April 21-24, 1999
Higher Education in general, and the community colleges in particular, are operating in a rapidly changing environment. The emergence of a global market for education and training is challenging old ways of doing things and many think that greater use of technology is the route to the future. Drawing on thirty years experience of the Open University, one of the world’s largest and most successful learning systems, the address will clarify the nature of the challenge and the real potential of technology to meet it. An important conclusion is that the ‘soft’ technologies of organisation and process are more important than the ‘hard’ technologies of electrons and bytes.
It is a great pleasure to be with you at this conference, which is such an impressive gathering of the community college community. For some years I have been privileged to be a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, first when it was based in Princeton, New Jersey and now when it is based in Menlo Park here in California. Over recent years the Carnegie Foundation has been developing its international linkages, especially with China. It has found that while the Chinese are very interested in all aspects of US higher education they find the community colleges a feature of the system that is both uniquely American and uniquely relevant to the challenges that China faces.
Some months ago I took part by video-conference in a seminar in Aspen, Colorado organised by the University Continuing Education Association and the Council of Graduate Schools. There was a lot of talk about the research university being America’s greatest contribution to the world of higher education. I caused something of a frisson by arguing that the research university is merely an adaptation of a 19th century German phenomenon, whereas the community college is an American invention and this country’s great contribution to the world of learning. So this conference is where it is at and I thank you for inviting me.
Your conference brochure says ‘Click to the Future’ and this whole event assumes that technology provides the map to the buried treasure of successful teaching and learning in the knowledge age. It is not my intention to rain on that exciting parade but I would like to try and make the search for the buried treasure more purposeful. My title is Technology is the Answer: What was the Question? and this keynote address has four parts.
First, I shall outline what I believe the question is. What is it that technology must make possible in order for it to add value to our higher education enterprise?
Second, I shall give examples of where technology has answered that question successfully. This will lead me to talk briefly about the mega-universities.
Third, I shall explore what makes the use of technology successful in these institutions. This will lead me to distinguish between hard and soft technologies and to stress the importance of the soft technologies.
Fourth, and finally, I shall apply all this in the here and now by bringing you up to date on the development of the United States Open University and suggesting how, together, we might create something unique in this country: the combination of a mega-college and a mega-university.
Back then to part one. What is the question? What are the problems in higher education that technology can solve? Or, to be more positive in the style of California, what are the opportunities to which technology can help us rise?
When human relationships get complicated we sometimes talk about an eternal triangle. Higher education has its eternal triangle which is made up by the balance of forces and tensions between access, cost, and quality. Some would make it a quadrilateral by adding in flexibility but I shall include that as part of the access challenge.
Higher education is experiencing a world-wide crisis as it grapples with the tensions in that triangle. The forces pull in different ways as you move around the globe. In the developing countries there is a crisis of access. Right now we require one large new campus to open every week, somewhere in the developing world, just to keep participation rates constant. Did a big new university open somewhere last week? Probably not. Is another one on schedule to start next week? Probably not. In many parts of the world higher education is actually regressing because universities and wars don’t mix.
Half the world's population is now under 20. Our traditional concept of campus teaching will deny higher education to nearly all these youngsters. Yet providing them with education and training is not just a pressing issue for the countries concerned. This is a time bomb ticking under our collective security. Without vigorous action many of these young people will grow up to be unemployed, unconnected and unstable. In a global world that is a global problem. We require mass training for employability and mass education to inspire the human spirit.
The problem of access is not confined to the developing world. Right here in rich California you have a crisis in teacher education. There are 30,000 unqualified teachers working in the schools of the State and you need up to 200,000 more new teachers in the next decade. This is where the crisis of access blends with the crisis of flexibility that challenges higher education everywhere. You know its elements well. Are universities teaching the knowledge and skills that students need? Do our teaching methods match the habits of today's learners? In the case of California’s untrained teachers how do training solutions blend with daily practice in the classroom? Do they blend with the teacher’s lifestyle at all? Bluntly, is the traditional campus model of the university appropriate in the era of lifelong learning? I’ll come back to that later because the Open University and the California State University system are working together on that problem.
Around the world access to universities is not keeping pace with the aspirations of growing populations. Why not? The answer leads us along the second strand of the crisis. The model of higher education that we 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.
They show that for an American family the cost of sending a child to college, adding up tuition, room and board, is approaching 15% of the median family income. That's up from 9% of median family income 15 years ago. Moreover, 15% of income is the cost of sending your offspring to a public university. If you pick a private university the figure is nearly 40% of median family income, up from just over 20% in the same fifteen year period. People are asking whether this considerable personal investment in university education is value for money. Most citizens think that the community colleges represent better value for money and one approach to solving the problem of the eternal triangle may be to extend their scope – let me come back to that too because that solution is being adopted in Britain and the Open University may be able to help here.
