20th May 1998
Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open
University
Like other contributors to this conference I shall not try to range over all the myriad issues addressed in the Government's consultative paper and its responses to Dearing and Kennedy. My comments will address five key issues: expanding numbers; cutting costs; ensuring quality; using the knowledge media (by which I mean the new technologies arising from the convergence of computing, telecommunications and the learning sciences); and credit accumulation and transfer. I will end by drawing some lessons of history relevant to the University for Industry project.
I've described this phenomenon, which I believe to be the most important development in higher education in the late 20th century, in my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education and I will not explore it further here. The key point is that distance education can reduce costs dramatically while actually improving quality - but only if it is done at scale. This is a real challenge for government. The educational and economic imperative is to concentrate resources in the most cost-effective institutions and get the economies of scale of distance education. The political and territorial fudge is to encourage all universities to get involved in open and flexible technology-based teaching - even if it does increase costs all round.
Of course, many institutions do not have student numbers large enough to achieve economies of scale. Even a university the size of the OU may not achieve critical mass in some subjects at some levels. There is scope, therefore, for collaboration and partnership in creating, sharing and using distance learning materials, in developing a delivery network of study centres. laboratories and computer networks, and in establishing strong support services, including staff development.
Costs to individuals are no less tricky politically but Dearing and the Government are to be congratulated on at least facing the issue. The issue is that historically those who pay taxes have had to pay nearly all the costs of school and university education for young people. Then, on top of this, these same taxpayers have had to pay out of their own pockets for their own continuing education and training through part-time evening courses or distance education. This traditional arrangement is now breaking down. So many young people now want to continue full-time education into their twenties that the taxpayers simply can't afford to bear the whole cost. Furthermore, these same taxpayers are being exhorted to spend more of their income on lifelong learning for themselves. Quite rightly the Government has introduced fees for full-time university students and begun to erode the massive subsidy from the poor to the rich that Britain's traditional system of university funding represented. I wish them luck and a stiff spine as they face down the complaints from the middle classes.
However, it's time to take equity a step further. If the country is serious about lifelong learning it should make loans available to part-time students on exactly the same means-tested basis as they are for full-time students. Research commissioned by the OU from London Economics shows that the additional cost of extending loans averaging £500 per annum to part-time students (assuming an income threshold of £16,000) would be no more than an additional 0.5% of the cost of the loans scheme to the Exchequer in the short term and 1.5% in the long term.
Furthermore, tax-breaks for students should be extended beyond the present narrow focus on National and Scottish Vocational Qualifications. Part of the reason that lifelong learning is still more of a political slogan than a daily reality for most people is that Government cannot really bring itself to bring lifelong learning into the mainstream of public policy.
Furthermore the quality assessment processes have achieved the remarkable feat of replacing the old folklore about university quality with something more intellectually robust. Pre the Teaching Quality Assessment process the public thought that quality in higher education had four elements: the date of foundation of the university (the older the better); its admission processes (the more focused on school results the better); the wealth of the university (the richer the better) and the size of teaching groups (the smaller the better). By introducing some output measures to set against these input measures the Funding Councils have done us a signal service. The fact that the OU now ranks 10th out of the hundred plus UK universities for the proportion of its programmes ranked as excellent does make me favourably inclined to the methodology. I do not deny that. But the move to output measures is creating a sea change in perceptions. Now that the Open University is publicly recognises as accounting for the majority of all English university students taking excellent-rated programmes in subjects as diverse as geology, music and social policy you know something has changed in our HE system.
Why is the OU so successful in the quality rankings? On the input size I would identify: good staff, a multi-disciplinary team approach to programme and course development, rigorous internal and external QA processes. On the output side the keys are excellent course materials, locally based tutorial support and assessment, first class research and scholarship, and highly professional logistics. Concerning the latter, for example, we've just invested more than £10M in a complete redevelopment of our student support, administrative and logistical systems to respond to the greater expectations of this era of consumer choice. Our students and clients rightly have high hopes of us. Which leads to my third topic, information and communications technologies, or what I prefer to call the knowledge media.
