A conference sponsored by
KPMG Peat Marwick LLP
Boca Raton, Florida
January 10-12, 1999
By
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
Introduction
It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here. Thank you, in particular, to whoever set the dates for this conference. By holding it just after a meeting of the Board of Governance of the Open University of the United States, which was held here in Florida yesterday, you made it easy for me to join you.
The key themes of this conference are technology, transformation and public policy. Over nearly thirty years the Open University has been the most successful university in the world in using technology for teaching and learning at scale. It has effected a transformation in the way that universities can do their business. It resulted from the most successful public policy initiative of the United Kingdom government in education in the last half-century. So the triangle of technology, transformation and public policy is one in which I feel very comfortable.
As we meet here today I suspect that the Open University, with around 50,000 students on-line from their homes, may be the world's largest single University user of the Internet for students taking degree credit courses by distance learning. So we know a bit about technology. Furthermore, with 25,000 students taking Open University courses outside the UK, we also know something about global learning and the knowledge economy. Last October, during our major annual examination session, we collected over 150,000 examination scripts from 400 centers in 111 countries. Open University students are contributing to the transformations of the knowledge economy in many countries. I am particularly proud of the impact of our 17,000 students in the former Soviet bloc. They are located all the way from Prague to Vladivostok and the Kurile Islands and are having a tremendously rejuvenating effect on the development of business in those countries.
I appreciate the role of KPMG is organising this meeting. We have had some useful contacts with KPMG this year as we have developed an alliance between the Open University of the United States and the Western Governors University to form the new Governors Open University System. We believe that this alliance will enable people around the United States to experience the best of distance learning within a competency-based framework.
The Western Governors University began as the Western Virtual University and then changed its name. Some people thought the change of name was a sinister indication of political intent. I disagree. The record of university innovation in general, and the history of distance education in particular, show clearly that political support is essential for success. I congratulate the Governors on backing this project by identifying it with themselves. The creation of the new entity, the Governors Open University System partly reflects the fact that support for the concept has spread outside the western states and is growing going nationwide. It is good to see new approaches to higher education on the public policy agenda again. The UK Open University would not have achieved the rapid liftoff that made it so successful, so quickly, without being strongly rooted in the public policy of the day.
What Works, What Travels?
In the conference brochures this session has had several titles. In one it is listed as Mega-university. In another it is Technology-based teaching: What makes for success? There’s no conflict between those two titles. Today I’ve merged them into Distance Learning: The Vision and Distance Education: The Reality - What Works, What Travels?
Vision is important for an educational project. “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s heaven for?” wrote the poet Robert Browning. But a vision becomes a mirage unless it can be made a working reality.
Under 'what works' I shall say a word about the 'functional requirements' for distance learning, which is the primary application of technology in higher education. Under 'what travels' I shall comment on the ambition of 'global learning' which trips easily off so many lips these days.
The Vision
What is the vision that motivates those who want to harness public policy to the transformation of higher education through technology? A good expression of such a vision, valid far beyond the western United States, is the statement made by the western Governors early in 1996 entitled, A Western Virtual University: from Vision to Reality. I quote from the opening section on the Governors' goals for the Western Virtual University and their analysis of the problem:
"All Western Governors are feeling the press of increased demand on their systems of post secondary education. ...the well-being of their states depends heavily on a post secondary education system that is visibly aligned with the needs of a transforming economy and society. At the same time the states' capacity to respond to these challenges is severely constrained by limited resources and the inflexibility and high costs of traditional educational practices and by outdated public policies."
From this analysis the Governors derived six goals for the WVU:
Making that vision a reality means answering two questions affirmatively. First, can you simultaneously make higher education more accessible, less costly and more flexible? Second, are there credible ways for assessing the competence of students and the performance of universities. I am pleased to say that I can answer yes to both questions from real experience gained on a large scale.
