The 8th Cambridge International Conference on Open and
Distance Learning
Madingley Hall, Cambridge
28 September 1999
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
Introduction
I am honoured to have been invited to give this keynote address because this particular conference has acquired a very special place in the affections and in the calendar of all those who approach distance learning with a particular concern for the student. That category should embrace all those who are involved in distance learning but we all know that it doesn’t.
Some are in the distance learning business for the money they hope it will earn for them. Some are in distance learning because it seems like a promising application for the particular technology that they are infatuated with. Some are in distance learning because they think it will help their institution to survive and prosper. I could extend that list.
But you are here - and many of you are regulars at this conference - because, from modest beginnings, this gathering has become the best place to discuss good practice in the provision of support to students. Partly because student support is a down-to-earth activity involving real people this conference has always had a straightforward, no-nonsense style. The other reason for that pleasant, pragmatic style is the role of Roger Mills in initiating and sustaining this conference series over the years.
I am very sorry that Roger is away this year because of illness and I know we all wish him a speedy recovery. As Regional Director and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the Open University Roger always has the interests of students uppermost in his mind and this conference reflects that stance.
Given what I have said about the style of this conference you may feel that the title I have chosen is pretentious and out of place. That title is Purposes, Technologies and Values. But I’ve chosen it for two reasons.
First, you are already believers in and practitioners of distance education. You don’t need me to give a stirring exhortation about its virtues. I can take for granted your commitment to distance education and your competence in doing it.
Second, distance education is now centre stage in the discourse about the future of higher education. We have moved from periphery to mainstream in a very few years. Being in the mainstream obliges us to address some of the preoccupations of the academic mainstream. I’ve chosen three such preoccupations: purposes, technologies and values.
I shall look at these preoccupations in the context of university-level distance learning. That’s not because I want to depreciate the importance of distance learning at other levels. The role of distance learning in education and training is growing at all levels and in all circumstances. However, university-level distance learning is what I know about, and university-level distance learning is where there is a particular need for us to have a clear discourse.
You know Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Distance learning is now caught on the horns of that dilemma.
Not very long ago we all wished that the world would take more interest in what we did and show more appreciation of the virtues of distance learning. Today we must often wish we could be released from the close embrace of Wall Street, the technology companies and the media. With a guru like Peter Drucker announcing the imminent demise of campus education right-thinking people have suddenly discovered how important distance learning is. Where were they when we needed them?
But this not the time to retreat back into our shells. We have laboured long and hard to get recognition for distance learning. It would be churlish of us to refuse that recognition just because it doesn’t always take quite the form we might wish. We have a chance to flow in the middle of the educational stream. My aim today is to think with you about the implications of that.
The Open University now has some 30,000 people taking our courses outside the UK, either for our own credit and awards or those of other universities such as the Open University of Hong Kong. This has given us a wonderfully diverse student body.
In Europe alone OU students have over 100 countries of birth and over sixty first languages. This diversity has been very good for us in all sorts of ways. In particular, it has made us a better university academically because it is obliging us to challenge our assumptions of normality and make our perspectives explicit.
You can challenge my assumptions of normality later, but let me make by perspectives explicit now. I was going to say that I speak to you with three hats on – representing three roles. Actually those roles blend together so completely that they make up one variegated hat. Some might say a jester’s hat. What are the three roles?
First I speak to you as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University and a proud sponsor of this conference. My day job is to guide the destinies of a large and successful distance teaching university. Since I last spoke to this conference I have added a night job, which is to be President of the United States Open University, the sister university that we set up last year. Here we are launching a brand new distance teaching university, so issues of purposes, technologies and values are very much in my mind.
One of the curious features of having these two jobs is that I find myself sandwiched between two chancellors. Let me bring you greetings from both.
The Chancellor of the Open University is the Right Honourable Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons. She is the titular head of the University but expects me to run it. She is a wonderful Chancellor with an extraordinary rapport with our students and a great interest in the international implications of our work. She sends you her best wishes to you.
The Chancellor of the United States Open University is Dr Richard Jarvis, who took office at the beginning of this month. There the roles are reversed. As President I am the titular head of the USOU but I expect Richard, as Chancellor, to run it.
