Westminster University, Harrow Campus
12 September 1999
Keynote Address
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
Abstract
The international profile of the Open University is situated within the wider context of the international activities of universities generally. The evolution of the OU’s overseas schemes is described and the implications of this network of the intellect for the future of the University are explored.
Introduction
It is a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. May I begin by bringing you greetings from the Chancellor of the Open University, The Right Honourable Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons in our Parliament. She is a wonderful supporter of the Open University and much admired by our students.
I am delighted to have been invited to address this conference for three reasons. First, I have admired CASE for a long time, ever since it published the book that I have always found the most useful guide to being a university head, James Fisher’s Power of the Presidency.
Second, I am tremendously proud that Lady Chisholm, our very distinguished Director of Development at the Open University, is the Chair of the Board of CASE Europe. Third, I am pleased to see that Revel Barker, our Director of Alumni Relations, Revel Barker is on the organising committee. With that kind of talent this conference in particular, and CASE Europe generally, cannot help but be a success.
My ambition this afternoon is to help you think about a new world, the world of Borderless Higher Education. That’s the term coined by a joint Australia-UK research project which is being funded by the university heads in those two countries. Last week Kitty Chisholm and I attended a focus group convened to reflect on the early results of the study. The twin themes of competition and collaboration seemed to define the meeting.
One the one hand most of the university people present, however much they tried to walk on the sunny side of the street, kept coming back to the threat of competition from new and different providers. On the other hand the business people present suggested that if the universities would just come out of their cossetted cartel and collaborate with commercial companies all would be well.
I’ve titled this talk: International collaboration and competition: the development of an academic community spanning the world.
I shall start with a few general remarks and health warnings and then concentrate on a case study, that of the Open University. I shall do this first because I enjoy telling the story of the OU’s engagement with the wider world but also, second, because in the smoke and mirrors world of borderless higher education it is essential to ground our discussion in something real.
General observations
So let me begin with a few pithy observations about the new world of borderless education and virtual universities.
First, this new world is not all that new. Students have always flowed around the world. Erasmus was the archetypal borderless student in Europe. There were lots of English students at the University of Paris in medieval times and when they were thrown out of Paris for being too rowdy they decamped and set up a new university at Oxford. The concept of the virtual university, whatever it means, isn’t new either. It was invented by Cardinal Newman as a rude epithet and at least as early as the University of London external program in the last century there have been university studies without the requirement of real presence on campus.
Second, swallow a valium before you swallow the idea the university campuses are doomed to extinction. I believe that rumours of the death of the campus are greatly exaggerated and I refer you to an excellent article on that subject by Bruce Johnstone, former Chancellor of the State University of New York. Many young people will always want to live some years in the freewheeling atmosphere of the campus where they can experience love, liquor and learning without having to expose the rest of the community to the sometimes unsightly encounters that these heady activities generate.
Third, take everything that you read about the new world of borderless education with cups full of salt. This is a world where, more than most, journalists reprocess the same errors, institutions are economical with the truth, and there is a lot of sound and fury signifying rather little. That’s why I want to root these remarks in a reality that I know and about which I am not ashamed to tell the whole truth.
The Open University
Let me use the title of the Open University to set the stage. The Open University has the good fortune to have a distinctive and inspiring mission. It was given to us in a brilliant short speech made by our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, at the OU’s inaugural ceremony on July 23, 1969. That was the week when the Apollo astronauts returned from the first moon landing. It was a time when everything seemed possible.
In his speech Geoffrey Crowther urged that the new University should be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas. Those four ‘opens’ remain our mission today and I shall note later that our sister institution the Open University of the United States, which was formed earlier this year, has added two further elements of openness to its mission statement.
Here is what Lord Crowther had to say about openness to places: I quote:
We are open as to places. This University has no cloisters - a word meaning closed. Hardly even shall we have a campus. By a very happy chance, our only local habitation will be in the new city that is to bear two of the widest-ranging names in the history of English thought, Milton Keynes. But this is only where the tip of our toe touches ground; the rest of the University will be disembodied and airborne. From the start it will flow all over the United Kingdom.
