Edinburgh
6 September 1999
Address by Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
Introduction
It is a pleasure and an honour to address this international gathering of university administrators. I very much appreciate the invitation to speak to you because, as will become clear as I talk, I believe that the role of administrators in universities will become substantially more important as methods for the delivery of higher learning and teaching change.
I shall begin by making some general points about innovation in universities. Then I would like to explore the role of technology in innovation. I shall argue that the most important innovation in higher education in the last fifty years has been the creation and growth of the large distance teaching universities that I call the mega-universities. By examining how these institutions use technology successfully we can derive some general conclusions about the innovation. Looking at the adoption of new technology in other fields of endeavour, notably the hi-tech industries, also yields some useful insights.
I have taken as my title: Innovation at Scale in the Delivery of Learning and Teaching:
will the whole be greater than the sum of the parts? The last part of that is very important. It is easy enough to innovate in this or that corner of the university. What is much more difficult is to have a successful institution-wide strategy for innovation through technology. It is in this area that the role of university administrators will be crucial. Your role is to be the glue that holds the academy together and makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
The traditional teaching-learning paradigm
First, then what about innovation? We clearly think it is A Good Thing because we constantly use the word innovative to describe programmes, methods and the design of buildings of which we are particularly proud. We appear to assume that the public likes innovative developments. But I’d like to pause for a moment to ask what we are innovating from. What is the traditional baseline that serves as our comparator when we say that our latest scheme is innovative?
Before I explore that, let me make the obvious point that if we regard innovation as a good in its own right we condemn ourselves to a treadmill of change. If innovation is good in itself, then we know that any innovation we are about to make will soon be superseded by a further development that we can call innovative with respect to the first. In other words, we are implicitly assuming that the innovation we are about to introduce is not the best that can be done. It will soon be obsolete.
These assumptions are, of course, reasonable assumptions about what we call new technology – even if much of it is no longer very new. If you are making computers or telecommunications equipment this is the world you are in. You know that the amount of work you can get out of a given volume of silicon will double every eighteen months, so you know that in eighteen months’ time you or a competitor will be able to build an electronic mousetrap that is cheaper and better than the one you are about to market now.
Nevertheless, we ought to reflect for a moment before carrying over to the activities of universities these assumptions about the virtue of innovation that derive from physical electronic devices. Take another example. How much emphasis do we place on the virtue of innovation when the subject is making love? It seems that at least as early as the Romans human beings had figured out pretty nearly as many angles on that activity as the self-help books contain today. I suspect that when it comes to making love most of us are more concerned to follow well-established practices with care and love rather than imagine that we can invent a totally new amorous technique. If you accept that analogy then the question becomes: where on the spectrum between lovemaking and electronic devices do you place learning and teaching in universities?
The methods of learning and teaching in universities may not have the antiquity of those of love-making but they have established a tradition – or I should say a set of traditions because national academic traditions have a more powerful influence on the use of technology for teaching and learning than we realise. For example, although universities in English-speaking countries normally expect students to construct personal understandings of domains of knowledge, views on the ideal way to encourage this constructivist approach vary from one country to another. In North America the emphasis is on giving the student a chance to question and comment as the teacher presents a topic to a group in a classroom. The British tradition reverses these roles so that, in the ideal of the Oxbridge tutorial, the teacher addresses questions and comments to a student who presents a topic in an essay.
I shall return to this distinction between the North American norm of teaching in a classroom and the British ideal of learning in a tutorial when I discuss distance learning. Suffice it for the moment to observe that small tutorials are now rare in British universities so that, in practice, classroom teaching, whether labelled as a lecture or a seminar, is now the norm in Britain too. So classroom teaching is the starting point for innovation in methods.
People committed to innovation in learning methods bewail the tenacity and longevity of lecturing as the standard university activity, but let us look at its strengths. The essence of this method is that a single individual is responsible for the four key tasks that make up the act of teaching.
First, the individual academic will plan the curriculum for the course. There will be some reference, obviously, to the programme in which the course fits, but the faculty member has a wide degree of latitude to choose the material to be covered.