The Mega-Universities
The evidence for saying yes to the first question comes from the large distance teaching universities that I call the mega-universities. These are unitary universities (i.e. not federations of campuses), that teach at a distance and enroll over 100,000 students each. There are now twelve of them and they enroll over 3 million students between them. They have increased access dramatically in their respective countries - not just in absolute numbers but in reaching the groups campus universities don't reach. They have cut costs sharply. All operate at less than half the average cost per full-time student of the campus universities in their countries. They have made study much more flexible - working people, housebound women and people with disabilities can now complete university degrees.
I tell this story, which to me is the most exciting development in academic life in the century now ending, in my book, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. Here because time is short, I'll just sketch the portrait of one of the mega-universities, the one I know and love best and the one which was the model for most of the others: The Open University.
The Open University
The Open University was first called the University of the Air. It might then have been called the Prime Minister's University, because, like WGU, it began life as a political vision. I note that the most successful mega-universities, such as the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand (that I will visit next week) and the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India also had and have strong political backing. However, instead of being named the Prime Minister's University, Britain's University of the Air was renamed the Open University and set itself the inspiring ambition of being open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. Thirty years on what has it achieved?
What about being open to people and increasing access? Tick that box. With 150,000 students taking degree credit courses the Open University is the biggest university in the UK. It awards over 100 Ph.D. degrees every year and awarded its 200,000 bachelor's degree in 1998. Its student profile is more like that of the general public than you find at other British universities. The proportion of students from blue-collar families is double. Gender is 50:50. Disability and ethnicity reflect the wider population. There are 7,000 OU students over 60 years old.
What about cost? A British government study showed that for bachelor's degrees the OU's costs per graduate varied between 40% and 80% of those of the campus universities depending on the subject. Comparisons of cost per credit completed are even more favorable.
What about flexibility? Tick that box too. Everywhere from oil rigs in the North Sea to submarines under the polar ice you find OU students. It is the only University I know of that has had a serving head of state do one of its degrees while in office (the President of an African country who completed the MBA degree two years ago after 4 years of study – and made most members of his cabinet do it with him).
So the mega-universities have turned the usual paradigm upside down as far as access, cost, and flexibility are concerned.
But, you are asking, what about quality? Isn't distance learning an inherently inferior type of study?
No, it is not. In fact it has the potential to provide its students with teaching of better and more consistent quality than other universities.
My predecessor, Walter Perry, applied to become the first Vice-Chancellor of the Open University from the position of Vice-Principal of the University of Edinburgh because he saw it as a golden opportunity to improve what he considered to be the lamentable quality of teaching in British universities. Other distinguished academics who joined the infant Open University were motivated by the chance to improve higher education in other ways. Most stayed until retirement because they had the opportunity to implement their ideals.
But the evidence for the success of the Open University is not just anecdotal. Britain now has national, government-sponsored quality assessment processes for its universities. Today the Open University ranks number 10 out of the country's 101 universities for the quality of its teaching. It has been judged excellent in disciplines like Earth Sciences, Chemistry and Music, where you would not think that distance learning had a natural advantage. Indeed, today the majority of all English students who are following programs rated as excellent in these three disciplines are at the Open University. Late last year we achieved the top rating, 24/24, in the assessment of the quality of our teaching of engineering, ranking higher than some very famous schools including my own alma mater, Oxford.
That touches on part of the second question I asked earlier. Are there credible ways of assessing the competence of students and the performance of universities. The British government does measure university performance and its published results put the Open University in the elite upper decile.
Britain has also introduced, over more than a decade, a system of competency-based qualifications at all levels called National Vocational Qualifications. The Open University is a leader in the use of this competency-based approach in higher education. We now have enough experience to know just how difficult it is to define the outcomes of university level study in terms of competencies ways that are convincing. However, rather like strategic planning, this is one of the those activities where the process is almost more valuable than the product. Coming clean about what a university can do is a good discipline. That, as well as the fact that governments and the corporate sector like qualifications to be described in terms or competencies – or at least learning outcomes – is why the new Governors Open University System will make this a requirement for its programs.