But it is already clear that the University will rapidly become one of the most potent and persuasive, and profitable, or our invisible exports. Wherever the English language is spoken or understood, or used as a medium of study, and wherever there are men and women seeking to develop their individual potentialities beyond the limits of the local provision (and I have defined a large part of the world), there we can offer our help. This may well prove to be the most potent form of external aid that this country can offer in the years to come. The interest of those all over the world who are wrestling with the problem of making educational bricks without straw has already been aroused, and before long the Open University and its courses, electronically recorded and reproduced, will be for many millions of people their introduction to the riches of the English language and of Britain's heritage of culture.
There are no boundaries of space.
For a statement made thirty years ago that has a very contemporary ring to it. Indeed, Crowther’s later remarks about openness to methods could have been made yesterday. Reading them today it sounds as if he had advance notice of the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
After Crowther’s comments at the inaugural ceremony about the OU’s international potential it is not surprising that the University became active on the world scene almost as soon as it had successfully absorbed its first cohort of 25,000 UK students in 1971.
I shall talk about that activity three ways. First, I shall situate the OU’s overseas work within the context of the international activities of universities generally. Second, I shall describe the evolution of the OU’s international involvements in a broadly chronological way. Third, I shall reflect on their implications for the OU in particular and for universities in general.
Universities International
Modern universities have a complex network of international relations, both collaborative and increasingly, competitive. Let me try to set things in context.
Internationalism is as old as universities. Important human innovations are almost always international in their early years and universities were no exception. Helped by the international reach of the Church the medieval universities, right from the foundation of the University of Bologna in 1088, attracted students from all over Europe. I already noted that Oxford University was created by a group of English students who were thrown out of the University of Paris for being too rowdy. Eurosceptic football hooliganism is nothing new. In those days the students were the university so when they moved it moved. There are obvious parallels with modern distance education which in many ways resembles the medieval university more than anything that happened to higher education in between.
1) Travelling students
A very important aspect of academic internationalism is that students leave their own country to go to study in another. This is a massive phenomenon today and many here will know a lot about it. Our host, the University of Westminster is particularly distinguished in this regard. However, this is not an activity in which the Open University is engaged so I will make only three comments about it.
The first is that it is a profitable activity for universities and countries because today they can charge fees to foreign students that comfortably exceed the marginal cost of serving them. The second is that this is inherently a business that keeps people honest because the students are physically present and fully integrated into the academic processes of the host university. The third is that this traffic in human beings has important spin-offs in terms of international understanding.
I am aware of some research which claims to show that many British students who go on Erasmus exchanges come back more xenophobic than they left but that merely shows that most Erasmus movements are too short. I can only say that spending four years as a student at the University of Paris made me franco-tolerant for life. Our nearest neighbours may drive us crazy, especially their lorry drivers, but I will always tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s because, if you are a student in another country for any serious length of time, you do get somewhat absorbed into the culture.
2) Research
The second aspect of internationalism is research. This has always been an international activity and the Internet has made it even more so. Fifteen years ago some academics at the OU did not have enough colleagues in their department with similar interests to make a viable research group. Today those same people are enthusiastic participants in electronically linked research groups that span the world. It’s a wonderful phenomenon but I will say no more about it.
3) Know-how and technology transfer
The third aspect of academic internationalism is the sharing of know-how and the transfer of technology related to the operation of universities. This has a long history. The University of London and others were involved in helping to establish a good number of universities around the Empire that are today – and have long been – fully indigenous and independent. A more recent example of such technology transfer, in which the Open University has been closely involved, is the setting up of open universities and distance teaching universities in other countries. Although Russia and South Africa had preceded Britain in setting up distance teaching systems for higher education, it was the UK, through the creation of the OU, that brought distance learning into the modern era.