He comes with a tremendous academic and administrative record at the State University of New York and, most recently, as Chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada. I should also note, because of where we are, that on the way he acquired a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in Mathematical Geography from Cambridge University. He is in the UK at this moment, getting to know colleagues at the OU here and he sends his greeting to you.
My second role, or the second part of my jester’s hat, is that of scholar or better, scholar practitioner. Three years ago after some research on the challenges that new technologies pose for universities of all kinds, I published my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. What has surprised me is the success this book this book has enjoyed in the United States, where there aren’t any mega-universities; and in campus universities where distance education is a novelty. This summer I had to write a new introduction for the fifth printing, which was a useful pretext for reflecting again on issues of purposes, technologies and values.
My third role is that of a student. I have been a student for much of my career and since coming to the Open University I have completed a diploma in theology, a master’s degree in educational technology and, just last week, a new Open University course called T171 You, Your Computer and the Net.
One of the nice things about working in distance education is that you can take a course from your own university without embarrassing the instructors, so many OU staff are also OU students. Indeed, both of the senior OU colleagues with whom I happened to have regular meetings last week were also taking courses – all different – and we were able to compare notes on our experience. This is healthy in two ways: first it means we walk the talk about lifelong learning; second it gives us direct knowledge of the OU’s strengths and weaknesses.
Six hundred years ago, in one of the earliest literary references to an academic, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about the Clerk of Oxenford, one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. After noting that he preferred books to fine clothes and had little money, he described him with the lovely line:
"And gladly wolde lerne, and gladly teche"
I like that for two reasons. First this early academic does his work gladly and so should we. Second he learns before he teaches, and there is a lesson for us too. Lifelong learning is not new, it’s just insufficiently practised.
Purposes
Which is a good introduction to my comments about purposes. What are we trying to achieve? Here I want to look beyond our day-to-day work of serving students and look at our endeavours in the wider context. Distance learning is moving into the mainstream of university education. What is that about? What should it be about?
In the end it boils down to a simple dogma. And it is a dogma. I don’t think you can deduce it from first principles. You just have to believe it. That dogma is that knowledge is important. It sounds terribly trite. Isn’t it something that we all take for granted in our so-called knowledge economy? No doubt we do, and that is why I want to dwell on it for a minute and make a few quick points.
First, for all the progress of education, learning and research, we are still a pretty ignorant lot. Sometimes the knowledge we claim to have does not go very deep. Some of you will be aware of the work of Howard Gardner at Harvard, who showed that a significant proportion of top engineering graduates did not really understand Newton’s Laws of motion. More generally he has found that many adults have an understanding of the natural world based on the assumptions of five year olds.
It seems that although scientists may reach consensus, it has little impact on the views of the population at large or on the views of potential leaders. Earlier this month, for example, The Economist reported the expressed views on evolution of some of the candidates in the US presidential race.
Steve Forbes, the second most popular Republican candidate, asserts that:
“a lot of what we thought was true (about evolution) is not true”.
Al Gore, who had previously argued that science has a place in schools, has now changed tack saying:
“localities should be free to teach creationism as well”.
George Bush is clearly sitting on the fence with one ear to the ground on each side:
“I believe (children) should be exposed to different theories about how the world started”.
Whereas Gary Bauer, for the Reaganite Republicans simply says:
"I reject the basic tenet of (evolutionary) theory... and so do most Americans"
He is, of course, right. Gallup polls show that only 10% of Americans say they hold a secular evolutionist view of the world. 40% believe in strict biblical creationism. Four million also believe they have been abducted by aliens. The good news is that so far, at least, none of the candidates is proposing that the schools teach survival courses for those threatened with alien abduction.
But my aim here is not to poke fun. Although they would shudder at the thought, these politicians are victims of the downside of developments in academic thinking like post-modernism and deconstructionism. From the idea that knowledge is a construct that depends on the history and context of the individual it is an easy jump, in a democratic society, to the idea that my views on any subject are just as good as yours or anyone else’s views. That is the idea we have to fight.
Our task – our key purpose – is to inculcate the academic mode of thinking which is one of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit. It is the mode of thinking that uses reason and argument to assess evidence. It uses imagination to develop hypotheses and reasoned experiment to test them. It is the best way that humanity has found to build the house of knowledge on solid foundations. If knowledge is important then the academic mode of thinking is our most vital tool.
