Ankara, Turkey
5 May 1998
By
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open
University
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
<
j.s.daniel@open.ac.uk>
I discovered this remarkable phenomenon three years ago when I was writing my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Daniel, 1996). I wrote that book in order to clarify my own thinking about the role of new technologies in university-level distance education. My immediate focus was the UK Open University, which I have the honour to lead at its Vice-Chancellor. However, I thought it would be interesting to look at the implications of these technologies for all of the large open universities around the world.
I took the figure of 100,000 enrolled students as an arbitrary cut-off point in defining a large open university and I coined the term mega-university for these big distance teaching enterprises. Then I set out to identify which universities around the globe were mega-universities by this definition and to get some up-to-date statistics about their work. I found ten, which rose to eleven in 1996 when Payame-Noor University in Iran passed the 100,000 mark. Today Allama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan may also qualify and it will not be long before some of the state open universities in India also operate on this scale.
However, the biggest surprise in my research was the discovery that Turkey's Anadolu University was probably the largest university in the world as measured by the number of degree-level students. The contest for first place is between Turkey and China with the other mega-universities some way behind. I found it extremely difficult to get a good figure for the number of degree-level students in the China TV University System. This is partly because it's not absolutely clear which of its programmes can be characterised as degree-level study and partly because this huge federated institution simply doesn't have good central data on student numbers.
In the end I judged that the China TV University system had 530,000 degree-level students in 1994 and Anadolu University had over 570,000 degree-level students in its distance learning programme. But whether or not Anadolu University has more students than China's TVU system or not, it did seem to be clear that Turkey led the world in the proportion of its university students enrolled in distance education. I was surprised by this discovery. Having been active in international distance education circles for 25 years I thought I knew most of the significant institutions, yet it was only in researching for my book that I began to learn about Anadolu University.
I was so intrigued to discover this huge institution and to read about the pioneering work of Yilmaz Büyükersen (McIsaac et al., 1988) that I visited Anadolu University in Eskisehir in May 1996 to learn more about it. I am most grateful for the warm hospitality that I received during that trip. By visiting Turkey I was able to discover why the extent of university distance education in the country was so little known about in the rest of the world. I found relatively little awareness of Anadolu University among people in Istanbul and even when you go to the University's campus in Eskisehir the distance education programme has a very low profile. Most people assumed that I had come to admire the campus, which is indeed one of Turkey's nicest, and to learn about the 17,000 students studying in the classrooms there, not about the 570,000 studying at a distance. If I understood correctly the University spent more of its budget on the 17,000 campus students than on the 570,000 distance students.
As far as I could tell most of the faculty at Anadolu University were not involved in the distance education programme of the Open Education Faculty and not particularly proud of it. However, there were some hopeful signs. I met some young faculty members who were involved in the distance programme and were also aware of the rapid development of distance learning in other countries. They seemed very enthusiastic about the idea of devoting their careers to bringing greater professionalism and effectiveness to the work of the Open Education Faculty.
That's why I'm so glad to be here at this symposium. I assume that the holding of this event in Ankara is a symbol of a greater commitment by Turkey to the celebration and exploitation of its achievements in distance education. I am pleased to celebrate with you and I hope that the distinguished foreign experts who have come here can help raise the profile of distance education in Turkey and contribute to its further development.
Second, I shall look at the new horizons for distance education within distance education itself. In this context I shall look particularly at what new technologies are bringing to distance education. There is no doubt that the emergence of new technologies through the convergence of computing, telecommunications and television is a major reason why distance education is suddenly very fashionable. There is a widespread assumption that the World Wide Web, in particular, will be the vehicle for a massive expansion of distance learning. But is this a fashion or a fad? So far only a tiny proportion of distance education students, even in the technologically advanced countries, are actually using the new technologies for even 50% of their learning. Will new technology suddenly transform the reputation of distance learning?
In my book on the mega-universities (Daniel, 1996: 1-12) I argue that the crisis of access to universities in the emerging market countries is just one aspect of a wider problem. Even those countries with well developed higher education systems are finding it increasingly difficult to fund them, while the universities themselves are discovering that inflexible, classroom-based teaching methods do not suit the increasing numbers of part-time students who are combining study with paid employment.
There is no doubt that the methods of distance education can solve this triple crisis of access, cost and flexibility. The eleven mega-universities enrol three million students between them, which is a solid contribution to access. They operate at 50% or less of the cost of campus universities and they allow people the flexibility of studying wherever they are.
In the academic world, however, it is not enough to show that distance education could solve a looming problem. Refugee camps can provide food and shelter but most people do not want to live in refugee camps. The problem in some countries is that higher distance education is viewed as the academic equivalent of the refugee camp. This is not surprising because in some countries, such as Indonesia and South Korea, the large distance teaching university was originally conceived as a second class alternative for the growing numbers of school leavers who could not gain admittance to the existing campus universities. It was never expected or intended that these new institutions would acquire reputations to match those of the established universities.