There isn't time to talk about assessing competencies today but I can assure you that we have given ourselves an ambitious task. From our experience the task of defining higher level skills, the sorts of skills that the Governors Open University System will be interested in, is more demanding - more intellectually demanding - than defining the knowledge associated with them. Furthermore the cost of assessing them in a credible manner is greater than the cost of setting conventional exams because it should usually involve either observation in the candidate’s workplace or assessment of a portfolio..
I should stress that research at the Open University is by no means confined to researched on teaching and learning. Research of international caliber is being conducted in each of the University’s schools. Overall the OU places in the top third of UK universities for the volume and quality of its research and, with 1,300 doctoral students, plays a major role in training future researchers. For the OU being open to ideas does not just mean ideas for new ways of teaching. Because we teach on such a large scale the wider academic community often expects our courses to define the state of the art in each discipline. We have a duty - and our scale gives us the resources - to move the intellectual paradigms forward. Research can benefit from networking just as much as teaching.
An accessible university, a cost-effective university, a flexible university, a quality university, an intellectually vibrant university, an Open University.
What about new technologies?
But many of you here are consultants and policy wonks who try to live in the future. That's all very well, you are thinking, but doesn't the Open University use the old media. Doesn't it have some courses that are not 100% delivered on the Web? Don't Open University students have to have a real mailbox as well as an account with an Internet Service provider? Doesn't it even use television?
Guilty as charged. In partial defense let me recount an anecdote told by Governor Leavitt of Utah, who is the co-chair of the Western Governors University.
'A Utah higher education official asked a high school senior: "Would you rather go to class on campus with other students or take courses alone via computer or television?"
"I want to be on campus, go to class, meet people and have fun." the student said.'
There you have it. The difference is between 'taking' a course, which sounds passive, and being on campus, where the verbs are active: 'going' to class, 'meeting' people, and 'having' fun.
That is the challenge for distance learning. New technologies are fine but they are a means to an end, not the end itself. The real challenge, the key purpose, is to imbue distance learning with all those active verbs.
I've held senior posts in four universities engaged in distance teaching for over twenty years and I've been a distance learner myself. Last year I had the chance to observe it in a new light because my wife became an Open University student, taking one of our German courses. My overwhelming impression is of how active she was.
When she worked with the course materials on the dining table it was all go. She moved from writing, to listening to cassettes, to grappling with grammar to watching videos. One weekend she was out both days: on Saturday to a five-hour tutorial group in Oxford, which is forty miles away, and on Sunday for three hours to a self-help group organized spontaneously by four local students at a coffee shop just a few miles away. Her course materials went into the suitcase when we traveled. Her main regret was missing meetings of the self-help group because of travel and other commitments. In no way was she the passive recipient of deliveries of instruction. She was an active member of a learning community and the beneficiary of a learning system that facilitated her study in various ways.
I should add that next month I myself will begin study as an Open University student. I’m taking a new course, T171 You, Your Computer, and the Net. I’m taking it for two reasons. First, to make myself more competent with equipment I already use constantly. Second, because this is our first entirely Web-based course and I want to see whether it works as well as the multiple media course that my wife took last year.
What are the components of this Open University learning system that has proven effective over 30 years with two million students? What works? Why do we call what we do supported open learning rather than distance learning.
The success of the Open University rests on four pillars. These are the essential functional requirements:
One: high quality, multiple media learning materials, preferably developed by teams of academics and experts;
Two: personal support to each student from a living, breathing human being who knows the student's name and aspirations;
Three: efficient logistics and administration. If you can't get the right material, information and people in the right place at the right time forget it, because the students will.
Four: as I've already mentioned, teaching rooted in research. It sounds like an optional extra but it's not. It makes the courses intellectually active, which is an important way to be active in a university.
That summary of what works is my answer to those who look down their noses at the Open University for not being 100% electronic. The fact is, as I've said, we are already much more electronic than most. This year the 4,000 students in our first year science course will each spend 60 hours working on state-of-the-art CD-ROMs at home. That's nearly a quarter of a million hours of CD-ROM work or nearly 30 person years of learning activity. I defy anyone to match that level of multi-media use in a single university course.