The importance of knowledge and of the academic mode of thinking as a tool to develop knowledge, is integral to our second key purpose, which is education. Education comes from the Latin educere meaning to lead out. The process has many facets and takes place in many stages.
At the stage of higher education a key aim must be to lead students to an appreciation of the quality of the knowledge that is held up before them. We must lead them to develop an attitude of systematic scepticism for two main reasons, first so that we are not misled and second so that we are not coerced.
I mean avoiding being misled by slogans such as the knowledge economy and the selfish gene. Genes are not people and the knowledge economy, which presumably means the shift from manpower to brainpower, has been going throughout this century. Most importantly we need to know how little we really know. In the words of the former editor of Nature, John Maddox, in his book What remains to be discovered:
"What stands out, is that there is no field of science that is free from glaring ignorance, even contradiction."
By avoiding coercion I mean having the knowledge and the power of reasoning to make our own judgements about the solutions proposed by those in power. One way that power corrupts is that those in power draw conclusions, from their own imperfect knowledge, about how society should be organised. Some of them then try to impose these solutions. Nazism and communism are two examples of the process that have blackened the record of this century.
There will always be groups, corporations, governments and majorities of our fellow citizens who may try to curtail our freedoms or lead us in dangerous directions. Thomas Jefferson said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Knowledge and the ability to think clearly are what we should be inculcating in our students so that they can maintain that vital vigil.
By now you must be thinking that this is heady stuff but that it bears little relation to the real world of young students seeking a modicum of instruction in IT skills and business management so that they can find employment. Fair point, but there is a new element in the educational equation, something that we, as distance educators, are well-placed to take with us into the mainstream of education.
That new element is lifelong learning. Lifelong learning has been a political slogan for some years already. It is making progress painfully slowly. Two weeks ago I attended the annual residential meeting of the vice-chancellors of the UK’s universities. In the official language all the right things were being said about lifelong learning, mature students, part-time study and the like.
But the lapses when vice-chancellors and ministers are speaking extemporaneously show where we really are. The minister who talked about higher education being for ‘young people’ and the vice-chancellor who said our collective task was to be attractive to ‘students and their parents’. However, we all know how easy it is to lapse from the language of political correctness. The good news is that slow progress is being made.
But there is one penny that has still to drop. People used to talk about lifelong learning as a ladder of learning that you could climb through life. Then they realised that it’s not a ladder. In terms of levels people go downwards and sideways. For example, since my doctorate, I’ve done another master’s degree and a diploma and last week I finished a first year undergraduate course.
A climbing frame is a better metaphor. And once you accept that, you realise that there is more than one place to start. I would argue, in particular, that in the age of lifelong learning it will make more sense for young people beginning higher education to focus on fairly vocational courses. It seems that many of them want to do that anyway and have little time for the more rarefied skills like the academic mode of thinking that I talked about a moment ago.
It is as mature people that they may be more ready to tackle - and more interested in exploring - a broader sample of the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Should we target the teaching of more academic knowledge at such people?
Before you accuse me of being a person in power ready to coerce others on the basis of a hypothesis derived from partial knowledge, let us look at some evidence. I don’t regard it at conclusive, but I do find it interesting.
Two years the UK conducted a major survey of graduates with the aim of trying to define a concept called graduateness. The basic question was: how is someone changed by doing a university degree? Graduates from all universities were included in the sample and, not surprisingly, the results did not differ greatly from institution to institution, except in one case. Graduates from the Open University, much more than graduates from elsewhere, said that university study had changed their lives.
At first sight that is odd. After all, the average age of OU students on entry is 34 so you would think their lives had achieved a degree of stability. Comments about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks come to mind. Conversely, you might think that the young, malleable students who study full-time at university after secondary school would be changed by the experience of university. No doubt they are, but if so they are much less aware of it than our older OU students, perhaps because it is mixed in with the general process of maturation.
How do Open University graduates say that study has changed them? Like all graduates they find that the degree has made them more employable. However, our mature students give greater importance to personal development than to employability. The American author Patricia Lunneborg has written two books, OU Women and OU Men, based on in-depth interviews with Open University graduates.
