Theme: Quality Indicators and Distance Learning
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor: The Open University of the United Kingdom
President: The Open University of the United States
I am delighted to be with you today. I am particularly glad of this chance to pay tribute to the accreditation community in the USA.
I do so as someone whose institution has just been through an accreditation visit and awaits the formal outcome. At the end of last year the Middle States Association, with observers from the North Central and Western associations, came to check out the new Open University of the United States. Naturally, we await Middle States’ decision with great interest but, whatever it is, we found the process a valuable and formative experience. We were most impressed with the quality of the team that Middle States assembled, the courtesy and care with which the preparations and the visit were conducted, and the constructive and perceptive nature of the comments that were fed back to us. USOU, the Open University of the United States, will undoubtedly benefit greatly from the insights that the group shared with us.
So I begin by commending you on an accreditation culture that produces such a good experience for an embryonic institution. I am, of course, aware that higher education accreditation in the United States is in a period of transition and that not everybody thinks everything that you do is wonderful. But please do not abandon the courteous and constructive style of assessment that we experienced from Middle States. In the UK we have had a plethora of quality assurance bodies in education in the 1990s. The evidence shows that the adversarial, even brutish style which some of them can adopt does not deliver the goods. Fear, compliance and defensiveness do not make a soil in which continuous quality improvement can grow.
Your theme is quality indicators and distance learning. My comments on that theme derive from two strands of my experience. First, I have lived for the last eight years in a country that has been seriously, even pathologically, obsessed with the measurement of quality in education.
All this navel gazing has obliged UK academics to get seriously to grips with issues of quality and standards. I myself have had to think them through thoroughly, first because I head the UK’s largest university, and second because the Open University is one of the world’s most successful exponents of distance learning in quality and quantity.
That is my second strand of relevant experience. I have had the great privilege of being involved in the development of university distance education since its modern era began in the early 1970s. For twenty years of my career I’ve been associated with distance teaching in four very different jurisdictions and environments.
It is on that experience that I base these remarks. My title is: Building in quality: the transforming power of distance learning, and I shall organise my comments around ten propositions.
My first proposition is that distance learning is a world of extremes. All generalisations about it are therefore false except for that one.
That makes it comfortable territory for you. You take diversity in higher education as a fact of life. I keep hearing a quotation that may be apocryphal because the allegedly respected figure in American higher education who is meant to have uttered it is never named. It says that if you take the world’s ten best universities, many of them would be American, but if take the world’s ten worst universities they would all be American. That’s probably being hard on yourselves but you do take difference and variety for granted.
Whether on not that snide quote is true of American universities it is certainly a valid comment about distance learning. When you look at the best university education around the world some of it is now distance learning; when you look for the worst, all of it is distance learning. Worst of all, bad distance learning may now be given a new lease of life by the brave new world of on-line teaching.
In any kind of classroom teaching there is some physical contact between teachers and taught. That contact keeps people somewhat honest. Distance learning has no such fetters. Forty years ago it was called correspondence education and those who practised it with integrity had constantly to chase away unscrupulous schools operating from post-offices boxes that did vanishing acts. E-mail addresses are even more ephemeral than post-office boxes so a whole new breed of scam-artists is being attracted to on-line education. This would be a consumer protection issue rather than an accreditation issue except that it may involve accredited institutions.
For years many Indian universities have run shoddy correspondence courses as milch cows to subsidise their campus operations. It was to clean up this activity that the national and state governments of India set up a network of a national and state open universities, giving the Indira Gandhi National Open University a co-ordinating role for all university distance learning in that country.
On-line education will put similar temptations in the way of universities in this country. Accreditors must watch for that when they look at institutions as a totality. Sadly, it seems that present prestige is no protection against future fallibility. Some big-name institutions are putting out shoddy on-line courses with very low student success rates.
So distance learning is a world of extremes. It is now highly fashionable but let us not be naïve. Neither adulation nor condemnation is appropriate. Each manifestation of distance learning must be looked at for what it is.
My second proposition is that distance learning is growing in importance. That’s why you must take it seriously. I illustrate this proposition with an anecdote. Two weeks ago I had the immense privilege of receiving an honorary doctorate from the open university of Thailand. The privilege was the greater because I was the first person from outside Thailand ever to receive this honour.
I was part of a graduating class of 12,000 and we each received our degrees at the hand of the Crown Prince of Thailand in six ceremonies over three days. I note in passing that these highly formal, meticulously organised events, where His Royal Highness gave degree certificates individually to each graduate, were about as far as you can get from the relaxed, slightly shambolic, circus-like atmosphere of most American university commencement exercises. At the UK Open University we pride ourselves on having well-organised degree ceremonies but the Thais made us look like amateurs too.