A lesson of this century is that any industry whose costs increase faster than inflation over a long period is heading for trouble: either for complete collapse or for unpleasant upheavals. If higher education wishes to avoid such turmoil we must exorcise our hang-ups about reducing costs even in the community colleges. We academics are uniquely resistant to the idea that cheaper is better. The definition of quality as fitness for purpose at minimum cost to society does not resonate with us. Why not? Two reasons, one noble and one ignoble.
The noble reason is that with campus instruction there has appeared to be a good correlation between available resources and the rankings of institutions on teaching quality. For instance, Britain's nation-wide teaching quality assessments show that, with one notable exception, the numbers of 'excellent' ratings that universities receive broadly match the funds available to them. That is not surprising. Higher education is still a craft industry. But that is changing and so should assumptions that costlier is necessarily better.
The ignoble reason for opposing economy is that the academic tradition esteems faculty for who they are, not for the value of what they produce. This means, first, that we instinctively resist the substitution of capital for labour and, second, that we show little interest in finding out what teaching activities cost.
The third strand of the crisis is quality. Society is less ready than it was to let higher education define quality on its own terms. Our usual measures are the age of the institution; the resources available; the research reputation of the faculty; and class size. We are less ready to be judged on the standard of service as perceived by students and other stakeholders. Zemsky and Massy summarised the situation well when they wrote: "What has changed is not just the public's mood but its willingness to support institutions that allocate goods rather than serve customers and that value producers more than products."
So there is a triple crisis of access, cost and quality - but do not panic! How does an ancient civilisation view a crisis? In Chinese lettering the ideogram for crisis is made by combining the sign for danger with the sign for opportunity. That's profound.
The dangers in the present situation are obvious. But let’s look at the opportunities. Is new technology one of them? With Silicon Valley just up the road you think you must answer yes. But wait a minute. If you accept that some combination of my challenges of access, cost, quality and flexibility do indeed make up the question that technology has to answer then the answer is not so obvious. Take access. The new technologies from Silicon Valley certainly haven’t made any dent on the access problems in Africa – and even here in the USA they are giving even more opportunities and choices to those who already well endowed rather than bringing in the disadvantaged.
Try costs. Even the most enthusiastic salespeople are reluctant to promise a reduction the costs of education. What they may say is that technology will cost more but will improve the quality or efficiency of learning. Maybe, but I’ve heard very few persuasive examples of that happening either.
Finally, I know from experience that the flexibility argument cuts both ways. It so happens that I am myself a student in a Web-based course at the moment. Unfortunately, in the eight weeks since I began the course I’ve made four trips to the USA and one trip round the world. Those who tell you that it’s easy to dial in from your hotel and study the course from wherever you are aren’t paying the phone bills. That inconvenience tends to offset the advantage of being able to access lots of nice resources on line even if you are in a place with reasonable communications links.
So is technology really an opportunity? Yes it is, but you must start with a proper definition of technology. What is technology? Here's how we define it for our first-year technology 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 is about practical tasks - whereas science is about understanding. Third - very important - technology always involves people and their social systems. So when you use technology in education, remember that processes, approaches, rules and ways of organising things are just as important as the devices with coloured lights that we call hardware and the latest all-singing, all-dancing software.
If you take this more profound definition of technology than you can point to success in answering my questions. You find, however, that they are answered by new applications of technology rather than by applications of new technology. What do I mean?
I shall argue from example. There is a new approach to higher education, based on different technology, that is now most successful answer to the crises of access, cost, quality and flexibility.
It is the mega-university, a term I use to designate a university that teaches at a distance and has at least one hundred thousand students. There are now eleven of them, but since none of them is in the United States you won't know much about them. Of course, you have universities like California State University, which have several hundred thousand students. But they are federated universities with many campuses and thousands of faculty. The mega-universities are unitary institutions with one campus and hundreds of faculty. Here is a list by country, name, year of foundation and 1996 student and faculty numbers.
The numbers alone, 2.8 million students in just eleven universities, suggest that these mega-universities are resolving the crisis of access. This is partly because the mega-universities have also addressed the crisis of flexibility. They allow lifelong learners to study whenever they choose and wherever they are.
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. Not quite as expensive as here but in the same ballpark.