They mention new careers, better job opportunities, more self-confidence, a sense of achievement, more opportunities in life and new friends as the results of their studies. I particularly appreciated the man who told her, with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation, that ever since doing a degree with the Open University he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question. That is what it is all about, the inculcation of the academic mode of thinking that makes hypotheses, and the development of the systematic scepticism that examines the evidence.
If young full-time students gravitate increasingly to vocationally related courses and approach their university experience with more utilitarian and instrumental attitudes there is a danger that they may graduate with little proficiency in the academic mode of thinking and an attitude of credulity to authority and the tabloids rather than systematic scepticism.
On the evidence I’ve given it may be somewhat later, as lifelong learners, that they become mature students in both senses of the term: ready to seek understanding; more alert to the nature of knowledge; open to a discourse about what can be known.
Each year, at our twenty-five degree ceremonies, many thousands of Open University graduates comment to me individually about their studies. A surprising number do second, third and even fourth baccalaureate degrees. I’ve often heard the comment, ‘I’m now studying properly what I only did superficially as a young student doing my first degree’.
You get my drift. University education, in its fullest sense, may well be wasted on the young. It is only later, as minds are matured by life experience, that they are ready for real university study. That gives distance education a more prominent role than it has claimed in the past in promoting fundamental academic values.
Perhaps we are returning to an older human tradition which valued the wisdom of older people. You could argue that for most of this century we have tried to provide wisdom through the university education of a small elite of very able young people. Now that we are educating many more young people beyond school it is natural that we focus on making them occupationally competent rather than precociously wise.
But there is more. There is evidence that university study as a mature person makes a proportion of people more likely to get involved in the life of the wider community. I expect that Open University data is typical. 46% of our graduates report an enhanced interest in current affairs, reading non-fiction and watching more serious TV programs. 40% said that as a result of their studies they had become more interested in helping people in need. 20% had become more involved in cultural activities. 10% had become more involved in political activities. These are minority percentages which imply that the behaviour and interests of the majority of graduates do not change on these dimensions. But that’s fine, we are talking about education, not brainwashing.
Nevertheless, those who change are substantial minorities. Those percentages, applied to an OU graduating class exceeding 10,000 each year, are a contribution to a more cohesive society that becomes very significant if you add in similar proportions of the mature graduates from all universities.
This assumes, of course, that engagement with the wider community is a good thing, but I plead guilty to that charge. A future where we simply live and move nervously in and between the electronic security of our separate gated communities, be they smart condominiums, prisons, universities or office buildings, is not one that appeals to me.
I find it interesting that 10% of OU graduates get more involved in political activities. Some universities, especially in the USA, have become concerned about the utilitarian and self-centred attitudes of their students. They have set up programmes to get them involved in the community. They find that it is easy to get students interested in grassroots community activity and giving help to individuals but very difficult to get them interested in the political process. I have the impression that young students here have a similar scepticism about politics.
Older students may also have a low opinion of politicians but they also realise, more than the youngsters, that politics matters because society works in certain ways. I’m simply suggesting that, apart from the few young aspirants who aim to move effortlessly from office in the Oxford or Cambridge Unions to a seat in the Cabinet, it may be our older graduates who have more potential to change politics for the better.
Thomas Jefferson, who is arguably the greatest public figure that the modern world has produced, said that humanity divides into two groups. There are those who fear and distrust the people and those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. It makes me proud that one product of Open University study is numbers of graduates who identify with the people and do something about it in the Jeffersonian tradition.
Those who have confidence in the people have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition. However, our power structures usually see the consciousness of the citizenry as a danger which must be lulled and channelled towards the inoffensive and superficial. We each have our views on where to raise the consciousness of our fellow citizens. The point of producing graduates who engage with the community is not to channel its concerns in a particular direction but to encourage the general civic consciousness that is the foundation for decent democracy.
For me the Canadian author John Ralston Saul makes a persuasive analysis. In his book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West he argues that since the Enlightenment we have perverted the use of reason by confusing it with technocratic expertise. We have become a society that wants instant answers from experts to each new question. Saul argues that a mature society should often prefer to live in doubt than to put its faith in such instant answers. I hope that my Open University graduate who cannot see less than six sides to any question will contribute to a society that is comfortable with doubt.