Since the establishment of the OU in the early seventies some forty other open universities have been established around the globe. Many of them – too many to list here – made considerable use of OU assistance and consultancy in setting themselves up. I find that the Vice-Chancellor of the OU has an informal ex-officio role, in relation to the world-wide distance learning community, rather like that of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion.
I took advantage of this role two years ago to write a book about the technological opportunities facing the largest open universities. The title is Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Daniel, 1996).
I shall not talk about the mega-universities here except to say that there are now a dozen of them that enrol over 100,000 students each and more than three million between them.
Those in China, India, Thailand, Spain, Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh drew substantially on UK Open University expertise and people in their early days. We should be proud of this transfer of British technology. The mega-universities are clearly the most helpful response to what will be the biggest challenge facing higher education in the next century, namely how to cope with the tens of millions of new students who will seek university learning in the developing world.
One other aspect of technology transfer is validation and accreditation. In 1993 the Open University took over the legacy of the Council for National Academic Awards when the CNAA was wound up. Today Open University Validation Services is a substantial operation. We have been rather cautious about accepting overseas institutions into this network but there are now a handful of institutions in the rest of Europe that are OU accredited and an increasing number of European research organisations that sponsor students within the Ph.D. programme that we inherited from the CNAA. We proceed cautiously because ensuring the quality of activities that are based on quality assurance is of supreme importance.
4) Face-to-face teaching and franchising
The fourth form of international academic activity is when a university teaches or franchises face-to-face courses in other countries. This is inherently a problematic and disreputable activity that regularly tarnishes and brings into disrepute every other form of international university activity. Hardly a week now goes by in the UK without some vice-chancellor or principal telling the press – unconvincingly – that a particular overseas partnership of the institution has had its problems but they are now resolved and everyone can now live happily ever after.
Any programme that requires staff to travel regularly to teach elsewhere is inherently unstable. That applies just as much to programmes within Britain if the distances are significant. Before coming to the Open University I was president of Laurentian University, which serves the vast region of north-eastern Ontario in Canada.
There I learned, the hard way, that it was relatively easy to start a programme in one of the towns of the region by getting faculty to travel. However, it was very difficult to sustain it once the novelty wore off and students started to ask for a greater variety of courses. Once that stage is reached, especially in an overseas programme, you’ve lost it and quality is at risk. Even if one can hire competent local academics it is hard to supervise them.
5) Distance education
The fifth and final type of international activity I shall mention, which brings me to the activities of the Open University, is distance education. This is a world of extremes.
On the one hand distance teaching, even more than the franchising of face-to-face teaching, has long been attractive to fraudsters and scam artists of various hues. Any commercial transaction where buyer and seller never meet is open to abuse and the arrival of the on-line world has only increased the opportunities for sharp practice. At least a post-office box has some sort of geographic reality you can try to track down, whereas web servers can be anywhere.
On the other hand, because it relies on tangible materials and a supporting learning system distance education can, in principle, provide much better and more consistent quality than face-to-face teaching. Furthermore, it is much easier for the university to assure quality and standards.
The recent expansion in international distance education programmes is a direct result of the reduced ability of students from poorer countries to go abroad. In the 1980s the Commonwealth Secretariat, in particular, became very concerned about the drop in student mobility within the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth of Learning, a distance learning agency serving the whole Commonwealth, grew out of this concern.
I shall now explore international distance education in more detail by examining the work of the Open University.
The world-wide Open University
It has been said that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absent mind. As a description of the process by which the Open University came by its current international activities that would be somewhat harsh. Nevertheless, it is true to say that the OU has, until recently, reacted to the actions and requests of students, governments and potential partners rather than setting out proactively to create an international academic community. In describing these developments it is convenient to distinguish between students and institutional partners.
1) Mobile Students
The OU had to develop some policies about its international reach almost as soon as it began operations in 1971. This was because, with a large student body who were mostly in full-time employment, some students found themselves moving out of the UK for various reasons. Many wanted to continue their studies and the University decided to offer a limited service to make this possible. A key feature of the service is to provide examinations and today this is a significant operation. For example, during our main examination session last year, OU students wrote exams in 111 countries.