Second, the same person will organise the learning resources required, whether this be seating the students in a circle instead of in rows or preparing slides, transparencies or computer activities. The university provides some central services to support these functions but faculty members quickly become fairly autonomous in designing, preparing and using their preferred teaching aids.
Third, the same academic will teach the course, usually by standing in front of the class and speaking to them in a more or less formal presentation.
Fourth, in many countries, although less often here in Britain, the faculty member who has taught the course will set and mark both the formative and summative assessments that determine the student’s grade. In Britain the assessment process tends to be organised centrally and also involves external examiners from other universities in an attempt to ensure common standards. But set aside this British idiosyncrasy for the moment. What can we say about this traditional baseline of university teaching?
First, it is a very robust method. Individual academics are flexible and resourceful. They can readily adapt their approach if something goes wrong. When I worked in Canada, for instance, it seemed that in any academic term Murphy’s Law operated and the major snowstorms always came on the same day of the week. If this happened, say, on a Wednesday, then courses taught on Wednesday might lose several lecture sessions in a particular term. The professor would therefore have difficulty covering all the material intended for the course. This of course is a terrible problem for a teacher and the term anupholsteraphobia has been coined to describe this fear of not covering all the material.
Intelligent students will, of course, take advantage of this phobia by seeking to establish a convention that it is not legitimate for the teacher to set examination questions on any topic that was not taught in the lectures. Rightly or wrongly is it easy for the teacher, under this flexible system to prune the exam to fit what was actually taught. Similarly, if the overall performance of the students in the exam is poor, teachers who are marking their own students can add marks here and there to get the average class mark back into the comfort zone.
Similarly, if a particular classroom proves to be unusable on a particular day because of a broken radiator or somesuch, the faculty member can scout about and find alternative accommodation. Finally, a key example of the flexibility of this system, when major events occur, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the discovery of bucky balls, or the hiccup in the economies of south-east Asia, academics can quickly tweak the material of their courses to integrate the new reality.
If I appear to dwell overmuch on this element of flexibility in the traditional teaching model of higher education it is because newer approaches, while they may be better, are usually less flexible from the point of view of the institution. That is why I said that these newer approaches will make greater demands on university administrators. I trust that I do not insult you if I say that the traditional approach, where the individual academic controls the key elements of the teaching process, makes relatively limited demands on the administration. If you can prepare a timetable of classes, keep the buildings clean and at a proper temperature, organise an efficient payroll system, register students and collect their fees then teaching and learning will occur. None of this is rocket science. I shall show that newer approaches make greater demands on the administration – but that if all goes well the institution will have more to show for it.
It will have more to show for it because the newer approaches allow universities to address more directly the key challenges that we face, summarised in the eternal triangle of access, cost, and quality. Some would make it a quadrilateral by adding the challenge of flexibility, but I shall subsume that into the eternal triangle. Traditional methods of university teaching do not allow us to address any of these challenges effectively. Access is constrained by the need to build more and more buildings and hire more and more staff. Cost is a problem because traditional methods do not scale up, or at least they do not yield economies of scale. Quality is variable and inconsistent because, while some faculty may be very good, others may be just adequate. The good ones can have bad days and the adequate ones can have good days.
The mega-universities
This brings me to what I believe to be the most important new approach to higher education of the last half century. It is important because it has show that it can address successfully each of the challenges of access, cost and quality.
The approach is exemplified in what I call the mega-universities. These are the universities, all but two of which date from the last thirty years, that enrol over 100,000 students and teach at a distance. Compared to other very large universities, which are usually federated universities with many campuses and thousands of faculty, the mega-universities are unitary institutions with one campus and hundreds of faculty. Here is a list by country, name, year of foundation and 1996 student and faculty numbers.
The numbers alone, nearly three million students in just eleven universities when this table was done, suggest that these mega-universities are rising to the challenge of access. This is partly because the mega-universities have also addressed the challenge of flexibility. They allow lifelong learners to study whenever they choose and wherever they are.