There is, however, enormous promise. Only about a quarter of OU students have networked computers at home. Yet today, a normal working day, those 40,000 students will read and exchange nearly 200,000 messages over our networks. Such interactive applications, which enhance networking and conversation between students and teachers pay very high dividends. Even more passive media such as the good old World Wide Web, are useful for promoting independent learning and research skills.
The OU's Knowledge Media Institute is dedicated to researching and developing imaginative new applications of information and communication technologies to teaching and learning. Above all, its task is to scale up the use of these technologies. After all, with 500,000 new adults to educate any educational application of technology that cannot help tens of thousands of people at the same time is a waste of development effort. The Government is worried about the potential technology gap between rich and poor. The OU is doing something about it, as it has done for years. We've always reached further into the majority socio-economic groups and the minority ethnic groups than most universities. Today, somewhat to our surprise, we are seeing a steady growth in the numbers of 18-25 year-old students coming to the OU. Who knows, before long we join the mainstream of Cool Britannia!
This is not a minority sport. To date the OU alone has dealt with some 200,000 applications for credit transfer or advanced standing. On top of that we estimate at over 1,000 per year the number of former Open University students with partly completed degrees who transfer their OU credits to other institutions and continue their studies there.
So there is huge expertise in this field right across the country. It is vital that Government recognise this and stop pretending that credit accumulation and transfer is a radical new idea. The value of a national CATS scheme is not just that it is the key to the lifelong learning agenda, although it is. If you think of the universe of knowledge and skills as a three dimensional climbing frame around which people move throughout their lives, it is clearly important that they can carry with them some record of the knowledge and skills already acquired. CATS does that.
But CATS is also the key to a sensible funding regime for institutions. Unless there is some basic common metric of study completed it is practically impossible to devise an efficient funding system and to discourage institutions from massaging their student number counts. Credits are actually a useful measure of funding effectiveness because in a era of lifelong learning many people will be interested in outcomes that are less than a degree or diploma. We need curricula, qualification frameworks and funding systems which work with the grain of the real needs of learners.
It is vital to bring these people into the learning age because the Government is, quite rightly, acting on the contemporary belief that what distinguishes the world's successful economies is not the training of their elites, but the education of their ordinary people. But never underestimate the challenge. Choosing my words carefully, I feel bound to point out that of all the high profile national ventures into lifelong and open learning of the last twenty years, only the Open University has had a substantial impact. The least one can say about the Open College, the Open Tech and the Open Poly is that they did not quite live up to the expectations of their founders. The general lesson is that for such a project to work the rhetoric and razzmattazz must be backed up with adequate infrastructure and a clear idea of purpose expressed in a qualifications framework.
The OU is committed to the concept of the UfI and keen to participate. Indeed, we already are. In partnership with the Birmingham City Council we are part of the ADAPT programme to develop electronically-delivered materials to support the training needs of small and medium sized enterprises. We have a huge ore body of excellent learning materials that can be mined for the benefit of the University for Industry in partnership with others. We know more than any other institution in the UK about the large scale use of information and communications technology by adult learners, so we can help the UfI achieve its ambitions in that domain too. We have a national system of validation, accreditation and credit-rating that can be used in support of the UfI project and its partners.
The UfI will stand or fall by the quality of the guidance and counselling it provides, for its ambition is to reach those who are most difficult to reach. The OU has a highly developed national network of local educational guidance and counselling which is designed not just to bring people to the OU but to give comprehensive and appropriate advice to all enquirers about how to satisfy their needs. We would like to integrate this excellent service as closely as possible with Learning Direct.
Interestingly, these effects showed up in a survey of all British graduates that was done in the context of the Higher Education Quality Council's work on graduates. In trying to identify the key characteristics of graduateness the survey asked a sample of graduates from a range of institutions what university study had done for them on various dimensions. The results for graduates from all universities were broadly similar but there was one interesting exception. To a very much greater extent than graduates from elsewhere, OU graduates said that the experience of doing a degree had changed their lives.
That's odd when you think about it because OU graduates are mature people whose lives had achieved a degree of stability, not to say inertia. You'd think that it would have been the young students, still at a more malleable age, whose lives would have been changed by the university experience. But it was the OU students who were aware their lives had been changed.
We should reflect on that. It should give us the courage of our convictions and a determination to create in this country an age of lifelong learning. It really could be a renaissance for a New Britain.