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. So there is more than an order of magnitude difference from either the US or UK costs. That is a powerful response to the crisis of cost. Statistical purists may object to adding up rupees and rands, pounds and pesetas to give an aggregate mega-university budget. Fair comment. The real comparison is within each country. In each case the per capita student cost at the mega-university is well below 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.
But what about quality? Surely you can’t have quality with such high volumes and such low costs? Yes you can. I noted earlier that there is a reaction against universities being judge and jury about the quality of their programs and operations. This had led the UK government to put in place a pretty tough quality assessment system that applies to all universities and colleges in both teaching and research. Each year the Quality Assurance Agency selects a number of subject areas and then assesses the quality of teaching in each institution that offers that subject. You get graded on six dimensions, the results are published, and the newspapers gleefully construct league tables from the results.
The most telling table is that which rank orders the universities on the proportion of subjects in which their teaching has been rated excellent. Only a small minority of universities – less than twenty – have received excellent ratings for most of their programs. I am pleased to say that the Open University, which is the UK’s mega-university, is in that elite and ranked number 11 nationally at last count.
The most recent subject to be assessed was General Engineering and I simply point out that the Open University was the only university to receive the maximum score of 24/24. Cambridge University, with its distinguished engineering tradition, had to be content with 23/24. That’s an important example, because some people used to argue that you couldn’t teach Engineering at a distance. Yet the fact is that in subjects, like Chemistry, Music, Earth Sciences and Social Policy a majority of all English university students taking excellent-rated programs are now with the Open University.
I conclude therefore, that if you start with a good definition of technology there are examples where technology is an answer to those key questions: how do you enhance access, cut costs, raise quality and provide greater flexibility. The best examples are the mega-universities.
That brings me to the third part of this address. What technologies provide the basis for the success of the mega-universities?
The key technology for the mega-universities is not any particular device. It is the increasingly organised body of knowledge called distance education. Distance education uses a combination of hard and soft technologies. Hard technologies are bits and bytes, electrons and pixels, satellites and search engines. Soft technologies are processes, approaches, sets of rules and models of organisation.
The most important thing to understand about using distance education for university-level teaching and learning that is both intellectually powerful and competitively cost-effective is that you must concentrate on getting the soft technologies right. The hard technologies change.
Indeed, they change quite rapidly. Only three years ago video-conferencing was all the rage. Now to hear some people talk, you would think the Web is the only learning medium that exists. In a few years the pattern of technologies available and fashions in media use will have changed again. To cope with these changes you need a sound framework of soft technologies to ensure you employ the hard technologies effectively.
These soft technologies are simply the working practices that underpin the rest of today’s modern industrial and service economy: division of labour, specialisation, teamwork and project management.
These are not the traditional working practices in college teaching. There the habit is for the same individual to do everything: develop the curriculum; organise the learning resources; teach the class; provide academic support; and assess student learning. This robust, cottage-industry model does not require much organisation. However, it also does not allow us to reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access and higher quality.
The Open University operates on the basis of a model of distance education that it calls Supported Open Learning. It has four key ingredients: 1) excellent learning materials; 2) individual academic support to each student; 3) effective administration and logistics; and 4) teaching rooted in research. The world’s largest distance teaching universities, which I call the mega-universities, owe their considerable success to these principles of supported open learning which they have introduced with appropriate local variants. By operating flexibly at large scale, with low costs and with good quality, the mega-universities have created a revolution in higher education.
The mega-universities have achieved this feat by adopting the soft technologies of modern enterprise that I listed. Division of labour means that some people develop learning materials, others support students, yet others provide logistic support and so on.
Division of labour means specialisation, and this enables the university to focus special training and resources on each function. For example, the Open University spends nearly two million pounds annually on training its 7,000 associate faculty who provide support to individual students. They become highly skilled at that task and very dedicated to their students.
Once you have division of labour and specialisation then teamwork is necessary if you want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. But experience also shows that when academics develop courses in teams the outcome is superior, in both academic and pedagogical terms, to what an individual could do alone. This is because the work of the course team is a splendid example of the development of understanding through mutual criticism and systematic scepticism.
The course team engages in an iterative process which involves academics and other professionals in a dialogue that moves toward a shared understanding. Instead of simply repackaging the current scholarly orthodoxy this process moves the academic paradigms forward. I cite a new Open University course, Understanding Cities, as a good example of this. In teaching students how to think about the mega-cities that will dominate the world in the next century, the course team found it needed radically to revise the standard thinking about cities. The impact of this work will be felt across the whole international academic community and not just by the few thousand Open University students who will take the course.