Likewise, there are some 50,000 students on line from home. Some courses, like the one I’m taking, are 100% on line, but in most the networking is just one learning medium in an integrated multiple media package. But in the aggregate it is non-trivial. On the average day OU students send and read, between them, over 200,000 messages on the 6,000 plus computer conferences in which they are involved.
But this is not the delivery of instruction either. Student-to-student communication far outweighs that between faculty and students.
So what is my message? Simply to encourage you to concentrate on using technology in ways that facilitate learning and communication. Forget about the magic medium that will be the total answer to teaching and learning. That is tomorrow's technology and always will be.
We are working today with a new technology, the Web, that is in its infancy. Let us avoid the hubris of thinking that, in this age when innovation is the watchword, the Web is the end of technological history. The Web will improve and newer and even more exciting technologies will come along. But we must not fall into the trap of thinking that any technology will allow us to bypass the hard work of creation, imagination, and communication that underpins successful teaching and learning.
To have value technology must enable the student to do more. If we simply use it as a new means of presenting information there won't be much learning from our advanced technology-based learning, just as there hasn't been much demand, so far at least, for video on demand.
The most important computing developments of the 1980s were not those that allowed humans to communicate with computers but those that allowed humans to communicate with humans. That makes sense. It also explains why computer conferencing seems to be a potential killer application. We've had great success with it in our teachers' training program. The program takes in 1200 new students each year and the OU equips them with computers, modems and the FirstClass conferencing system. They can take part in a whole series of sub-conferences: by subject, by region, by tutor - or create their own.
I think the large size of the class is one reason for its success. There is a law, which some call Metcalfe's law and others the law of the telecosm, which says that the utility of a network is roughly proportional to the number of users squared. That suggests our network would be several thousand times less useful if there were only twenty in the class. The effect is noticeable. I think of the student who posted a note on the network one evening asking for help because she had lost her voice during teaching practice. The same evening another student replied from the other end of the country and attached two pages for advice from her sister, who is a speech therapist.
The importance of soft technologies
My final comment about technology is to observe that the longer I work in technology-based education – and the more the Open University tries to work in partnership with conventional universities to develop distance learning programs – the more I realize that what really count are the soft technologies of process, not the hard technologies of bits and electrons. Most basic of all, and deeply countercultural for most universities, is the notion of division of labor. Ever since Adam Smith pointed out that division of labor produces advantages of quality, economy and reliability this simple idea has spread to all areas of human life, including all parts of the knowledge economy except university teaching on campus. Yet, as the success of the Open University has shown, the idea of breaking a task into its component parts and then setting up processes to perform each of them well is the key to leadership in the knowledge economy.
Division of labor is the most fundamentally important technology for the new age of teaching and learning. Its important subsidiary technologies are teamwork, interdependence and equality of esteem between workers in different fields. It is on their inability to implement these basic principles that most projects aimed at using technology in education founder.
Global learning
Let me conclude with a few comments about global learning. I support the idea of a common market for learning. All universities must subscribe to the ideal of a free trade in ideas. But we must be aware that ideas interact with cultures. One president of a state university whose campus was located in the state capital me that his job was considerably more demanding when the legislature was sitting because the legislators take an active interest in what is being taught on campus and how it is being taught.
In my experience, people who say that the course they have developed is international and can travel anywhere simply have not understood the issues. My Open University colleague Robin Mason recently published a book called Globalising Education. It consists of case studies of a range of technology-taught courses from various sources around the world that each claimed to be international. She found that very few of them were genuinely international. Most were merely standard national courses with a few students overseas.
We are very conscious of this challenge at the Open University. We have 30,000 people taking our courses outside the UK and 15,000 of them are taking them in their local languages: Russian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Bulgarian. I am sure that as these courses evolve they will become less like, rather than more like, the UK version.
My colleagues tell me that they are finding it very academically enriching to have students of different cultures and languages in their courses - especially when those students remain in their home environments. When I went to the University of Paris for my doctoral studies I expected to adapt to the French academic environment. But a student who remains at home and takes a course from another country is much less patient with all the unexamined cultural and intellectual assumptions that it carries.