Three developments have changed the attitudes of governments in towards distance learning. First, they can now see some examples, around the world, of distance teaching universities that have acquired excellent academic reputations. Second, growth of student numbers and pressures on public funds have led to a deterioration of the quality of many campus universities, not just in the developing countries of Africa but in some industrialised countries. Third, many policy makers believe that new technologies will transform education and that institutions already engaged in distance learning will be in the vanguard of these changes.
The general public, of course, is more sceptical. Their views of educational institutions and methods change slowly - and rightly so. They believe that educational quality is linked to the age of the institution (the older the better), the selectivity of its admissions (the tougher the better), the resources it can deploy (the more the better), and the size of its classes (the smaller the better). Distance teaching universities tend to fail these tests. They are new, some of them have open admissions, they are proud of being more cost-efficient than campuses and, although their effective class size is very small (the individual student) they appear to be big and impersonal. Can these perceptions be changed?
The Success of the UK Open University
The answer is that these perceptions can be changed. It takes time but the example of the UK Open University shows that a distance learning university can move from ridicule to prestige in a generation. It's an inspiring story.
The example of the UK Open University should be a great encouragement to all of you because it has shown - and the British government has formally recognised - that it is a University of quality. Here are three pieces of data.
First, the three higher education funding councils in the United Kingdom - for England, Wales and Scotland - are government bodies that have to assess the quality of the higher education programmes that they fund. They examine the quality of teaching in each discipline and the highest quality rating that they award is 'Excellent'. Over the last few years quality has been assessed in many disciplines and you can now judge the overall quality of each UK university by the proportion of its programmes that have received 'excellent' ratings. These proportions are listed in Table 1. It shows that among the 101 universities of Britain there is a small premier league of universities where the majority of programmes are excellent. The Open University ranks number ten in this premier league - and therefore in the top ten percent of all UK universities.
The second set of data show how far the Open University has actually redefined the notion of quality in university teaching. Let us look at some disciplines, separate out the programmes in each discipline that are judged to be excellent and count the number of students involved. Then, let us find out what proportion of these students - expressed as full-time equivalents - are with the Open University. Table 2 shows the results. In two subjects, Geology and Music, Open University students are the majority. In all the others they are a large minority. This is a remarkable result. Many people would not think that distance learning had a natural advantage in either geology or music, because of the need for practical work. Yet most of the students in England who are receiving excellent university instruction in those subjects are studying at a distance.
The third set of data comes from Scotland. The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council recently commissioned a survey of part-time students in all Scottish universities. Table 3 gives some of the results. In every area but one the Open University scores higher, usually much higher, in student satisfaction than Scotland's campus universities. It scores three points lower - only three points lower - on 'Friendly Atmosphere' which is itself a remarkable result for distance learning.
You should take encouragement from these remarkable results.
Measuring quality
But what do these results mean? How does the Higher Education Funding Council for England measure quality? It aims to assess the student learning experience and student achievement against each university's aims and objectives. Six core aspects of higher education provide the framework for the assessment. They are:
Achieving Quality in Distance Learning
How does the UK Open University - and all open universities - achieve quality. There are four ingredients.
First, high quality multi-media learning materials. Study materials must be excellent and varied to make study in the home or the workplace a congenial university experience. One way of ensuring quality is to have courses produced by multi-skilled teams.
Such teams include a number of academics, so that the structure and concepts of the course are developed in a critical and intellectually fertile environment. They also include people skilled in the design and production of the media that the course will use: editors, TV and audio producers, graphic designers, software specialists, experts in student assessment and so on.
The challenge is to get a good balance between the time and effort invested in the making the course and the quality of the student experience. The great advantage of the large open universities - what I call the mega-universities - is that they can afford to make large investments. However, smaller universities can use the same principle by working collaboratively to produce courses.
The second key to quality in distance learning is dedicated personal academic support. Each UK Open University student has their own tutor for each course, one of OU's 7000 associate lecturers. These part-time academic staff comment on and mark the student's assignments, hold group meetings where possible and give support by phone and e-mail. Not all students choose to attend the group meetings, even when they are available, but nearly all students rate the help from their tutors very highly.
The third quality element is efficient logistics. Each individual student must receive the right materials and information at the right time. With over 100,000 students that requires careful attention to detail.
Fourth, a strong research base. When thousands of students use the materials for each course and millions of people view each TV programme the content must be academically up to date. Thanks to economies of scale the Open University has the resources to move the academic paradigms steadily forward.