Finally, division of labour, specialisation and teamwork all require project management. The university itself has to take responsibility for seeing that it all hangs together.
If you get the soft technologies right the hard technologies will take care of themselves. That’s because good soft technologies lead you to use the hard technologies with two key questions and one key principle in mind.
Question one: is this use of technology effective for students? That’s an obvious question but it is too often forgotten as infatuation with the latest medium takes hold.
Question two: is this use of technology scaleable? If it is not then it is a failure. It will decrease access, increase costs and depress quality. The opposite of what we should be trying to achieve.
The key principle: multiple media is better than a single medium. There is no perfect single learning medium and probably never will be.
By asking these questions and observing that principle the Open University has become a massive user of today’s technologies. I illustrate that with a few figures:
Right now we have 50,000 students on-line from home and they are exchanging 200,000 messages a day, mostly with each other but also with the associate faculty members who are their personal mentors. That’s a density of internet use by students that few universities can match.
I’ve just finished writing my annual report on the Open University for 1998. I report that we sent out 340,000 floppy disks to students. But that was 20% down on the year before.
We sent out 130,000 CD-ROMs and those numbers are going up fast. But we don’t ignore other well-tried and successful media. We shipped 1.1 million audio cassettes to students and nearly half a million hours worth of videotape viewing. The last is in addition to our 20 hours per week of TV broadcasting on the BBC, where some programs pull audiences of over two million.
Let me mention three courses in particular.
The latest version of the OU's first level Science course, S103 Discovering Science uses the full multimedia capabilities of CD-ROM on a large scale. This course includes eleven CD-ROMs which engage each of the 4,000 students on the course in some 60 hours of work. The University considers that for the next few years CD-ROM is the only technology that can bring the advantages of interactive multimedia into most students' homes. These CD-ROMs are proving enormously popular with students, who seem to be convinced that the highly interactive nature of the medium increases their learning productivity and challenges them to think by forcing them to answer questions.
Our new introductory computing course, M206, Computing: An Object-Oriented Approach has enrolled over 5,000 students this year. It innovates in both curriculum and methods, which is what we always try to do. Introducing students to computing through objects, rather than through programming, is a major innovation – and one about which the industry is very enthusiastic. It uses just about every conceivable new teaching method – indeed its weakness may be to overdo the innovation on this front.
Then there is a brand new course called T171 You, Your Computer and the Net which I happen to be taking as a student myself – the nice thing about being head of the Open University is that you can take courses yourself without embarrassing the faculty teaching it by sitting there in the class. We’re running T171 as a small pilot this year with only 750 students and will ramp it up into the many thousands in the next presentations. It makes intensive use of the Web and I’m finding it helpful to be able to make up my own mind about the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.
In all these developments the University is greatly assisted by its Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). This was set up in 1995 with a mandate to combine leading edge development of the Web, the Internet and on-line communication generally with the scaling up of the resultant technologies to reach large numbers of students. The KMi has a special commitment to the development of enabling technologies for students with disabilities. It is constantly developing new applications of the Internet (such as its world-wide telepresence system, KMi Stadium). In a short time the KMi has become a focus for the collaborative development of teaching technologies by all faculties of the Open University.
So much for the past and the present. I said I would finish with some remarks about the future of Open University methods in the United States.
Over the 30 years of its existence the Open University has become a more and more global university, not because we set out with an international strategy but because our courses, programs and methods have proved attractive to individuals, institutions and governments in many countries. The result is that today we have 30,000 students taking our courses outside the United Kingdom. We have developed five models through which others can take advantage of the Open University.
Direct Teaching
The first model, which we use in the rest of the European Union, is to enrol students directly just as if they were in the UK. That now accounts for about 9,000 students in Ireland and continental Europe. It’s interesting that the numbers in the Republic or Ireland are now greater than in Northern Ireland. We now hold commencement exercises in Dublin, Brussels and Paris and have staff on the ground in most European countries.
Whole course user
In the second model, which we call whole course user, other institutions buy our courses and teach them for their own credit. The biggest example is the Open University of Hong Kong, where UK Open University courses for the MBA and in Math, Science, Computing and Technology account for some 7,000 students. Even though students get OUHK credit and awards such an arrangement needs a close academic partnership so that faculty can plan future courses together. The Florida State University is also a whole course user for our Master’s level courses in Open and Distance Learning.