I remember one day, soon after the Open University had started to enroll substantial numbers of continental European students in its courses, sitting next to the Head of our Economics Department in the cafeteria. I asked her what she had been doing that morning. She replied that she had spent the morning with a course team going through one of our Economics courses and challenging every assumption of normality that contained. I thought that was wonderful. The basis of academic life is to challenge what is normal. Going global forces us to do that and enhances the acuity of our thinking.
I suggest to you that such grinding and difficult intellectual work is much more important for the future of international education and the life of the human mind, than an obsession with the information and communication technologies through which our unexamined assumptions and prejudices are channeled.
When you invited me to come here I looked back at an address I gave in Salt Lake City three years ago when the Western Governors University was still in its infancy as the Western Virtual University. I finished that talk with ten recommendations drawn from my reading of the history of universities, the development of distance education and the success of the Open University. They remain valid today as the Western Governors University and the Open University of the United States ally to create the Governors Open University System – and as KPMG worries about leadership in the knowledge economy. Let me recall them and comment on them.
Number One: don't think of technology as a way to deliver instruction. Think of it as a way to create the university, in all its richness, in students' homes. That’s even truer today, as a rush to Web-based courses risks creating a form of electronic correspondence education that could soon share the dismal reputation that conventional correspondence education had forty years ago.
Number Two: don't innovate on too many fronts at once. Make sure that the key innovations, like competency-based assessment, are done well so that the wider world see their merit..
Number Three: remember that the key to both the economic success of distance education and its ability to deliver top quality is to operate at scale. The ambition of the Governors Open University System is to appeal nationally while operating locally.
Number Four: I said then that conceiving the Western Governors University as a network gluing existing institutions together was fine. But I warned that it's tough to make consortia work and urged that the WGU have degree awarding powers and enough independence for it to call some shots if needed. I consider that the alliance between the Western Governors University and the Open University of the United States is evidence that lesson has been learned. The Governors Open University System will draw on the wonderful richness of American higher education and we are in the process of developing the rules of engagement between GOUS and other universities.
Number Five: if you're serious about enhancing access remember that students can't engage in advanced technology-based learning unless they have the advanced technology. Don't believe everything you read in the papers about everyone now being on-line and wanting to live most of their lives two feet from a computer screen. I think that caveat is still true despite the exponential growth of the online world.
Number Six: remember that students must want to use the technology. Does it allow them to do exciting new things or is it just a complicated and inconvenient new way of presenting the same old content?
Number Seven: I said that it is perfectly possible to find good courses elsewhere and offer them through the Western Governors University. They just had to face down those who say it's no good if it's not invented here. Using others courses will be an important activity for the Open University of the United States through the Governors Open University System. We shall be looking for good distance learning courses that address specific competencies or learning outcomes and negotiating and buying the rights to use them in GOUS.
Number Eight: Providing good personal tutorial support to distance students is as important as having good courses. New technology allows good tutors to have an impact over a wide area – and existing networks of institutions, especially the community colleges, can provide ready-made study centers for face-to-face contact.
Number Nine: learn from the traditions of distance education, both the individual home study tradition and the remote group classroom tradition. There's a lot of wisdom there and some bitter experience of things that didn't work.
Number Ten: think of any distance learning university as a real, flesh and blood academic community. Universities have been around for a thousand years, inspired by the timeless academic ideal that knowledge is important. Aim for evolution, not revolution from that proud tradition.
As the title for the conference implies, knowledge is now a defining element of the world’s economies. Institutions called universities have a 900-year tradition of dedication to the dogma that knowledge is important. It would be ironic if the knowledge economy deprived itself of the benefits of that rich tradition by deluding itself that everything must be reinvented. I have tried to show that through the work of the Open University and similar institutions the academy is reinventing itself – very successfully – for the demands of the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
Reference
Daniel, JS (1996) Mega-Universities and knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London
Mason, RD (1998) Globalising Education, Routledge, London