Conference hosted by the
University of Graz, Austria
Department of Contemporary History
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
President, The United States Open University
For text see: http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/
Introduction
It is a great pleasure to be with you in Austria at this conference, which is an impressive gathering. I am most grateful to Helmut Konrad, Manfred Lechner and their colleagues for the warm welcome to Graz and particularly for finding the necessary adaptor to allow me to link up to my e-mail yesterday. Nowadays a university rector without access to e-mail is like a taxi driver without a taxi.
My title is The Global Business of Higher Education: Technology is the Answer but what was the Question? and this address has four parts.
First, I shall outline what I believe the question is. What is it that technology must make possible in order for it to add value to our higher education enterprise?
Second, I shall give examples of where technology has answered that question successfully. This will lead me to talk briefly about the mega-universities which I see as an important global trend.
Third, I shall explore what makes the use of technology successful in these institutions. This will lead me to distinguish between hard and soft technologies and to stress the importance of the soft technologies.
Fourth, and finally, I shall apply all this in the here and now by bringing you up to date on the development of the Open University in Europe and suggesting how, together, we might create something unique on this continent. This is where I shall touch on the regional impacts of a global trend.
What is the question?
Back then to part one. What is the question?
What are the problems in higher education around the globe that technology can solve? Or, to be more positive, what are the opportunities that technology presents to us?
When human relationships get complicated we sometimes talk about an eternal triangle. Higher education has its eternal triangle which is made up by the balance of forces and tensions between access, cost, and quality. Some would make it a quadrilateral by adding in the challenge of flexibility but I shall include that as part of the access challenge.
Higher education is experiencing a world-wide crisis as it grapples with the tensions in that triangle. The forces pull in different ways as you move around the globe.
In the developing countries there is a crisis of access. Right now we require one large new university campus to open every week, somewhere in the developing world, just to keep participation rates in higher education constant. Did a big new university open somewhere last week? Probably not. Is another one on schedule to start next week? Probably not.
In many parts of the world higher education is actually regressing because universities and wars don’t mix. Half the world's population is now under 20. Our traditional concept of campus teaching will deny higher education to nearly all these youngsters. Yet providing them with education and training is not just a pressing issue for the countries concerned. This is a time bomb ticking under our collective security. Without vigorous action many of these young people will grow up to be unemployed, unconnected and unstable. In a global world that is a global problem. We require mass training for employability and mass education to inspire the human spirit.
The problem of access is not confined to the developing world. In the United States, for example, there is crisis in teacher education. There are 30,000 unqualified teachers working in the schools of California alone and they need up to 200,000 more new teachers in the next decade. This is where the crisis of access blends with the crisis of flexibility that challenges higher education everywhere. Are universities teaching the knowledge and skills that students need? Do our teaching methods match the habits of today's learners?
Around the world access to universities is not keeping pace with the aspirations of growing populations. Why not?
The answer leads us along the second strand of the crisis. The model of higher education that we know and love costs too much. Africa simply can't afford more campuses with more classrooms and more student residences. But affordability is not just an African problem. Here are some figures from the newspaper USA Today. They show that for an American family the cost of sending a child to university, adding up tuition, room and board, is approaching 15% of the median family income. That's up from 9% of median family income 15 years earlier. Moreover, 15% of income is the cost of sending your offspring to a public university. If you pick a private university the figure is nearly 40% of median family income, up from just over 20% in the same fifteen year period. People are asking whether this considerable personal investment in university education is value for money.
A lesson of this century is that any industry whose costs increase faster than inflation over a long period is heading for trouble: either for complete collapse or for unpleasant upheavals. If higher education wishes to avoid such turmoil we must get serious about reducing costs. Academics are uniquely resistant to the idea that cheaper is better. The definition of quality as fitness for purpose at minimum cost to society does not resonate with them. Why not? Two reasons, one noble and one ignoble.
The noble reason is that with campus instruction there has appeared to be a good correlation between available resources and the quality of teaching. For instance, Britain's nation-wide teaching quality assessments show that, with one notable exception, the numbers of 'excellent' ratings that universities receive for their teaching programmes broadly match the funds available to them. That is not surprising. Higher education is still a craft industry. But that is changing. What is costlier is now not necessarily better.