In that respect such graduates, whether from the Open University or from your programs of distance education, can provide a vital counterweight to the false certainties of the experts. Saul recalls that for the Romans sensus communis meant humanity and sensibility as well as common sense. Our more restricted use of the term common sense is, as he puts it, ‘the narrowing effect of a civilisation which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions’.
So much for purposes. I hope that those comments about the superior qualities of mature graduates have challenged you thinking about the purposes of distance education. What about the technologies we use for it?
Technologies
I suspect that one of the distinctive features of this particular gathering of distance educators is that you are not particularly fixated on technology. Today that makes you unusual. While the current infatuation with distance learning may have something to do with perceptions of the changing lifestyles and expectations of students most of it, especially in the United States, is technology driven.
It’s all reminiscent of Toad, in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. You will recall how Toad’s life was a succession of crazes. He had a craze about horse drawn caravans until one day an automobile forced his caravan into the ditch. He then had a craze about cars.
You see the same phenomenon in distance education. Three years ago you could attract thousands – far more than at this conference about mere students – to conventions about video-conferencing to remote classrooms. Yet today that technology has joined Toad’s caravan in the ditch. There is only one technology now – the web.
Let me make a few quick points because I must not outstay my welcome.
First, this is not the end of history. The web is certainly not the culmination of technological development. Second, the web has many very appealing characteristics as an electronic form of correspondence instruction. It goes everywhere. Well not quite. It’s not as universal as the postal service but it does provide a world-wide network for those who can afford it.
It is instantaneous – more or less. It can be driven by individual teachers – you don’t need all the paraphernalia of course teams and media developers that we often associate with distance learning. It’s interactive – which is the holy grail of education. But how interactive is it really?
The intellectual forefathers of the web – and I think of people like Vannevar Bush and his article As We May Think published over 50 years ago in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945 – stressed that human beings think in an associative way. Hypertext links are a brilliant aid to associative thinking. But in the documents we find on the web those links are someone else’s associative thinking.
If, by interaction, we mean a response that is specific to your own particular input then, as my colleague Diana Laurillard puts it: hypertext is ‘no more interactive than writing in the margins of a book’ because the system remains neutral to whatever the student does. By connecting associated items of information hypertext is a good information retrieval system, but this very fact makes it inimical to academic knowledge.
To quote Diana again:
‘Academic knowledge ... is not reductive; it is unitary, indivisible. In education we want to preserve the relationship between what is known and the way it comes to be known, so the notion of a fragment of information has no place in that kind of analysis. ... If there is any relationship between knowledge and information it is contrastive, the one unitary/holistic, the other elementary/atomistic’ (Laurillard, 1993:123).
In their book on the Java programming language Freeman and Ince (1996) highlight the same problem from a different perspective:
'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 pointers to other sections of the text and visual images. The most one often gets with the vast majority of Internet applications is some small amount of interactivity, for example an application asking the user for an identity and a password and checking what has been typed against some stored data which describes the user.'
Since the web is our modern icon I’d better leave that there rather than ruin my reputation by further iconoclasm – but I leave those views with you.
My main point about technologies is that there are two kinds, soft technologies and hard technologies. The hard technologies use bits and electrons. The soft technologies revolve around approaches and processes. The key to success in distance learning is to get the soft technologies right. These are division of labour, specialisation, teamwork and project management. It is these approaches which are crucial to the four pillars of quality which uphold the success of the Open University namely: high quality study materials; personal academic support to each student; slick logistics; and an academic community rooted in research.
Those qualities all depend more on the soft technologies of process than the hard technologies of the web or any other medium. Putting it another way, if you get the soft technologies right the hard ones will take care of themselves.
I am, of course, aware that some see the advent of the web as putting an end to all this talk of distance educators about division of labour and teamwork. Doesn’t the web return us to the comfort of the world where the individual teacher can do their own thing once they learn how to save their lecture notes in HTML? I don’t think so, but we might discuss that after I’ve made some final remarks about values.