The next development for mobile students occurred in 1982. By that time there was a significant community of OU students in Brussels and with the encouragement of the British Council the University attempted to provide them with the same sort of tutorial services that students receive in the UK. By 1990 this scheme had extended to the Benelux countries and enrolled 500 students. The following year, to reflect the growth of this programme and the gathering pace of European integration, the University decided to extend eligibility for admission to all European Community residents.
Today there are about 5,000 OU students in Continental Western Europe (the term used by the OU to designate the European Union (excluding the UK and Ireland) plus Hungary, Switzerland and Slovenia). They are fresh in my mind because I presided at an Open University Degree ceremony in Brussels yesterday.
These continental OU students are extraordinarily diverse. The largest numbers of students are in Belgium (669); Germany (641); France (525) and Greece (490). Nearly half of the group hold British nationality but 60% have lived in the UK at some time. However, a survey of revealed that students had 99 countries of birth and spoke 64 languages (including three who can write fluently in Latin and eight in Hebrew).
The survey also revealed that two-thirds of the students were on line. The four major reasons given for choosing to study with the OU were, in order: 1) ‘distance learning fits my available time’; 2) ‘the OU’s courses are in English’; 3) ‘the OU is flexible across national boundaries’; 4) ‘the OU has a high reputation’.
Another survey looked at the experience of these students with OU study. This again revealed a great variety of attitudes both in students’ concepts of the OU and their perceptions of its cultural stance. Some saw the OU as a provider of liberating educational experiences, others as a mail order supplier. Some welcome the OU’s roots in a British academic tradition, others note the ‘UK bias’ in some courses. The dialogue among staff that such surveys engender is just one of the enriching aspects of international activity, as is the opportunity to preside at a degree ceremony in Brussels, which I did yesterday.
2) Eager partners
With the exception of a small but growing number of graduate students who register directly with the OU from all over the world in certain designated programmes, it is only in Europe that OU students outside the UK deal directly with the University as individuals. Elsewhere the OU operates in partnership with local institutions. Although these partnerships show considerable diversity there are basically two models.
In the first, known as the whole course user model, the partner institution takes OU courses but teaches them for its own credit and awards. This is the model for the relationship with the Open University of Hong Kong which, going back to its origins as the Open Learning Institute of Hong Kong, is one of the OU’s oldest partnerships. Today there are some 7,000 OUHK students taking OU courses. They are mainly studying science, maths, technology and computing. A programme in Western Humanities is being phased out. However, two years ago the OUHK adopted the OU MBA programme and immediately took 40% of the Hong Kong MBA market against a multiplicity of other providers.
Although the whole course user model involves a less close partnership than the second model that I shall outline it does necessitate effective academic co-ordination. A whole course user needs access to OU student assessment material and it is obviously important that the institutions share information about academic plans and course revision schedules.
In the second model, sometimes called the institution as tutor, the OU works with a local partner but the students study for OU credits and awards. This necessarily creates an intense relationship on both the academic and administrative fronts. The OU has an important set of these partnerships in Central Europe and Russia. These began with the piercing of the Berlin Wall and the liberalisation of the former Soviet bloc starting in the late 1980s. First Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, and later Russia, Bulgaria, and Romania approached the OU to make available its business programmes. The OU developed partnerships with a private or non-profit organisation in each country and introduced a similar teaching model across the region.
This called for the translation of each course into the local language and the training of a cohort of local tutors. Following standard OU practice exams are marked centrally. The processes of standardisation are, however, made more cumbersome and complex by the necessity of ensuring that papers are marked to the same standards in each of seven languages.
Despite the administrative complexities of these schemes people at the OU are extremely proud of what has been achieved. In 1998 over 17,000 people, living from Prague in the west to the Kurile Islands north of Japan in the east, were studying business and management in their own languages and contributing strongly to the transformation of their local economies as a result. These programmes are now entirely supported by student fees, which have to be set low because of the economic climate. I am confident that no other initiative in education and training from the West has had such a massive and long-lasting effect for good in this region.