The disreputable reason for opposing economy in universities is that the academic tradition esteems faculty for who they are, not for the value of what they produce. This means, first, that universities instinctively resist the substitution of capital for labour and, second, that they show little interest in finding out what teaching activities cost.
The third strand of the crisis is quality. Society is less ready than it was to let higher education define quality on its own terms. Our usual measures are the age of the institution; how exclusive student admission is; the resources available; and class size. We are less ready to be judged on the standard of service as perceived by students and other stakeholders. Zemsky and Massy summarised the situation well when they wrote: "What has changed is not just the public's mood but its willingness to support institutions that allocate goods rather than serve customers and that value producers more than products."
Problem or Opportunity?
So there is a triple crisis of access, cost and quality - but do not panic! How does an ancient civilisation view a crisis? In Chinese lettering the ideogram for crisis is made by combining the sign for danger with the sign for opportunity. That's profound.
The dangers in the present situation are obvious. But let’s look at the opportunities. Is new technology one of them? If you accept that some combination of my challenges of access, cost, and quality do indeed make up the question that technology has to answer then the answer is not so obvious.
Take access. New technologies certainly have not reduced made the access problems in Africa – and even here in Europe they are giving even more opportunities and choices to those who already well endowed rather than bringing in the disadvantaged.
Try costs. Even the most enthusiastic salespeople are reluctant to promise that technology will reduce the costs of education. What they say is that technology will improve the quality or efficiency of learning. Maybe, but I’ve heard very few persuasive examples of that happening either.
Finally, I know from experience that the flexibility argument cuts both ways. This year I myself was a student in a 36-week web-based course offered by the Open University. Unfortunately, during the period of the course I made ten trips to the USA and one trip round the world. Those who tell you that it’s easy to dial in from your hotel and study the course from wherever you are aren’t paying the phone bills. That inconvenience tends to offset the advantage of being able to access lots of nice resources on line even if you are in a place with reasonable communications links.
So is technology really an opportunity? Yes it is, but you must start with a proper definition of technology. What is technology? Here's how we define it for our first-year technology students at the Open University: "Technology is the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines."
Let's unpack that. First: technology is more than applied science. Non-scientific knowledge, such as crafts, design, and managerial skills are involved. Second: technology is about practical tasks - whereas science is about understanding. Third - very important - technology always involves people and their social systems.
So when you use technology in education, remember that processes, approaches, rules and ways of organising things are just as important as the devices with coloured lights that we call hardware and the latest all-singing, all-dancing software.
If you take this more profound definition of technology than you can point to success in answering my questions. You find, however, that they are answered by new applications of technology rather than by applications of new technology. What do I mean?
I shall argue from example. There is a new approach to higher education, based on different technology, that is now most successful answer to the crises of access, cost, quality and flexibility.
The Mega-universities
It is the mega-university, a term I use to designate a university that teaches at a distance and has at least one hundred thousand students. There are now eleven of them. Here is a list by country and name. And here I add the student numbers for 1996 – in all cases they have grown since then. The numbers alone, 2.8 million students in just eleven universities, suggest that these mega-universities are resolving the crisis of access. This is partly because the mega-universities have also addressed the crisis of flexibility. They allow lifelong learners to study whenever they choose and wherever they are.
Having just heard that inspiring address from President De Klerk you will notice that one of the mega-universities is the University of South Africa, the country’s largest university. It served all the races of South Africa throughout the apartheid years and now has a vital role in the new South Africa.
The mega-universities also a dramatic response to the crisis of cost, as this table shows. In the USA there are 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. 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 the US costs. That is a powerful response to the crisis 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.
Quality in Distance Education
But what about quality? Surely you can’t have quality with such high volumes and such low costs?
Yes you can. The UK government has put in place a pretty tough quality assessment system that applies to all universities and colleges in both teaching and research. Each year the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education 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 enjoy constructing 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 and ranked number 11 nationally at last official count.
