May 14, 1998
By
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open
University
But why did you invite me? I really blame Russ Edgerton, the former President of the American Association of the Higher Education - now at the Pew Trusts - who wrote a wonderful foreword for my book.
Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education and then asked me to give the opening keynote at last year's AAHE conference.
From then on one thing led to another and I have been flattered by many invitations to address groups in the US, which has been most pleasant, even when I can't show up in person. You've given me the title Survival of Higher Education: Using New Technologies.
Let me begin by challenging you with six uncomfortable propositions.
My second proposition is that the recipe for coping with the crisis has only two basic ingredients.
Proposition three is that technology provides the most fertile ground for growing these two ingredients.
My fourth proposition is that the new knowledge media change the relationship between people and knowledge in a fundamental way.
My fifth proposition is that American higher education is not using technology as well as it could. Perhaps Loma Linda University is an exception but the general problem is that your university system is driven by teaching rather than learning.
The final proposition is that we need university-wide technology strategies. Letting faculty do their own thing will not crack the problem.
Let me take these six propositions one by one.
The ingredients of the crisis are access, cost and flexibility and they blend differently around the globe.
In the developing countries there is a crisis of access.
Right now one large new campus needs to open every week, somewhere in the world, just to keep participation rates constant.
That is not happening. Population growth is outpacing our capacity to give people access to universities. In some countries the situation is desperate. The World Bank notes that Africa is a disaster area for higher education.
If nothing is done many of our world's youngsters will grow up to be unemployed, unconnected and unstable. In a global world that is a global problem.
Higher education in the emerging countries can't keep pace with the aspirations of growing populations because of the second strand of the crisis.
The model of the university that we all know and love costs too much. Africa simply can't afford more campuses with more classrooms and more student dormitories. But affordability is not just an African problem.
Here are some figures from that invaluable identifier of trends, USA Today. You know the picture better than I do.
For an American family the cost of sending a child to college, adding up tuition, room and board, has now risen to 15% of median family income: up from 9% 15 years ago.
That is for a public university. For private universities the figure is nearly 40% of median family income, up from just over 20% in the same fifteen year period. For how much longer will your compatriots will see that considerable outlay as value for money?
Any industry whose costs increase faster than inflation over a long period is heading for trouble: either for complete collapse or for unpleasant upheavals. We must reduce the costs of higher education.
The good news is that exceptions are now appearing to the traditionally good correlation between the rankings of universities by quality and the resources available to them.
Britain's official nation-wide teaching quality assessments show, as you would expect, that the proportion of 'excellent' ratings a university receives for its programs broadly matches the funds available to it.
But there is an interesting exception. That outlier is the Open University.
Expenditure per student at the Open University is the lowest Britain, yet it ranks number ten out of the country's hundred universities for teaching quality.
It is a member of the elite premier league of universities where most programs are rated as 'excellent'. The significance of this exception is that the Open University is a technology-based learning system.
It also operates on a large scale. For example our level one nursing course, K100 Introduction to Health and Social Care is being taken by 5,000 students this year. This is a case of more means better, for I'm sure that it is the best course on this topic in Britain.
But let me round out these local crises of access and cost by identifying a crisis of flexibility nearly everywhere. You've all heard the questions.
Are universities teaching the knowledge and skills that students need?
Do our teaching methods match the habits of today's learners?
Are universities confident about the quality of what they do?
Bluntly, is the traditional campus model of the university appropriate in the era of lifelong learning?
So there is a triple crisis of access, cost and flexibility - but do not panic! How does an ancient civilisation view a crisis?
In Chinese the ideogram for crisis is made by combining the sign for danger with the sign for opportunity. That's a profound insight. The dangers are clear but we also face opportunities. New technology is one. What should we do about it?
The dish they make is called competitive advantage.
Today many organisations undertake the activities of teaching, service and research that are the mission of higher education. So what is competitive advantage of universities in this environment?
The competitive advantage of an organisation grows out of the value that it creates for its buyers, either in terms of low prices or unique benefits.
Who are our buyers? They are our students. Governments, parents and employers may be surrogate buyers, but if we focus on value for the student we won't go far wrong.
What are the two ingredients that students value? To be special and to be inexpensive.
The problem, of course, is that there is little scope for cutting costs and developing difference within today's technology of the campus classroom. When you try to cut costs and develop difference in this familiar framework quality suffers.
There is a now a new type of university, based on different technology, that is the most successful answer to the crises of access, cost and flexibility.
It is the mega-university, a term I coined to designate a unitary university that teaches at a distance and has at least one hundred thousand students. There are now eleven of them, but since none is in the United States you may not know much about them.
Unlike your big federated universities with thousands of faculty and many campuses, the mega-universities are unitary institutions with hundreds of faculty and just one campus that looks more like a business park.
The numbers alone, 3 million students in just eleven universities, suggest that these mega-universities are addressing the crisis of access.
They are also a dramatic response to the crisis of cost, as this table shows.
In the USA you have 3,500 colleges and universities with an enrolment of 14 million students and an annual spend on higher education of around $175 billion. That's an average cost of $12,500 per student.
In Britain we have 182 higher education institutions, 1.6 million students, and a spend of some $16 billion. That's around $10,000 per student. In the same ballpark as yourselves.
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. There is more than an order of magnitude cost difference from either the US or the UK.
Country by country the per capita student cost at the mega-university is not more than half of 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.
These mega-universities also address the crisis of flexibility. They allow lifelong learners to study whenever they choose and wherever they are.