My point, however, is that Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University now makes the highest single contribution to Thailand’s output of university graduates. Distance learning is no longer a marginal or non-traditional part of academic life in that country. Moreover, the high success rates of the graduates of Thailand’s open university in admission to graduate schools, and the extensive use of the university’s academic materials in the country’s other universities argue that it has achieved academic as well as quantitative leadership.
That is the way the world is going. In twenty years time there may be 150 million university students in the world. It’s a safe bet that a significant proportion of them will be involved in what we call distance learning. Even today the twelve largest open universities, the mega-universities, enrol over 3 million students between them.
But the more important point for you today is that distance learning is not just an extra wing that we are building on to the existing structure of higher education. The proper analogy is that building distance learning into the academy will renovate, refurbish and transform the whole structure for the better.
Your theme is quality indicators and distance learning. My conclusion is that the integration of distance learning, if done well, will drive all higher education to better levels of quality.
How can I make such an outrageous statement? Haven’t I just said that distance learning can be a very poor form of education? Even on its good days, is it not a form of education that invites condescension. Ought we not to exhort its practitioners to work hard so that their efforts might occasionally match the teaching on campus?
My answer is an emphatic no. But why do I think that such condescension is dreadfully misplaced? Why is that patronising attitude in the same category as the clipper captains who were snooty about the early steamships or the makers of horse-drawn buggies who scorned the first automobiles?
Essentially for the same reason.
My third proposition is that good distance learning deploys technologies that are inherently superior to our traditional classroom approaches.
What technologies am I talking about? First, what technologies am I not talking about? I’m not talking about what you may have imagined when I pronounced the word technology. I’m not talking about bits and bytes, electrons and pixels, lasers and satellites, the Net and the Web – important though they may be.
I’m talking about the more fundamental technologies that are expressed in working processes, forms of organisation, approaches to problems. These are the revolutionaries that will leap out of the Trojan Horse called distance learning if the academy allows it through the gates.
Modern distance learning of quality began when higher education was given a challenge to which conventional methods couldn’t respond. In 1970 the Open University was tasked to reach working people all over the United Kingdom, at minimum inconvenience to each of them. My founding predecessor, Walter Perry, told his new staff to start with a first class of 25,000 students but to design the teaching system to suit an individual working in a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland.
So that was the first revolution: to operate on a large scale while focusing right down on the individual learner. In response to this dual challenge the staff couldn’t get away with a teaching system. It had to be a learning system. They had to start with the student, not the teacher. That was radical technological innovation number one!
What elements did the learning system need? First the lighthouse keeper has to have materials to learn from. Interactive materials: not in the sense of lots of buttons to press and mice to click, but in the sense of material that is interesting and engages the student’s mind in an inner discourse.
Second, evidence showed that for most people studying solo is not enough, however good the material. There has to be communication with at least one other person who has already mastered the material of the course. Not just someone who can answer questions, but more usefully, someone who can comment in detail on each student’s attempts, through their assignments, to show mastery and application of the course material.
Third, this needs efficient logistics and administration. Serving 25,000 keepers in 25,000 lighthouses required a sophisticated system for ensuring that the right information, materials and people are in the right place at the right time. Today, when 25,000 has become 150,000 and OU students write exams in 111 countries, sophisticated logistics are even more vital.
Fourth, the lighthouse keeper might have accumulated some university credits before being posted to the lighthouse. The system had to be geared up to counsel adult students and to assess work done elsewhere and give appropriate credit for it.
Fifth, this was to be a university. It would conduct research. Because it teaches at scale it can bring considerable resource to bear on materials development. Because it teaches in a very public fashion it wants to be at the cutting edge in its academic treatment of topics and pace-setting in its presentation of them.
Those were and are the five areas where the Open University has to be fit for purpose, those were and are the activities in which it aspires to set new standards for quality.
So my fourth proposition is that the fundamental technology of good distance learning is focus on the student. Everyone claims to be student centred these days. Good distance learning actually makes that waffle a reality.
Proposition five is that if you try to combine student centredness and large scale you must bring to the academy a radical technological innovation, namely the division of labour.
That, of course, is a big change. In classroom teaching one individual does everything - in true cottage industry style. The instructor plans the curriculum, organises the learning resources, teaches the material, advises the students, assesses their achievement, and reports the results to the administration. Good distance learning divides up this labour
The consequence of division of labour is another innovation: specialisation. Academics take discipline specialisation for granted but specialisation within the teaching function is a radical change. Some faculty can concentrate on developing learning materials; others will provide the interface with students; others prepare exams and assessment material; others mark the examinations. Individual faculty may be involved in more than one activity and people may change the focus of their activity over time. The important innovation is to separate out the tasks and deploy resources so as to do each of them very well.