The most recent subjects to be assessed, since that table was published, were General Engineering, where the Open University was the only university to receive the maximum score of 24/24; Psychology 22/24; and Biology and Physics each with 23/24. Since the press considers that 22/24 and above is Excellent we can expect to be in the top ten in the next league table. Of all English universities only the Open University scored the maximum of 24/24 in General Engineering. 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, like Chemistry, Music, Earth Sciences and Social Policy a majority of all English university students taking excellent-rated programs are now with the Open University.
I conclude therefore, that if you start with a good definition of technology there are examples where technology is an answer to those key questions: how do you enhance access, cut costs, raise quality and provide greater flexibility. The best examples are the mega-universities.
The technologies of distance learning
That brings me to the third part of this address. What technologies provide the basis for the success of the mega-universities?
The key technology for the mega-universities is not any particular device. It is the increasingly organised body of knowledge called distance education. Distance learning 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. These are not the traditional working practices in traditional university teaching. There the habit is for the same individual to do everything: develop the curriculum; organise the learning resources; teach the class; provide academic support; and assess student learning. This robust, cottage-industry model does not require much organisation. However, it also does not allow us to reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access and higher quality.
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 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 turned the economy of higher education upsude down. Better access, lower cost, greater flexibility.
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. The magic medium is tomorrow’s technology – and always 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.
Here are some more figures for 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. And 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.
Let me mention three courses in particular.
The latest version of the OU's first level Science course, S103 Discovering Science uses the full multimedia capabilities of CD-ROM on a large scale. This course includes eleven CD-ROMs which engage each of the 4,000 students on the course in some 60 hours of work. The University considers that for the next few years CD-ROM is the only technology that can bring the advantages of interactive multimedia into most students' homes. These CD-ROMs are proving enormously popular with students, who seem to be convinced that the highly interactive nature of the medium increases their learning productivity and challenges them to think by forcing them to answer questions.
Our new introductory computing course, M206, Computing: An Object-Oriented Approach has enrolled over 5,000 students this year. It innovates in both curriculum and methods, which is what we always try to do. Introducing students to computing through objects, rather than through programming, is a major innovation – and one about which the industry is very enthusiastic. It uses just about every conceivable new teaching method.
Then there is a brand new course called T171 You, Your Computer and the Net which I have just taken as a student myself – the nice thing about being head of the Open University is that you can take courses yourself without embarrassing the faculty teaching it by sitting there in the class. We ran T171 as a pilot this year with only 900 students. There have been 12,000 applicants to take it in 2000. It makes intensive use of the Web and I found it helpful to be able to make up my own mind about the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.
In all these developments the University is greatly assisted by its Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). This was set up in 1995 with a mandate to combine leading edge development of the Web, the Internet and on-line communication generally with the scaling up of the resultant technologies to reach large numbers of students. The KMi has a special commitment to the development of enabling technologies for students with disabilities. It is constantly developing new applications of the Internet.
An Academic Community Spanning the World
So much for the past and the present. I said I would finish with some remarks about the future of Open University teaching around the world and in Europe.
Over the 30 years of its existence the Open University has become a more and more global university, not because we set out with an international strategy but because our courses, programs and methods have proved attractive to individuals, institutions and governments in many countries. The result is that today we have 30,000 students taking our courses outside the United Kingdom. We have developed five models through which others can take advantage of the Open University.
Direct Teaching
The first model, which we use in the rest of the European Union, in Switzerland and in Slovenia, is to enrol students directly just as if they were in the UK. That now accounts for about 8,000 students in Ireland and continental Europe. It’s interesting that the numbers in the Republic or Ireland are now greater than in Northern Ireland. We now hold commencement exercises in Dublin, Brussels and Paris and have staff on the ground in most European countries. There are 146 Open University students here in Austria.
Whole course user
In the second model, which we call whole course user, other institutions buy our courses and teach them for their own credit. The biggest example is the Open University of Hong Kong, where UK Open University courses for the MBA and in Math, Science, Computing and Technology account for some 7,000 students.
Institution as Tutor
The third model we call Institution as Tutor. This involves a partnership between the Open University and another body. Students take Open University courses and programs for OU credit and awards but the local institution plays a vital role in local student support, administration and logistics. We have partnerships like this in 23 countries and in 19 cases the local government is investing some funds to support the venture.