They are also a dramatic response to the challenge of cost, as this table shows with 1996 data. In the USA there are some 3,500 colleges and universities with an enrolment of 14 million students and an annual spend on higher education of around $175 billion. That's an average cost of $12,500 per student. In Britain we have 182 higher education institutions, 1.6 million students, and a spend of some $16 billion. That's around $10,000 per student. Not quite as expensive as here but in the same ballpark.
Now group together the eleven mega-universities. They enrol, between them, some 2.8 million students. Their budgets aggregate to a bit less than $1 billion. That's less than $350 per student. So there is more than an order of magnitude difference from either the US or UK costs. That is a powerful response to the challenge of cost. Statistical purists may object to adding up rupees and rands, pounds and pesetas to give an aggregate mega-university budget. Fair comment. The real comparison is within each country. In each case the per capita student cost at the mega-university is well below the average cost at the other universities in the same country. In two cases it's only 10% of that average. The cost revolution is real.
But what about quality? Surely you can’t have quality with such high volumes and such low costs? Yes you can. One of the aspects of British higher education that will send frissons down the spines of our visitors from overseas is the UK’s draconian government-driven quality assessment system that applies to all universities and colleges in both teaching and research. Each year the Quality Assurance Agency selects a number of subject areas and then assesses the quality of teaching in each institution that offers that subject. You get graded on six dimensions, the results are published, and the newspapers gleefully construct league tables from the results.
The most telling table is that which rank orders the universities on the proportion of subjects in which their teaching has been rated excellent. Only a small minority of universities – less than twenty – have received excellent ratings for most of their programs. I am pleased to say that the Open University, which is the UK’s mega-university, is in that elite. Precise rankings change regularly as teaching quality assessments are published for more subjects, but over the last two years the Open University has ranked around 12th among all UK universities for the proportion of its programmes rated as excellent.
I can’t resist adding that in last year’s assessment of General Engineering the Open University was the only university to receive the maximum score of 24/24. That’s an important example, because some people used to argue that you couldn’t teach Engineering at a distance. Yet the fact is that in subjects as diverse as Chemistry, Music, Earth Sciences and Social Policy a majority of all English university students taking excellent-rated programs are now with the Open University. That’s because the Open University combines quality with scale.
What is the key innovation?
So far so good. The mega-universities have clearly made a big impact in addressing the challenges facing higher education in the countries where they have been established. But what is the key innovation on which they are based? And what are the implications for university administrators in campus universities? You can’t all have the thrills and excitement of working at open universities but you all have the challenge of managing innovation in your own context.
The key innovation of the mega-universities – call it their innovative technology - is not any particular device. It is the increasingly organised body of knowledge called distance education. It also goes by various other names, such as open learning, flexible learning and distributed learning. I call it distance education for the purpose of communicating with fellow professionals like yourselves, even though, at the Open University for example, we use the term supported open learning to describe to the public what we do.
Distance education uses a combination of hard and soft technologies. Hard technologies are bits and bytes, electrons and pixels, satellites and search engines. Soft technologies are processes, approaches, sets of rules and models of organisation.
The most important thing to understand about using distance education for university-level teaching and learning that is both intellectually powerful and competitively cost-effective is that you must concentrate on getting the soft technologies right. The hard technologies change.
Indeed, they change quite rapidly. Only three years ago video-conferencing was all the rage. Now, to hear some people talk, you would think the web is the only learning medium that exists. In a few years the pattern of technologies available and fashions in media use will have changed again. To cope with these changes you need a sound framework of soft technologies to ensure you employ the hard technologies effectively.
These soft technologies are simply the working practices that underpin the rest of today’s modern industrial and service economy: division of labour, specialisation, teamwork and project management. This an emphasis that should be congenial to administrators like yourselves. It is also the key to avoiding the treadmill of innovation. If you can successfully migrate your institution to a new technology of working practices you will be able to cope fairly readily with developments in the hard technologies. It is also the key to ensuring that when you innovate the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. If you have institution-wide processes for integrating new technological developments into your teaching practices you should be able to avoid creating a Tower of Babel of competing and conflicting learning methods.
Rather than expatiate about these working practices in the abstract like a management textbook I return to the methods of the mega-universities in order to work from a concrete example.
