Competing on the web
The October meeting of the Academic Board was preceded by special event. The Student’s Association, OUSA, launched its new website. President Alison Kirk showed us some of the features of this impressive communications resource and reminded us that there are now 60,000 OU students online who can benefit from it.
The net presents the OU with challenges and opportunities. We are a University that was created to serve people at a distance using, in the words of our Royal Charter, technological devices appropriate to higher education. The net, which gives instantaneous written communication to any point in the world where there is a computer and a telephone, has many appropriate features. They will become even more exciting as personal computers pack ever more power and the rapid transmission of video over ordinary phone lines becomes a reality.
There are times when I wish that the OU could start over again and base itself primarily on the Net. It would be much easier to design the OU for the Net from scratch than it is to adapt and modify the legacy of methods and habits that have grown up around other technologies.
In reality, however, the OU’s large student body and its reputation for teaching and learning of quality must be important assets in the net age. The leadership that OUSA is taking particularly encouraging. I remember speaking to an OUSA conference in the early 1990s and being chastised by some delegates for my enthusiasm for computers. Their worry was that a strong OU commitment to computer use would limit access to people who either could not afford or did not want to use a computer.
Access remains a worry but, with a third of OU students now online and the proportion rising steadily, it will soon be less of a worry. The key attraction of the net, which explains why OUSA has made a strong commitment to its integrated website, is communication. Use of the FirstClass conferencing system has revolutionised the way that the OUSA Executive does its business. It also allows students to communicate with each other about their course even where that course does not make ‘official’ use of computing.
I had the interesting and rewarding experience of taking one of the OU’s web-based courses this year. Like all OU students I found it difficult to find the time but I am glad to say that I completed it. It has given me useful direct experience of the strengths and weaknesses of the Web as a learning medium for the OU.
My emphasis this year will be to speed up the adoption of the web as a major component of the working environment for OU staff. The web has huge potential as a tool for administration and decision making yet the University has, as yet, hardly exploited it. I relish some healthy competition in web development between the OU and OUSA because the result will be better service to students.