That leads naturally to the obverse of the coin of specialisation, namely teamwork. Walter Perry, who focused attention on the individual student as lighthouse keeper, also held that the Open University’s most important innovation was teamwork by faculty. This is true both in course development and in the provision of support to students. When you think about it, it’s an interesting reversal of tradition. On campus individual faculty members teach students as groups; in good distance learning groups of faculty members teach students as individuals.
Furthermore, the teams are not just made up of faculty. Running a large multiple media learning system requires a host of specialist skills such as software design, editing, audio-visual production, website construction and instructional design. That requires another break with tradition because there has to be parity of esteem between the faculty and the other highly trained professionals who bring these skills. You can’t build teams on the principle of apartheid between faculty and other staff.
Once you mention teamwork and specialisation you are also talking about project management. Conventional campuses rely on the conscientiousness of individual faculty. However good a time they had the night before they will show up for class and muddle through their teaching. Teamwork also relies on individual responsibility but muddling through isn’t enough. Serious organisation is required.
So those are some of the technological innovations that flow from the original decision to start with the student, design a process for helping each one to learn, and then break it down into its key components. They are division of labour, specialisation, teamwork, parity of esteem and project management.
You will have realised as I listed them what these principles represent. My sixth proposition is that these technologies of good distance learning are also the accepted working styles of today’s advanced knowledge economy. Compared to letting everyone to do their own thing these principles are a superior form of organisation. That is why they promise a future of higher quality for all universities. Good distance learning just happens to be a good Trojan Horse for bringing them into the academy.
You need not fear that these working principles mean suppression of individuality for either student or faculty member. Students transferring to the Open University tell us, often with surprise, that they find more personal support in the OU than they did on campus. A survey in Scotland found Open University students more enthusiastic about all aspects of their teaching system than students in other Scottish universities.
Nor does working in a course team suppress the creativity of individual faculty members. Refining new insights through discussion with other team members makes them more robust. The course team merely carries over into teaching the teamwork and peer review that faculty take for granted in research.
How do we sum up the story so far? Let me express it as proposition seven. In conventional higher education the teacher teaches. In distance learning the university teaches. This is a radical difference with great future promise.
As people concerned with accreditation you should be pleased with this development because your aim is to ensure that universities stand behind what they do and offer reliable quality to their students. While tradition may value faculty members simply for who they are, you are more interested in what they actually do and how well they do it. My experience is that distance learning places faculty members in more productive environment where they operate with more consistent quality.
But that all sounds terribly technocratic and efficiency driven: sweet music to state legislators but, surely, an atonal cacophony to the faculty senate?
No. When they experience it, faculty find the working style I’ve described to be more intellectually and academically satisfying than the conventional cottage industry approach. And that is true not just for working a team developing a new course.
Our 7,000 associate faculty also seem to find their work at the interface between the students and the course highly rewarding. I have already signed hundreds of 25-year service certificates for associate faculty members who have worked with us for a quarter of a century in this capacity. When I ask senior professors at other universities why they continue, year after year, to work with the Open University as part-time associates, they reply that they enjoy the students and the atmosphere of common intellectual purpose that a good distance learning system engenders.
But such warm feelings are all very well. The key point for you, let’s call it proposition eight, is that these approaches to distance learning make it easy to build quality in. The process of dividing the teaching and learning process into its distinct components makes for ab initio quality assurance rather than post hoc quality control.
I should justify that claim by taking you through the four key components of distance learning once again.
As regards the development of materials it’s easy to see how quality gets built in provided – an important proviso – that courses are developed by teams and that all team members have their names on the whole product. Faculty are trained to be critical and they will be critical of each other’s contributions on both academic and pedagogical grounds. The course team is not always an easy environment. Some faculty, very few in my experience, can’t handle this intellectual goldfish bowl. Most faculty, however, feel that the cut and thrust of course team meetings are the reason they chose an academic career.
Last month I visited our partners at Florida State University who are developing a distance learning program in Information Studies. I could see that they were already turned on by the course team approach. They felt liberated by the notion that a course can have a life of its own independently of any individual who may be associated with it.
Indeed, if you are a university president the real worry about course teams is that they may overdo quality. They can easily become perfectionist and spend undue time and money chasing the last 5% of quality in the course.
In the second function, namely supporting the individual student, you can’t assume that quality will take care of itself. You have to build a system. In the case of the Open University it has several components.
First there are full-time faculty whose main job is to recruit, induct, supervise, inspire, monitor - and sometimes fire – the associate faculty in their discipline and region.
Second, we spend plenty of money, up to $2m annually, on training the associate faculty for both their general and their course-related functions. This training, by far the most sophisticated faculty training program in Britain, is one of the benefits that attracts associate faculty to the University.
