Annual Conference 1998
Lancaster University
16 December 1998
Keynote Address
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
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.
It is a pleasure to have been invited to address this conference for two reasons. First, I’m delighted to be at a meeting of the Society for Research in Higher Education. During the many years I spent in Canada I was active in the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education and did duty as president of CSSHE in 1982-83 and as chair of the Canadian Higher Education Research Network from 1985-87. I regret that my current duties do not leave time for substantial involvement in SRHE.
That, of course, is the dilemma that university heads pose for higher education researchers. Vice-chancellors have lots of experience and insight but do not usually have enough time to synthesise it properly and write it down. I well remember, when I was on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Higher Education from 1980-90, being adamant in refusing to publish any of the speeches that university presidents or their public relations departments often sent us.
So take that as a warning. These thoughts on the international activities of the Open University are those of a practitioner – I hope a reflective practitioner – rather than those of a scholar. I hope that any shortcomings in my analysis of the subject will be compensated by the greater incisiveness that comes from daily engagement with these matters.
The second reason that I’m delighted to be here is that I enjoy telling the story of the OU’s engagement with the wider world.
I have taken as my title Open as to places: An academic community on which the sun never sets. Let me use that title 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.
The second part of my title ‘an academic community on which the sun never sets’ is inspired by Jim Hall, who is now President of Antioch University but was for 25 years president of Empire State College in the State University of New York. In his book Access through Innovation: New Colleges for New Students he writes:
The British Open University has become the most admired model for the development of distance learning institutions across the world. With distance learning the most dynamic and rapidly growing approach to higher education in much of the Third World, as well as in such populous nations as China and the Soviet Union, the British Open University represents to the English-speaking world a contemporary, if benign, educational analogue to the political and economic importance of the nineteenth century British empire. (Hall, 1991:140)
I wanted you to understand that the parallel between the empire on which the sun never set and today’s world-wide Open University academic community comes from an American scholar and not from any imperial delusions of my own.
I have recalled the origins of the OU’s international activities in our mission and recorded a rather upbeat statement about their current reality as perceived by a foreign observer. I shall now follow up in 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 open universities in general.
Modern universities have a complex network of international relations. Perhaps someone at this conference will provide us with a careful taxonomy of the varieties of international involvement that can occur. I make no pretensions to completeness but 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 believe 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
So the first and 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. 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 very 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 the research which shows 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.
Several features made the OU different from what had happened elsewhere. It had strong political support, through Harold Wilson - who also integrated modern media into distance learning by creating the OU/BBC partnership. This enabled Jennie Lee to ensure that the OU would be a university of quality, as good as the best, whereas, previous to the creation of the OU everyone had assumed that distance learning was inherently an inferior form of education.
Thus it has been that 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. This is why the Vice-Chancellor of the OU has an 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. Many of you will know that the Open University took over the legacy of the Council for National Academic Awards when the CNAA was wound up in 1993. 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.
I should note that in the context of internationalism validation throws up some interesting paradoxes. One interesting dilemma came to light the other day. The Open University accredits most of the programmes of Richmond College: The American International University in London, which offers a residential, American-style liberal arts degree here in the UK. Not unreasonably, since it is dropping plenty of money into the UK economy, Richmond asked to pay the subscription and join the British Council’s Educational Counselling Service to get help with its promotion overseas.
The ECS Board at first refused Richmond’s money, on the grounds that it was an American import. I expressed outrage at this perverse form of discrimination against Open University degrees and the ECS board is now reconsidering. How British is an OU degree arising from an American liberal arts program? It’s the sort of question that will arise more frequently in today’s global academic world.
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 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.
I realise it is rather tasteless of me to hit a university when it’s down, but the recent QAA report on Thames Valley University does make the general point well. If you haven’t read it I recommend the QAA report on TVU. It’s a gripping read because its style is very understated. Here is what is says about TVU’s overseas work:
Two of the University’s current overseas partnerships have been the subject of audits by HEQC and QAA. The reports suggested that the University’s own oversight of the partnerships was less than fully rigorous, and that the monitoring of the quality and standards of the programmes concerned was largely informal and dependent on the actions of the partners themselves….