Supported Open Learning
The Open University operates on the basis of a model of distance education that it calls Supported Open Learning. It has four key ingredients: 1) excellent learning materials; 2) individual academic support to each student; 3) effective administration and logistics; and 4) teaching rooted in research. The world’s other large distance teaching universities, which I called the mega-universities, owe their considerable success to these principles of supported open learning which they have introduced with appropriate local variants. By operating flexibly at large scale, with low costs and with good quality, the mega-universities have created a revolution in higher education.
.The mega-universities have achieved this feat by adopting the soft technologies of modern enterprise that I listed. Division of labour means that some people develop learning materials, others support students, yet others provide logistic support and so on.
Division of labour means specialisation, and this enables the university to focus special training and resources on each function. For example, the Open University spends nearly two million pounds annually on training its 7,000 associate faculty who provide support to individual students. They become highly skilled at that task and very dedicated to their students.
Once you have division of labour and specialisation then teamwork is necessary if you want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. But experience also shows that when academics develop courses in teams the outcome is superior, in both academic and pedagogical terms, to what an individual could do alone. This is because the work of the course team is a splendid example of the development of understanding through mutual criticism and systematic scepticism.
The course team engages in an iterative process which involves academics and other professionals in a dialogue that moves toward a shared understanding. Instead of simply repackaging the current scholarly orthodoxy this process moves the academic paradigms forward. I cite a new Open University course, Understanding Cities, as a good example of this. In teaching students how to think about the mega-cities that will dominate the world in the next century, the course team found it needed radically to revise the standard thinking about cities. The impact of this work will be felt across the whole international academic community and not just by the few thousand Open University students who will take the course.
Finally, division of labour, specialisation and teamwork all require project management. The university itself has to take responsibility for seeing that it all hangs together.
If you get the soft technologies right the hard technologies will take care of themselves. That’s because good soft technologies lead you to use the hard technologies with two key questions and one key principle in mind.
Question one: is this use of technology effective for students? That’s an obvious question but it is too often forgotten as infatuation with the latest medium takes hold.
Question two: is this use of technology scaleable? If it is not then it is a failure. It will decrease access, increase costs and depress quality. The opposite of what we should be trying to achieve.
The key principle: multiple media is better than a single medium. There is no perfect single learning medium and probably never will be.
By asking these questions and observing that principle the Open University has become a massive user of today’s technologies. I illustrate that with a few figures:
Right now we have 50,000 students on-line from home and they are exchanging 200,000 messages a day, mostly with each other but also with the associate faculty members who are their personal mentors. That’s a density of internet use by students that few universities can match.
This spring I published my annual report on the Open University for 1998. I report that we sent out 340,000 floppy disks to students. That was 20% down on the year before – but we sent out 130,000 CD-ROMs and those numbers are going up fast. But we don’t ignore other well-tried and successful media. We shipped 1.1 million audio cassettes to students and nearly half a million hours worth of videotape viewing. The last is in addition to our 20 hours per week of TV broadcasting on the BBC, where some programs pull audiences of over two million.
But I am beginning to talk about the hard technologies. Let me go back and reinforce my fundamental point about changing the soft technologies. Earlier I described the traditional teaching paradigm in which one academic individual controls each step of the teaching-learning process in a manner that allows great flexibility. There is nothing wrong with this model per se, indeed there’s much that is right with it. It just doesn’t allow us to address the challenges that the times are putting our way in the areas of access, cost, quality and flexibility.
The model I’ve described for the Open University and the mega-universities is quite different. In the traditional model one individual does all tasks and tries to be a teaching generalist. In the Open University model there is division of labour and academics specialise in different elements of the teaching function.
In the traditional model teamwork in teaching is the exception rather than the rule although I note that academics take teamwork for granted when it comes to research. In the OU model academics work in teams, not only with each other but will other professionals who bring a variety of skills. The course team is fundamental to the academic acuity and pedagogical quality of Open University teaching. The founding Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, Walter Perry, came to the job in 1969 from the position of Vice-Principal of this University of Edinburgh where he was a professor of pharmacology.