Institution as Tutor
The third model we call Institution as Tutor. This involves a partnership between the Open University and another body. Students take Open University courses and programs for OU credit and awards but the local institution plays a vital role in local student support, administration and logistics. We have partnerships like this in 23 countries and in 19 cases the local government is investing some funds to support the venture. The most developed examples are in Singapore, where we run an Open University Degree Program with the Singapore Institute of Management for 6,000 students and in the countries of the former Soviet bloc where some 15,000 students are taking our management courses in six local languages. This program has been the major Western contribution to management education in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Validation
Model four is the accreditation and validation by the Open University of teaching, whether face-to-face or at a distance, in other institutions. Some years ago the OU was asked to operate the UK’s national accreditation commission, the Council for National Academic Awards. We set up Open University Validation Services which now accredits some fifty institutions at the Bachelor’s and Master’s level and has over 100 institutions sponsoring 500 PhD students in the OU research degree program. Open University Validation Services is highly regarded internationally for the quality of its work.
Sister University
Having listed those four models I must say that they still didn’t provide all that we needed to respond to the growing interest from individuals, institutions and employers in the United States.
Of course, we have had partnerships in the USA for some time. A link with the University of Maryland goes back many years. I have mentioned the Florida State University, which is working with us on a Master’s in Open and Distance Learning and on a series of Upper Division programs.
Nearer to here, and very important, is our partnership with the California State University system to offer a teacher training program called CalStateTeach. You have 30,000 unqualified teachers in the elementary schools of California and a need for nearly 200,000 more teachers in the next decade. CSU will launch this summer a California version of the Open University’s post-baccalaureate teacher training program. In terms of the questions and principle I just outlined this program has already proven its effectiveness in the UK, it is scaleable – which is clear vital given those numbers – and it is multiple media in approach.
But in our wider relations with the USA we believed that something more was needed. We felt that in the highly developed and sophisticated US higher education system we could make our most effective contribution through the establishment of an independent American university that shares the goals and values of the UK Open University. Three other factors reinforced this approach.
So the Council of the Open University decided to set up the United States Open University as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation registered in Delaware and licensed as an institution of higher education in that state. It has a Board of Governance largely made up of distinguished Americans from various walks of life. Last month that new university achieved candidacy for accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Schools and Colleges. It is seeking licenses to operate in other states as well as Delaware.
USOU will operate in two related ways and you can help determine the balance between them. First, it will have the capacity to teach its own courses and programs. We start this year with Master’s and Upper Division courses in Business, Computing, Software Engineering, European Studies and International Studies and we shall develop the program further in 2000 taking advantage of the UK Open University’s huge bank of quality courseware.
But second, and very importantly, USOU seeks partnerships with American universities and colleges in order to help them increase their reach and impact through Open University methods. With universities the interest is primarily in the joint development of distance learning programs that reach beyond individual states. We are working with Florida State University, for example, to develop an upper division program in Information Studies to which both FSU and the Open University will contribute courses. FSU has involved Florida’s community colleges as key players in the distance delivery system for this and other programs and that is an idea that USOU wants to extend much further.
The ideas for collaboration between USOU and the community colleges have been developed through many discussions with one of the greatest figures in this country’s community college system, Alfredo de los Santos of Maricopa, who will be well known to many of you. There are many students who have obtained credits at Associate level with the community colleges who would like to continue their studies in the Upper Division in a convenient way. USOU programs can provide this.
Furthermore, personal support and mentoring to students is a vital feature of the Open University’s method of Supported Open Learning. USOU will, of course, make appropriate use of on-line technologies in this area. The Americans on the USOU board have, however, made it clear that they see the optional group meetings and opportunities for face-to-face contact with associate faculty as a very attractive feature of Supported Open Learning and they want to see it reproduced here. It is clear to us that the community colleges, through both their faculty and their facilities, provide a superb intellectual and physical network for this purpose.
This also ties in with the work that we are doing with the Western Governors University to link USOU credit-based awards with WGU’s competency-based awards. That’s an important new area. The corporate sector is convinced that competency-based education is the way of the future. Universities are sceptical. Community colleges live in the real world and should have a key role in squaring this circle. We’d like to enlist you as allies.
We are therefore looking to develop agreements with community colleges, like the one we have with the Maricopa system, for the articulation of programs and the provision of services along the lines of the Institution as Tutor model that I outlined a moment ago.
The response of community college leaders like yourselves will determine how far this idea goes. For my part I think it has enormous potential. The community colleges are America’s great contribution to mass higher education. The Open University and its sister mega-universities are a great contribution from the rest of the world. Put them together and you would have the foundation of a unique mega-academy that could well be the leading model in the next century for higher education that is of top quality, that is accessible to millions because of its flexibility, and that is inexpensive.
Is that a project we could work on together?
Thank you.