you have both together then clear roles are vital. Project management and clear lines of authority are counter-cultural in campus universities so this has been a difficulty in all three partnerships. Time and again my colleagues come back from trips to the States saying, ‘The problem is, no-one’s in charge over there’. The same charge could sometimes be levelled at the OU but much less often I believe. Another comment often heard was ‘Their bureaucracy is even worse than ours!’
Being clear about who is in charge is probably the most crucial issue of all. That person must have the power to make things happen, which takes us back to the point about going in through the right door. It is also a good idea to have an advisory board with OU involvement. This helps co-ordination, increases buy-in and provides a counterweight to the more directive operational structure required. However, the advisory board must be properly serviced so that the record of its advice is clear and the meetings well organised.
6) Conclusion six is that you need faculty buy-in, the commitment of individuals on both sides, and mutual institutional respect. We have found that the best way to deliver this is to have as many players as possible visit the Open University early in the project. This removes doubt about the feasibility of distance learning, provides reassurance about the academic quality of what is proposed, and infects people with some of the idealism that permeates the OU as they begin to understand it. These visits cost money but repay it amply. They also help to focus the purpose of the project more quickly.
A second important tactic is to hold intensive workshops for those involved on both sides at regular intervals through the project. Perhaps the greatest operational difference between distance teaching and classroom teaching is the teamwork that distance teaching involves. We have found that conventional faculty become very enthusiastic about this feature as they get used to it, just as they learn to like the idea that a course can have a life that is independent of any single individual.
A third way of maintaining good communication is to use IT, notably computer conferences. These have particularly obvious benefits in a transatlantic relationship and we were surprised that our US partners did not make more use of them, although FSU is very keen on videoconferencing.
7) My seventh and final conclusion is that it is important to be as open an honest as possible with each other. In these partnerships both FSU and CSU obtained state funds in partial support of the project. In both cases it seems that the involvement of a foreign institution in the work was something of a complicating factor. It is important to keep the OU partner well informed about the nature and conditions of such funding so as to avoid the impression that the OU is being exploited, without proper recompense, for the sole financial benefit of the US partner.
Open questions:
Those are seven conclusions that I think would be generally agreed. Two other issues are less clear cut and I simply list them as open questions.
1) The first concerns symbolism and publicity. Here we encounter a cultural difference. Americans like to announce an initiative with a splash and then do it, landing on the moon being a good example. The British like to achieve something before they publicise it. In this respect the FSU collaboration tended to follow the American model. A smart new joint FSU/OU center, featuring the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack against mahogany panelling, was created in advance of clear definition of the project. The CSU project seemed to follow the British model in that publicity about Cal State Teach, the name given to the program developed in collaboration, was fairly restrained until the project was well under way. Each approach has its pros and cons and choosing one or the other should be a joint decision.
2) The second open issue concerns the division between business and academic functions. Some of my OU academic colleagues say that misunderstandings about the OU’s expectation that the collaboration was both an academic partnership and a business deal could have been avoided if they had dealt with both aspects with their American faculty counterparts. On the other hand OU management colleagues have unhappy experiences of having to unravel inappropriate business arrangements put in place by their academic colleagues in other jurisdictions. The answer must be to apply what we have learned about course development to these projects, and create project teams so that there is good communication between academics and administrators within both partners.
Western Governors University
I mentioned that there is a third partnership in play, that between USOU and the Western Governors University. I shall say very little about this, partly because there is no one here from WGU to put their view, and partly because the dynamics are very different. USOU and WGU are both recent start-ups so analogies with grown-up elephants are inappropriate, even if they like to think of themselves as elephant calves.
I would like to think that the USOU/WGU partnership is acting on some of the conclusions I have just outlined, notably in getting clarity upfront on purpose and contractual arrangements. We have decided to form an alliance but we are still in the process of determining the nature of that alliance. Both boards meet later this week to make decisions about this. Since USOU will begin operations with students in the coming months it is now urgent to bring closure on these negotiations.
Conclusions
I have focused in a low key manner on some of the issues that arise when very different universities from distinct cultures try to work together. I hope that my American colleagues will look at the bigger picture and assess whether these partnerships have advanced the mission of the their universities.