In 1969 both the press and the educational establishment were deeply sceptical about the Open University. One politician described the idea as ‘blithering nonsense’. But Walter Perry’s decision to risk his distinguished career on this innovation has been vindicated in a remarkable manner. Today the Open University is not only the UK’s largest university and ranked in the first division for quality. It has been the model for the creation of new universities in many countries has 30,000 students taking its courses outside the UK.
Yet when you ask Lord Perry today what was the Open University’s key innovation and the key to its success he replies unhesitatingly, ‘the course team’. That was the vehicle through which he achieved his goal of improving the quality of teaching in British universities and the rest followed from that.
But how practical is all this for all of you. Those from the United States, in particular, are no doubt thinking that the tradition of individualism in teaching is so deep rooted that ideas like division of labour and teamwork would fall on very stony ground in that country.
I have good news. In the last two years the Open University has worked with two of the major US state universities, the Florida State University and the California State University, to help them produce programmes using these principles. There was at first deep scepticism but it was followed remarkably quickly by the zeal of conversion. The California State University is developing, at system level, a teacher education programme called CalState Teach to address at scale the need to train many thousands of new teachers in that state. CSU created teams of faculty at the system level to develop courses within the general framework and methodology of the Open University’s Post-Graduate Certificate of Education program. Some months after these teams had been at work a veteran faculty member approached CSU Chancellor Charles B Reed. He told him that he had been a faculty member at CSU for 23 years but that the past year, working with his colleagues on the teacher education course team, has been by far the most stimulating, fulfilling and rewarding of his career.
At Florida State University, where the School of Library Studies is producing an upper division distance learning program in information studies, it is much the same story. After a little hesitation the faculty members are enjoying the team approach and in particular, coming to like very much the idea that a course can have a life independently of any of the individual faculty members who contributed to its development. I conclude that with proper leadership and training good academics can not only make the transition to these better methods successfully, but also fairly quickly.
Innovation and the students
So much for the faculty, who are usually considered to be the chief obstacle to innovation. I don’t share that view. University faculty are intelligent people and you should start with the hypothesis that any resistance they present to new schemes that are presented to them is perfectly rational. I have stressed the flexibility of the traditional model of university lecturing. Faculty understand that such flexibility makes it possible for them to keep the show on the road in the face of unexpected events. The traditional model gives faculty considerable independence in their teaching. Here again, my hypothesis is that faculty resistance to new schemes is not mainly due to fear of losing that independence, but is based on doubts about the reliability of those on whom they might become dependent if teaching becomes a team effort.
It has been said that on a traditional campus the teacher teaches whereas in distance learning the university teaches. That is a radical change and if it is to be made successfully the faculty must have confidence in the university’s ability to organise an operate an effective learning system. That, of course, means having confidence in you, the university administrators. That’s why your role will be more important in the future.
I would be telling fairy tales if I suggested that faculty at the Open University have unbounded confidence and regard for their administrative colleagues. Their admiration does stop short of idolatry but it is enough to create a very effective working relationship. The administrative tradition that was established by our first University Secretary, Chris Christodoulou; strongly developed by our second, Joe Clinch; and is now being modernised by our third, Fraser Woodburn, has served the university extraordinarily well. Many more functions are organised centrally than you will find in most universities and while schools or faculties may occasionally threaten to patriate particular functions such as marketing, editorial work, or the support of international activity, such threats are rarely carried out. The administration takes pride in developing its services to meet new needs and performance criteria. This adaptability, coupled with the economies of scale derived from working to tens of thousands of students rather than thousands of students, has produced a university that has unusual organisational stability.
What about the students?
So much for the faculty and the administration, but what about the students. They are, in the mass, a conservative bunch who will also make very pragmatic decisions about new schemes that are presented to them. If you want to innovate at scale and use innovation to make the university as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, you must carry them along.
Much of what I have talked about today derives from my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education which I commend to you. In writing that book I found that lessons from the technology adoption life cycle for high technology products were particularly helpful in understanding the student position on innovation.