There are also institution-as-tutor schemes in other countries. One in Singapore has already produced over 200 BA and BSc graduates and has over 6,000 students registered for 1999. We now have enough experience to know that this is a robust model. It avoids all the quality pitfalls that make franchising and the supervision from a distance of local face-to-face teaching such risky enterprises.
Most of the OU’s partnership schemes take a particular country as their reference point. In a particularly interesting example, the president of an African country and most of his cabinet completed the OU MBA between 1991 and 1995. I have yet to hear another university claim as an alumnus a head of state who completed the degree while in office.
This president was a brilliant student and my colleagues in the Open University Business School rank the experience of tutoring him and his ministers as one of the most intellectually exciting opportunities of their academic lives. There are now hundreds of people in that region of Africa taking OU Business courses at the Certificate and Diploma level. Having the president of a country as a graduate and devoted admirer of OU quality and methods does help to open doors.
Increasingly, as in other universities, the OU is partnering with companies. In the OU’s case the partner is usually a multi-national firm attracted by a quality learning system designed for mobile people. As the hundreds of students in such schemes move around the world they create other challenges and opportunities. This has been notably the case in the United States, which I must mention to complete my chronology.
3) A sister university
For many years OU students have been moving in and out of the USA as part of their general mobility. There are also close to 100 Americans among the OU students in Continental Western Europe that I mentioned earlier and no doubt many more within the OU’s UK student body. The presence of many American students in the OU around the world was not a reason for doing anything special within the United States. Other developments, however, led us to treat the USA differently from other countries.
First, when employees of one multi-national moved from Europe to the States, the American branch of their firm liked the OU courses they were taking and wanted to enrol some of the locals. The firm’s personnel people then told them that in the USA only US-accredited courses were eligible for company fee sponsorship.
Second, the OU has been approached by various US universities, notably the big HE systems in states with rapidly growing populations, for help and advice in developing supported open learning systems. They hope in this way to satisfy the demands of state legislators for more HE places at lower cost.
Third, some lay members of the OU Council have had memorable experiences of litigation involving the US subsidiaries of their companies and wanted to spare the OU a similar experience.
These three factors led to the decision to create a distinct sister university, the Open University of the United States (USOU), to seek accreditation as an American university. USOU now exists and had a successful accreditation visit from the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools earlier this year that gave us ‘candidacy’status.
Most importantly, we have appointed a Chancellor, Dr Richard Jarvis, who took office at the beginning of this month. Previous to that Dr Jarvis was Chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada and I believe he will be an outstanding leader for the new University.
I emphasise that this is early days. I believe that the OU is the first UK university ever to seek regional accreditation in the USA so we have a lot to learn. I am pleased to say that the US academic community has been very welcoming. The key reason for that, as far as I can see, is that the OU is perceived, rightly, as an academically driven operation with a commitment to research and the habit of using the development of each new course as a pretext for driving the intellectual paradigms forward.
An academic community on which the sun never sets
I have given a brief summary of the extensive and complex set of relationships that define the Open University’s international activities. The scale is considerable. This year some 30,000 students are taking OU courses and programmes outside the UK, the large majority of them for OU credit. This is equivalent to a large university in its own right.
What are some of the lessons and implications of this activity of collaboration and competition that might be of interest to this conference?
1) Enhancing academic quality
First, I’m convinced that our growing international reach is making us a better university academically. When foreign students come here to study on a British campus they don’t expect to find their home culture. However, when you take courses out of Britain into students’ homes around the world they are less tolerant of British bias and insularity.
Furthermore, they don’t have any British students to hand to explain mysterious acronyms and idioms. This places on us the obligation to examine very closely any assumptions of normality in the course materials and any assumptions about the backgrounds of the students. I think this is very healthy. Working with tutors in thirty countries also forces us to ensure that OU teaching methods are solidly grounded in research and culturally flexible.