The mega-universities owe their success to technology.
They owe it, however, to new applications of technology rather than to applications of new technology. But what is technology? Here's how we define it for our 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, tacit knowledge and managerial skills are involved.
Second, technology always involves people and their social systems. So when we use technology in education, let's remember that processes, approaches, rules and ways of organising things are just as important as electronic devices.
The key technology for the mega-universities is not any particular device. It is the body of knowledge called distance education. What is distance education?
Your answer to that question has evolved, even in the last year. Your Office for Technology Assessment, has a good definition of distance learning:
"linking of a teacher and students in several geographic locations via technology that allows for interaction."The trouble is that until recently most Americans took that to mean simultaneous audio- or video-conferencing to a set of remote classrooms.
But now I am delighted to observe that the American concept of distance education evolving rapidly from a fixation on synchronous videoconferences to a new understanding that sees asynchronous communication as inherently more powerful.
Why have your views on distance education evolved so fast? There are two reasons. One is the Internet. The other is the Web. You can use these two media synchronously but they are inherently asynchronous means of communication. America is suddenly appreciating the power of asynchronous communication.
There is now a massive infatuation with the Net and the Web as the answer to all the problems of higher education.
Here, finally is the answer. Never mind what the question was.
Maybe this technology is the answer. But what was the question?
Proposition Four is that the knowledge media change the relationship between people and knowledge in a fundamental way. Knowledge media is a term we use in the UK to denote the convergence of computing, telecommunications and the cognitive sciences.
Others talk about telematics, the information superhighway, and multi-media.
But the expression knowledge media challenges us in universities because it suggests that the combination of present technologies with what we know about learning may change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge.
Knowledge media are about the capturing, storing, imparting, sharing, accessing, creating, combining and synthesising of knowledge.
The knowledge media are not just a technical format, such as CD-ROM, the Web or computer conferencing, but the whole presentational style, the user interface, the accessibility, the interactivity. If the knowledge media do change the relationship between people and knowledge it will have massive implications for all of us.
So all universities are asking themselves what the knowledge media mean for them. Academics are effervescing with individual projects. State governors dream of merging higher education into a great collective virtual university. Will it ever be real?
Why?
Because your instructional system is driven by teaching rather than learning, by the needs of professors rather than students.
I must justify that statement. That means going back to the essentials of technology-based education.
Point 1. There are basically only two approaches to technology-based education: one targets individual learning; the other focuses on group teaching.
Point 2. Group teaching is based on synchronous communication. Teachers and students must communicate in real time. This is a teacher-centred form of education.
Point 3. Individual learning thrives on asynchronous communication. You create the university where and when the student wants it. This has to be a student-centred approach.
Those three points are all you need to know in order to use technology strategically. They reveal that the individual learning tradition of technology-based education has much more to offer, in terms of wider access, lower cost and greater flexibility, than remote-group teaching.
The mega-universities focus on individual students and the success of their pioneer, the Open University, has already had a global impact on higher education.
Why?
There are four keys to the success of the Open University:
I realise that to focus on individual learning, rather than group teaching, may be a difficult paradigm shift for American higher education. You seem to value teaching more than learning.
I admire, for example, your various awards for excellence in teaching but they all seem to focus on the teacher as performer rather than the learner as winner.
Yet in the end, in a world seeking better access, lower costs and greater flexibility, learning productivity is what counts.
In time you will come round. As your lively former Ambassador in London, Admiral Crowe, said to me, "The United States will always do the right thing - after having exhausted all other possibilities".
You are getting there. In only a year your infatuation with videoconferencing has been superseded by a love affair with Web-based teaching. But the focus is still on teaching rather than learning.
There's too much of the Lone Ranger and Tonto approach.
The Lone Ranger is the faculty member who thinks the world would be a better place if everyone had instant access to his lecture notes.
Tonto is the graduate student who actually puts this timeless academic material onto the Web because the faculty member doesn't have the requisite multi-media programming skills.
You are the people who might wonder whether the end product of this idiosyncratic process will enhance the reputation of the host university.
You are the people who should point out that the Internet is not in fact a very interactive medium.
In suggesting this you would be echoing the conclusions of those who spend their lives programming for the Web. Here is what they say:
"It is very difficult to build interaction into an Internet application. Most of the applications that have been developed tend to give the impression of being interactive. However, what they usually involve is just the user moving through a series of text and visual images following points to other sections of the text and visual images."
Why? Because a laisser-faire approach, far from enhancing cost advantage and valuable distinctiveness, is likely to increase costs, create excessive differentiation that students will find burdensome, and clog the Web with rubbish.
We are engaged in a battle. The purpose of using technology in teaching is to give better value to students. The world's universities are in crisis, assailed by challenges of access, cost and flexibility.
The United States has the world's strongest university system and the world looks to it for leadership. Yet you are wedded to a teaching-based approach to new technologies that makes it difficult for you to lead us out of the crisis.
You also assume too readily that institutional wealth is the best surrogate for quality.
Please do not confuse means with ends. The traditional classroom of the campus university has had a good run as a means for achieving the goals of the academy.
But the classroom model is approaching its 'sell-by' date. It is not the means that are important, but the ends to which universities aspire.
These principles are the dogma that knowledge is important, the appeal to reason and evidence, the link between conversation and community, the synergy between research and learning - in short the academic mode of thinking.
That is the essence of the university.
How to transmit those values is the question.
A good technology strategy is part of the answer.
I wish you well as you develop such strategies at Loma Linda University.
Thank you.