Third, we monitor carefully the way that associate faculty comment on and mark student assignments. We regard commentary on assignments as a key teaching activity and we want it done well. So central faculty monitor a sample of the million corrected assignments that we handle annually. New associate faculty get monitored more intensively, experienced ones less so. The purpose is twofold. First, it provides formative advice to faculty about how to comment on work in ways that help students. Second, it ensures consistency of marking for the continuous assessment.
As regards logistics and administration, as well as services like guidance and credit transfer, operating at scale with specialisation provides a natural framework for quality assurance systems. Because functions are concentrated, rather than distributed in a hundred cottage industries, you can readily develop benchmarks and performance standards.
Quality does not build itself automatically into all aspects of good distance learning, although that does tend to be true for the course team developing the materials. However, it is relatively easy to build quality assurance into the other functions if the university wants to. We’re back to the institution teaching, rather than the teacher teaching.
So far, so good. But proposition nine is that there must be a catch. There is, and it takes us back to proposition one about distance learning being a world of extremes.
What I have described holds true for forms of distance learning that focus on the student and lead to the modern styles of working that I have described. There is, of course, another approach to distance learning that uses technology to preserve the individual teacher-centred approach.
Today the technology of choice for that approach is the Web. The Web is a wonderful tool. This year 50,000 Open University students are tapping into it for their courses and I am one of them. But the key to effective use of the Web is to make it part of a student centred learning system. Using it for individual faculty to present their lecture notes by Web to the world is a missed opportunity.
Tony Bates, a lucid thinker about technology in teaching, calls this the Lone Ranger and Tonto approach. The Lone Ranger is the faculty member propelled by megalomania or a more noble motive to put course notes on the Web. Tonto is the graduate student who has the Web programming skills to convert his master’s timeless material for the new medium.
There is a nice irony here. Why is it that faculty who might be reluctant to have their own colleagues drop in on their classes are ready to expose themselves in a hostile environment like the Web? There is a real issue here for prestigious universities. For the average person the prestige of a university is mystique blended from the institution’s age, wealth and perceived exclusivity. Reputable universities will suffer if they give their names to shoddy and ineffective on-line courses as some are now doing. It was one thing when only the accreditation teams really saw what went on in universities. It will be quite another if the world can make its own judgements by surfing the Web.
If you believe that the process technologies of distance learning will transform the whole academy for the better then what you must not do is develop separate criteria for the assessment and accreditation of distance learning. That is proposition ten. Distance learning is part of the mainstream agenda of higher education and must be judged as such.
In the UK the Open University fought hard and successfully for the development of quality indicators that would apply to all universities. It did not want any special treatment. This was a risky strategy, because we knew that peers from other universities, who were more familiar with classroom methods, would be sitting in judgement upon us.
However, the strategy paid off. All UK universities have benefited from having a teaching quality assessment system that is independent of the teaching methods used. Teaching is judged on six dimensions:
1) Curriculum design, content and organisation;
2) Teaching, learning and assessment;
3) Student progression and achievement;
4) Student support and guidance;
5) Learning resources;
6) Quality assurance and enhancement.
Teams of assessors express their judgement of quality on each dimension on a four-point scale, which means you can score a maximum total of twenty-four. I am delighted to say, having prepared you appropriately, that in the most recent national assessment, which was of General Engineering, the Open University scored the maximum of 24/24, leaving Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College, London, licking their wounds with only 23/24.
As in the USA, the British press is much given to publishing league tables about universities. It’s good clean sport that keeps university presidents on their toes. The most telling UK league table ranks universities by the proportion of the disciplines they teach in which they are rated as excellent. On the twenty-four point scale I mentioned, twenty-two or above is considered to be an excellent grade. Out of just over 100 universities there are about 15 that have had more half of their programmes rated as excellent and I am proud to say that the Open University ranks at number 10 in this distinguished elite.
Furthermore in most disciplines where the OU rates as excellent it is teaching more students than all the other excellent-rated universities put together. That is the real revolution: quality and quantity at the same time. A deeply disturbing idea for those, and I expect that means most of you, who assume, implicitly if not explicitly, that in education quality means exclusivity.
I challenge you to jettison that outworn assumption and I wish you well in your work of enhancing the quality of American higher education. I hope my ten propositions have convinced you that distance learning can be a tremendous ally in that process. Embrace it. Don’t be afraid to inhale. But above all, be lucid. There is good distance learning and there is bad distance learning. You have the power to see that the good drives out the bad. I wish you all well and I challenge you to disprove Winston Churchill’s famous statement that “America will always do the right thing – after having exhausted all other possibilities”.
Thank you.