2) Staying at the cutting edge of distance learning
Second, it is increasingly clear to me that being active overseas is necessary to secure our reputation in the UK because it helps us remain at the cutting edge of the distance learning business. I think of the Open University as a collective endeavour of the UK’s entire academic community because thousands of academics from all British universities have helped raise it to its present pre-eminent position as the unchallenged world leader in university-level distance learning.
These academics from other universities have worked as tutors, as course assessors, as contributors to course units, broadcasts and software, as external examiners and as consultants. It is perhaps this teamwork across the whole sector, even more than the inspired work of the OU’s full-time staff that has been the key to success.
Distance learning is now the flavour of the decade, particularly in the USA, and it is important the OU engages with each new trend in distance education to assess its worth in a systematic manner.
Two years ago American universities thought that videoconferencing provided the map to the buried treasure of off-campus learning. Today the fad is on-line teaching. The OU learned long ago that there is no single magic medium. We don’t think that all future learning is going to take place exclusively on the Web. But we must engage with the Web to find the best way of integrating its strengths for learning and administration into our wider multiple media supported open learning system.
3) An evolving concept of partnership
Third, you can see that our concept of partnerships is evolving. Partnerships based on the models of whole course user and institution as tutor are fine, but they tend to put us in a supplier relationship which inevitably diminishes in volume as the partner institution matures. Foir example, in the early days the OU provided nearly 100% of the courses taught by our Hong Kong partner. Now the figure is down to 40%.
What we are doing now, the USA being the first example and our arrangements in Malaysia being the second, is to be part of the partner, so that we ourselves have a stake in the venture. This will, I think, make for a more fruitful and stimulating relationship but you will have to invite me back in a few years to tell you how it is working out!
4) Open to the world
Finally, engaging with the world makes us revisit the OU’s mission. In the UK we tended to think that the mission given to us by Lord Crowther: openness to people, places, methods and ideas, was timeless and complete. We put this mission to the first meeting of the Board of the Open University of the United States. They agreed that it was a good start, but suggested that for the USA two other elements were needed: to be open as to time and open to the world.
Already, without knowing about the thinking in USOU, staff at the Open University in the UK were coming to the realisation that greater openness to time is going to be important for the OU’s future. Like other UK universities the OU has long been used to a sellers’ market but must now adapt to people who expect institutions to react faster and be more responsive to their needs.
The idea of being open to the world is also an interesting whose time has come. You might think that with 30,000 people taking its courses outside the UK and examinations taking place in 100 countries the OU is already rather open to the world. In one way it is, but in another we have tended to compartmentalise our student body by institutional partner and by territory.
The Board of USOU realised, as the staff in the UK perhaps had not, that the University would be intellectually and culturally richer if it lowered the walls between the compartments.
Perhaps we still think in terms of an empire of teaching when we should be thinking in terms of a commonwealth of learning. We think in terms of a spider’s web of communication with a centre when we should be thinking of a world-wide web that is everywhere at once and has no centre. Being part of the partner is one expression of that.
For years one of the major weaknesses of distance learning has been the limited opportunities it gives students to communicate with each other. Modern technology has now solved that problem. In 1999 there are 50,000 OU students on-line from home and they exchange nearly 200,000 message per day through some 6,000 computer conferences. All those numbers will increase again in 2000. We now have a mechanism for bringing OU students all over the world together into a huge international academic community.
In its early years the OU was fortunate to benefit from the economies of scale inherent in the mass media of those days such as print and broadcasting. Today it can add the quality of scale of the knowledge media of the on-line world. According to Metcalfe’s Law the value of a network to each user rises as the square of the number of other users. That means that an on-line academic community of 100,000 people, which the world-wide Open University will soon be, is one hundred times richer, in the intellectual exchanges that it can foster, than a community of only 10,000. All we have to do is to organise things to make those exchanges effective.
Then we shall truly have a University that is open to places and an academic community spanning the world.
References
Daniel, John S (1996) Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London