The University’s projections envisage 25% annual growth in its overseas activities. This is an ambitious target, and one which again will require the closest of oversight if the quality of provision and standards of academic achievement are not to be jeopardised. We recommend that … in its reorganisation of its overseas activities, the University takes active steps to ensure that…the assurance of quality and standards (is) demonstrably given at least equal consideration to commercial and financial interests. (QAA, 1998:17)
That really says it all. 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.
In any case, can it then be called a British university programme? If a UK-owned ship is captained by a Greek, crewed by Filipinos and registered in Liberia it is not part of the British merchant navy. We should worry that UK universities act as flags of convenience for some pretty dubious teaching operations in other parts of the world.
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 international operations of the Open University have been described in a number of publications. I myself wrote about the University’s international role early in this decade (Daniel, 1991) and Alan Tait (1994) has given a more recent account. More recently still Robin Mason (1998), in her important book Globalising Education, makes comparative judgements about various international programmes, including one from the OU. At a more detailed level Regan (1998), Regan and Murphy (1998) and Spendiff (1998) have provided invaluable insights into the profile, motivation and experience of OU students in Continental Western Europe. Here I shall give a broadly chronological account of the development of the OU’s activities overseas before commenting in the next section on some of the issues they raise.
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 in October 1998, 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. By 1998 there were 4,734 OU students (5,398 course registrations) 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).
Regan and Murphy (1998) and Regan (1998) have provided interesting data on these students, who are extraordinarily diverse. The largest numbers of students are in Belgium (669); Germany (641); France (525) and Greece (490). Of the 2659 students who returned questionnaires (a response rate of 56%) 44% of the group hold British nationality but 60% have lived in the UK at some time. However, the diversity of the group is revealed by the fact that respondents had 99 countries of birth and spoke 64 languages (including three who can write fluently in Latin and eight in Hebrew). 174 respondents had dual nationality. 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’.
Using data from the same survey Spendiff (1998) has studied 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.
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 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. The tutors begin by taking the English version of their course as students with tutoring provided by OU staff. This ensures both that they gain complete familiarity with the course content and that they gain direct experience of OU tutorial methods – which are rather different from the forms of pedagogy in use in the former Soviet bloc. Once trained the tutors perform exactly the same functions as they would in the rest of the OU. 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 some 17,622 people, living from Prague in the west to the Kurile Islands 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. In the early days these programmes benefited from support from the Know-How fund. Now they are 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. Three other developments, however, led us to treat the USA differently from other countries.
First, when some 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 an accreditation visit from the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools earlier this month. An important recent development is an alliance between USOU and the Western Governors University, itself a relatively recent start-up, to bring together the complementary skills of supported open learning and competency-based award frameworks.
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.
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 that might be of interest to this conference? There are many but time presses so I will mention only three.
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 somewhat 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. That academic teamwork is something that other countries find it almost impossible to reproduce.
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, although I already see evidence that the infatuation with electronic delivery has peaked. 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) Open to the world
Third, 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 are 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.
I realise, of course, that in formal terms the name Commonwealth of Learning has already been taken. Indeed, I am proud to have chaired the planning committee for that new Commonwealth body in the late 1980s and served on its founding board. It now seems that the idea of the Commonwealth of Learning, the idea of networking the open universities of the world into a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, came a decade too soon.
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 1998 there were 40,000 OU students on-line from home and they exchanged nearly 200,000 message per day through some 6,000 computer conferences. All those numbers will increase again in 1999. 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 media of those days such as print and broadcasting. Today it can add the qualities of scale 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 on which the sun never sets.
Daniel, John S (1991) The International Role of the Open University, Reflections on Higher Education, Vol. 3 pp. 15-25
Daniel, John S (1996) Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London
Hall, James W (1991) Access through Innovation: New Colleges for New Students, ACE/Macmillan, New York
Mason, Robin (1998) Globalising Education, Routledge, London
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (1998) Special Review of Thames Valley University: Report of the Review Team, p. 17
Regan, Peter (1998) A New Academic Community: Open University students in Continental Western Europe – a survey, Open University, Newcastle-on-Tyne
Regan, Peter and Murphy, Liz (1998) Open University Students in Continental Western Europe: Country Statistics, Open University, Newcastle-on-Tyne
Spendiff, Anne (1998) First time in my life I think I’m not stupid: Experiences for being an Open University student in Continental Western Europe, Open University, Newcastle-on-Tyne
Tait, Alan W (1994) From a Domestic to an International Organisation, Higher Education in Europe, Vol. XIX(2)