The most developed examples are in Singapore, where we run an Open University Degree Program with the Singapore Institute of Management for 6,000 students and in the countries of the former Soviet bloc where some 15,000 students are taking our management courses in six local languages. This program has been the major Western contribution to management education in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Validation
Model four is the accreditation and validation by the Open University of teaching, whether face-to-face or at a distance, in other institutions. Some years ago the OU was asked to operate the UK’s national accreditation commission, the Council for National Academic Awards. We set up Open University Validation Services which now accredits some fifty institutions at the Bachelor’s and Master’s level and has over 100 institutions sponsoring 500 PhD students in the OU research degree program. Some of these institutions are in other European countries, Holland, Denmark, France and Italy. Open University Validation Services is highly regarded internationally for the quality of its work.
Sister University
Having listed those four models I must say that they still didn’t provide all that we needed to respond to the growing interest from individuals, institutions and employers in the United States. For example, we have had a partnership with the California State University system to offer a teacher training program called CalStateTeach which is a California version of the Open University’s post-baccalaureate teacher training program. It was launched last summer.
But in our wider relations with the USA we believed that something more was needed. We felt that in the highly developed and sophisticated US higher education system we could make our most effective contribution through the establishment of an independent American university that shares the goals and values of the UK Open University. So the Council of the Open University decided to set up the United States Open University as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation registered in Delaware and licensed as an institution of higher education in that state. It has a Board of Governance largely made up of distinguished Americans from various walks of life. Earlier this year the new university achieved candidacy for accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges. It is seeking licenses to operate in other states as well as Delaware.
The Future in Europe
For my concluding remarks, let me focus again on Europe. The Open University is very proud of the way it has become a very European university. With 8,000 students in the other countries of the European Union and 10,000 in the former Soviet Union we have a very diverse student body. A recent survey showed that in continental western Europe alone our students have 100 countries of birth and 60 first languages.
How should we develop in Europe from this starting point? I would appreciate your advice and comments on that question. At the moment we operate directly, in the other countries of the EU, that is to say not through partners and we teach in English. But might we not do better to work with partners? Are there universities in other European countries that would like to work with us, both to provide added services to students and perhaps to add some courses of their own to the curriculum? Is there any interest in producing versions of OU courses in other western European languages?
In the former Soviet Union, Russia and Central Europe, we work through partners and we teach in the local language. These programmes are evolving. As our partner institutions become more and more skilled at delivering the programmes we are giving them more autonomy and moving to the accreditation and validation of programmes that they will run, rather than doing all the exam marking in the UK. There are clearly opportunities for our partners in Central Europe to work together because most of the countries have minority populations that use the language of another partner. I mean, for example, Hungarian speaking people in Romania and Slovakia, or Russian-speaking people in Bulgaria.
Do these developments present us with an opportunity, in the context of the progressive enlargement of the EU over the coming years, to bring all these programmes closer together? Is it time to think of bringing our Central and Eastern European partners, as well as western European institutions who might like to join us, into a new structure, call it the European Open University. Such a structure would allow students to take courses from any of the participating partner institutions in any of the languages available. It would allow easy credit transfer so that students could build up truly European programmes of study. At the practical level it would also allow the partners to take advantage of study centres and other facilities across the whole of Europe. One could readily imagine a digital broadcast channel and a rich website associated with such an enterprise.
For the moment this is just a dream but I think it is a realistic dream. We have come a long way in only ten years since the Berlin Wall came down and gave impetus to the Open University’s expansion across Europe. The two professional associations, EDEN, the European Distance Education Network and EADTU, the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, have done a great job creating professional and institutional communities of practice around distance learning. Is it now time to take the next step?
I leave you with that thought. At the beginning I said that technology was the answer but asked what was the question. I hope that I have shown you that there are lots of important questions and that technology can answer some of them. In 56 days we shall start a new millennium. It is my conviction that the technologies of distance learning will play an important part in defining the university of the 3rd millennium. Let us work together to make that happen.
Thank you