August 16-21, 1998
Comments by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
I have been asked to address two questions about the impact of technological change on university leadership. First, how is the development and adoption of information technologies affecting the learning experience? Second, do technological developments hold promise for the sharing of university expertise and resources within the Commonwealth? I shall make five comments in response to each question.
1) It is useful to distinguish between information technology as professional tools, (e.g. word-processing and desktop publishing software, spreadsheets), and information technology applied to the learning experience itself. The first manifestation of IT is already having a considerable impact on the way students work. My own observation is that access to word-processing and desktop publishing packages has significantly improved the written work of both faculty and students. Spreadsheets are a very helpful tool in many disciplines.
2) The direct application of information technology to the learning experience is patchy in all countries. This is because the focus has been on the technology of devices at the classroom level rather than on the technology of processes at the institutional level. This situation is unlikely to change until university leaders take responsibility for developing and implementing technology strategies within their institutions. I have explored the context and the reality of technology strategies for universities in my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (1).
3) The first step in developing a technology strategy is to start from a broad definition of technology. The definition that we use for our students at the Open University is that technology is “the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines” (2). This definition reminds us that technology is more than devices with screens that plug into the wall. In creating a technology strategy within a university it is important to think of technology as approaches, rules and processes and, crucially, to understand that the strategy will be introduced within a social system made up of sceptical students and faculty. In this framework the important approach is to rethink the university as a learning system involving the whole institutional community. This is a radical change from the traditional approach in which individual academics have responsibility for planning their course curriculum, organising the learning environment, instructing the course and, in some jurisdictions, examining student achievement. This traditional model is a robust process that makes few organisational demands on the university. It is not, however, a useful starting point for gaining the real benefits of the application of IT to the learning experience.
4) The most successful examples of learning systems that have applied technology successfully to the learning experience are the mega-universities. These are the eleven large distance teaching universities, three of which are in the Commonwealth, that enrol over 100,000 students each and over three million between them. They have applied technology to the student experience in ways that have allowed them to address successfully the crises of access, cost, and flexibility that assail universities world-wide – and notably in most Commonwealth countries.
5) The key to the success of the mega-universities is that their learning systems are based on two other process technologies, division of labour and distance education. Division of labour, which is the key to economy and quality in applications of technology in other areas of human endeavour, is also the key to the application of IT to the learning experience in higher education. To have courses developed by one group of academics, tutored by another group, and examined by a third seems like a radical change. However, the same notions of division of labour and teamwork are already commonplace in the research function of universities. The experience of the mega-universities is that these approaches create a more stimulating intellectual environment for both students and faculty. Two rather different approaches to distance education are used by the mega-universities. The China TV University system uses a satellite-based remote classroom system to bring televised lectures to an enrolment of 700,000. All the other mega-universities use mostly asynchronous technologies to bring courses to individuals at home or in the workplace. The evidence suggests that the asynchronous approach yields greater economy, flexibility and quality. The Open University, for example, ranks 10th out of the 100+ UK universities on national assessments of teaching quality and yet operates at a cost per full-time equivalent student that is around half that of the average of the rest of the system. The radical change that asynchronous distance learning brings to higher education is that the quality of the learning experience increases with scale. The insidious link between quality of outcome and exclusivity of intake has been broken. This is true both for developing course materials (more students allow larger investments) and for networking. The UKOU now has 40,000 students on-line from home and the richness of communication they generate is testimony to the reality of Metcalfe’s Law (that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of other users).
1) The Commonwealth has played an important part in transforming the concept of academic mobility and intellectual exchange for the world as a whole. Two developments were particularly important. First, the Commonwealth Task Force on Student Mobility realised, in the mid-1980s, that resource constraints and government policy would not allow the physical movement of students between countries to keep pace with growing populations and demand. This led to the creation of the Commonwealth of Learning, whose planning committee I had the honour to chair in 1987-88. I am delighted to be on this panel with the distinguished current president of COL, Professor Dato Raj Dhanarajan. The second development was the establishment of what has now become the Open University of Hong Kong, thanks in good measure to the work of Professor Dhanarajan as Director when it was the Open Learning Institute of Hong Kong. Both COL and the OUHK have been pioneers in encouraging the use of courses and materials developed elsewhere as a way to build universities of quality quickly and economically.
2) The physical movement of students between Commonwealth countries is still important – and very profitable to universities in some of the more developed countries. However, events like the current economic downturn in south-east Asia are leading more and more universities to take distance education courses to students in other countries rather than bringing students from those countries to their own campuses. This is, of course, a very different educational process. Distance education is a high volume, low margin business compared to hosting international students on the home campus. There are also some serious issues of quality assurance to be addressed.
3) International partnerships for distance education are multiplying. The Open University, for example, now has some 25,000 students taking its courses in other countries. Two of its larger partnership schemes are in Hong Kong and Singapore. At the Open University of Hong Kong some 6,000 students take UKOU courses in science, technology and management for OUHK credit. The Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) has some 4,000 students taking courses in its Open University Degree Programme for UKOU credit. It is important to stress the two-way nature of these partnerships. For example, courses developed in Singapore are now being offered to Open University students in the UK.
4) On-line technologies now make it theoretically possible to teach students in other countries through Internet and Web-based courses without setting up any local infrastructure. Although it operates a small world-wide Master’s programme in Open and Distance Learning on this basis, the Open University is cautious about expanding this concept. Experience shows that the local personal and tutorial support provided by partners such as the OUHK and SIM is a key contributor to student success. Mason’s important study Globalising Education (3), which reviews a number of attempts by universities in various countries to offer technology-based teaching internationally, reveals that very few have made any serious attempts to internationalise the content and philosophy of the programme.
5) Thanks in good measure to the Commonwealth of Learning there is a very encouraging record of resource sharing between Commonwealth universities in the development of distance education systems and the application of appropriate technologies to the learning experience. For many years the UKOU helped the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) develop its systems and today IGNOU is very active helping other institutions both within India and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. My hope is that the next decade will see real progress in the development of university-level distance education in Africa. The need is desperate and there are encouraging signs that African countries and institutions are now prepared to make the organisational commitments necessary for success.