Values
I have the privilege of leading an institution that has a very strong value system and I like it that way. Fairly obviously the key value of the Open University is openness. Our traditional mission is to be: open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
To this the United States Open University has added, for its own mission, to be open as to time and open to the world.
So far we have interpreted openness primarily in terms of the external world. As a British institution the Open University does not entirely escape the British love of secrecy in its internal life. I remember being impressed that in my first month as Vice-Chancellor of the OU I had more documents marked Strictly Confidential and Restricted cross my desk than I had seen in five years as President of Laurentian University in Canada.
Success in the world of the web requires great internal openness and that is something we are working on. Another value that we hold dear, not just because it’s fashionable today but because Jennie Lee, one of our founders, built it in from the start, is quality. We don’t just hold quality dear, we achieve it. Britain has a national quality assessment system for university teaching which is pretty rigorous. The OU has now had 17 subjects assessed and we’ve been rated as ‘Excellent’ in 11 of them. That proportion, nearly two-thirds of programmes judged as excellent, puts us in the top ten of the hundred UK universities for quality of teaching.
What is even more interesting is the subjects in which we have been rated excellent. They are Business and Management, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, Biology, Geography, Music, Psychology, Sociology, Social Policy and Administration, and General Engineering. Who says that science and technology cannot be taught well at a distance? And of course the people making these judgements are academics from campus universities, which makes it all the more remarkable.
The next value that I am sure we all share at this particular conference is student-centredness. The Open University would not have scored those excellent ratings for its teaching without a high degree of student centredness. However, much of your discussion here is about students so I’ll leave that discussion to other sessions rather than be accused of spouting platitudes.
Let me end with a more controversial value. The Open University is a public, not-for profit, institution which exists to serve the public. At a time when there is a fashion for creating for-profit enterprises in distance education I find it important to restate the value of public service education. I am, of course, well aware that not-for-profit status does not automatically lead to student-centredness, quality and openness. Britain has a worse history than most countries of letting its public institutions drift into being run by the trades unions for the benefit of the employees. However, I do believe that the worst of that era is behind us.
I am also aware that the best of for-profit institutions are acutely aware of the need to provide customers with good service if they want to stay in business. However, at the end of the day a for-profit institution exists to return money to its shareholders. Let us not forget that the earlier history of for-profit distance education, which was called correspondence education, was not particularly happy.
I have mentioned one famous article in Atlantic Monthly. Let me mention another, Jessica Mitford’s paper entitled Let Us Now Appraise Famous Authors which appeared in 1970. It was a devastating exposure of one American correspondence school and famous people who lent their name to it – and it led to new regulatory frameworks for correspondence education around the world. Let us not forget that the electronic correspondence education that we now call online learning is even more tempting to unscrupulous operators that correspondence education using the postal service.
But a more important point takes me back to the beginning of these remarks. I suggested that the purpose of the enterprise that you and I are involved in derives from the principle that knowledge is important. That is a principle that invites an infinite commitment because there is always more knowledge to be created, discovered or understood.
I realise that public, not-for-profit institutions do not have infinite resources. However they do have, or can have, a frame of mind which is always striving for the next crest and always reinvesting in the next project, rather than saying – “that’s good enough, let’s now distribute the profits to the owners”.
There then, at somewhat greater length than I intended, are some of my current thoughts about purposes, technologies and values in modern distance education. I hope they will provide some nourishment to your discussions here in Cambridge and I thank you for inviting me along.
References
Bush, V (1945) As We May Think Atlantic Monthly – July (see http://www.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/vbush-all.shtml)
Daniel, JS (1996) Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education Kogan Page, London
Freeman, A and Ince, D (1996) Active Java: Object-oriented programming for the World Wide Web Addison-Wesley, Wokingham
Grahame, K (1908) The Wind in the Willows Methuen, London
Laurillard, D (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology Routledge, London
Lunneborg, P (1994) OU Women Cassell, London
Lunneborg, P and Daniel JS (1997) OU Men: Working Through Lifelong Learning Lutrerworth Press
Maddox, J (1998) What Remains to be Discovered The Free Press, London
Mitford, JL (1970) Let Us Now Appraise Famous Authors Atlantic Monthly 226, pp.45-54
Saul, JR (1992) Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West Penguin, Toronto.