Geoffrey Moore has summarised and structured a wealth of experience of the introduction of new technology - both success and failure. His book, Crossing the Chasm (Moore, 1991) looks at the challenge of marketing high technology. It starts from the fact that brisk initial sales of a new product often do not lead on to success in the mass market. This finding translates readily into a nightmare scenario for a university undertaking the technological transformation of its teaching: it is acclaimed by the first students, publicises its apparent success, and only later discovers that most students are indifferent or hostile to the change.
Moore shows how particular industries have successfully crossed the chasm between an initial group of buyers and the larger mass market. In a second book, Inside the Tornado (Moore, 1995) he argues that penetration of this later market occurs in a succession of phases.
There are parallels between the industrial experience reported by Moore and the likely experience of universities seeking renewal through new technologies. For many students, perhaps especially those of campus universities, the new methods will represent a discontinuous innovation. The reactions of buyers to discontinuous innovations are the theme of Moore's work. What lessons does it have for the role of technology in lifelong learning?
There is not time to explore this is detail today but let me attempt a short summary.
The technology adoption life cycle
The focus of Moore's attention is the technology adoption life cycle. Like many phenomena the adoption of new technology follows a Gauss (or bell) curve if one plots the numbers of people adopting a new technology against time. His analysis starts from the key finding that, at least for some high technology products, this is a segmented bell curve with potential time gaps between adoption of the product by different categories of people.
Moore distinguishes between successive groups of adopters:
· Innovators: the enthusiasts who like technology for its own sake.
· Early Adopters: who have the vision to adapt an emerging technology to an opportunity that is important to them.
· The Early Majority are the pragmatic solid citizens who do not like the risks of pioneering but are ready to see the advantages of tested technologies. They are the beginning of the mass market.
· The Late Majority, who represent about one-third of available customers, dislike discontinuous innovations and believe in tradition rather than progress. They buy high technology products reluctantly and do not expect to like them. The refrigerator is their ideal model of a technological device. The light comes on automatically when the door is opened, the food stays cold, and the user does not have to think about the equipment.
· The Laggards do not engage with high technology products - except to block them. They perform the valuable service of pointing out regularly the discrepancies between the day-to-day reality of the product and the claims made for it.
The most important time gap in technology adoption, which Moore calls the chasm, is between the early adopters and the early majority. Many high technology companies have disappeared after their product foundered in this chasm. This sad fate usually comes as a nasty surprise because sales volumes start to rise rapidly at the end of the early adoption phase. Then, just as the company is gearing up for increased production, sales suddenly dry up if the early majority does not buy.
The analogy with the use of technology-based teaching methods by universities is clear. Some students will always be attracted to new technology for its own sake (the innovators). Others will quickly see the potential for more convenient and efficient learning (the early adopters). The key question is, will the pragmatic solid citizens, on whom the success of the university depends, be attracted to form an early majority of users?
This can be pressing question for some institutions. A real example shows that the stakes can be high. In 1996 some 17,000 of the UK Open University's 150,000 degree-credit students were using on-line computing from their homes in their studies. Usually the innovators and the early adopters, taken together, account for about one sixth of the whole market. This implied that the Open University would not cross the chasm in the adoption of on-line computer use from home until nearly 30,000 of its 160,000 degree students were online. I’m pleased to report that 50,000 are online this year, so we seem to have crossed the chasm successfully. Since time presses I must refer you to the book for advice on how to cross the chasm.
Conclusion
Let me conclude. I have argued that successful institution-wide innovation depends on adopting new technologies in the teaching process. Experience shows, however, that getting right the technologies of process is more important than fixating on any particular equipment or software. In this way the university will be somewhat protected from the cycles of technological obsolescence that bedevil hardware-based innovations.
The importance of the technologies of process is good news for university administrators because your role will be crucial in conceiving and implementing the new working processes. In a university a good technology strategy has to be both effective and widely owned by the academic community. The university-wide plannning process that provides the best foundation for a technology strategy is an opportunity for university administrators to demonstrate their expertise and create real teamwork with their academic colleagues.
There are exciting times ahead. I wish you well and encourage you to exploit the opportunities they give you to enhance further your professional contribution to the academic endeavour.