In the UK the funding councils also assess the quality of research in each university on a regular basis and use these measures to determine how much money that university gets for research in each discipline. For research the Open University now ranks 30th out of the 135 institutions receiving public funds for research. Each OU faculty has is conducting research of international calibre. For example, one of the world's leading research groups on the interesting question of whether there is life on the planet Mars is in the OU's Earth Sciences department.
The Knowledge Media
Various terms have been coined for the new combinations of technologies that are creating so much enthusiasm in today's world, such as telematics, the information superhighway and multi-media. I prefer the term that has been coined by my colleague Marc Eisenstadt: knowledge media. He uses this term to designate the results of the convergence of computing, telecommunications, and the cognitive sciences.
Eisenstadt's term challenges us as academics because he believes that the combination of present technologies with what we know about learning will change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge. That's because the 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 or computer conferencing, but the whole presentational style, the user interface, the accessibility, the interactivity.
All universities are asking themselves what the knowledge media mean for them. Politicians and policy makers dream of creating virtual universities. Will virtual universities ever be real? Whether virtual universities become real universities will depend on whether they can contribute to the reinforcement of the four elements of quality that I have listed. Let me take them in turn, starting with the creation of high quality course materials.
Course materials
The knowledge media can contribute directly to course materials by providing components of those materials. However, the use of knowledge media in course materials is still constrained by the equipment to which our students have access. The minimum equipment that a distance student needs in order to benefit from the knowledge media at home or at work is a computer, a modem and a phone line.
This year, 1998, over 40,000 Open University students have this equipment. That is about one quarter of the OU's 150,000 students, so this is still a minority sport, although numbers are growing fast. In nearly all cases the equipment that the 40,000 students have allows them to read and send text. Far fewer can easily receive or send audio or video through their personal computers even though, of course, it is now possible to circulate audio and video on the World Wide Web.
This means that, for the time being, if we want to use the full teaching advantages of multi-media technology we have to use them in a 'stand-alone' fashion, by providing students with CD-ROMs rather than making the material available on the Web. That, of course, poses another equipment problem, because not many OU students have high-performance CD-ROM players at home.
This year (1998) the OU launched a new version of its first year science course. This course has made a large commitment to CD-ROM technology. Students will spend some 40 hours working with CD-ROM and we are very proud of the quality of those materials. There are 4000 students taking the course. I hope that you will examine our CD-ROMs on basic science for use in your own institutions. Developing such material is costly and it makes sense for you to take advantage of the investment we have made.
This raises another issue which is the focus of important work by Professor Diana Laurillard, the OU's Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Technology Development. She is interested in matching the time that staff invest in producing materials using particular media with the time and effectiveness of student learning from those media. (To take an extreme example, it does not make sense for the course team to invest 90% of its resources on developing a component of the course that accounts for only 10% of the time that students spend on the course.) This kind of work is increasingly important, because it is a sad fact that with each new medium the time that is required for developing good materials seems to increase.
The knowledge media are also proving useful in the process of course development. First, they allow faster communication and document exchange between members of a course team. Second, they allow members of the course team to keep in contact with students and observe the way they study the course, in ways that were not possible previously.
Student support
From our experience at the Open University I believe that the major contribution of the knowledge media to course materials is still to come. Its success will be determined by our own skill in developing good teaching materials using new methods and by the students' willingness to acquire the necessary equipment. However, I can report that the helpful contribution of the knowledge media to student support is already clear. Student support is the second vital element in quality distance education.
The key to the success of the knowledge media in enriching the discourse between students and our universities and - very importantly - between students and students is Metcalfe's Law. This says that the value of a computer network to a user is proportional to the square of the number of other users.
As far as tutoring is concerned, we have found that computer communication and computer conferencing have required us to develop new techniques. Students are less shy about sending e-mails to their tutors than they were about calling them on the telephone. In order to avoid an increased workload tutors our tutors have developed techniques for moderating conferences, posting the answers to frequently asked questions, and creating student self-help groups that have proved successful.
Logistics
The third key to distance learning of quality is good logistics. Here the development of modern computing systems has already been vital to the success of all our institutions. The development of distributed and interactive computing will enable students to do far more administrative operations themselves, with significant savings in cost and time.
However, reliability is vital. At the Open University we now process a million student assignments each year. These are a vital element of our teaching strategy, as well as a means of assessment. We are developing methods that will allow students to submit assignments electronically instead of using the post. Obviously we shall not introduce electronic submission generally until we know it is reliable. If even 5% of assignments were to go astray in the Internet that would mean 50,000 unhappy students.
Research
The final element of good distance teaching at university level is for it to be rooted in research. The immense contribution of the Internet to improving communication between researchers is already clear and does not need further elaboration from me.
The proponents of the virtual universities are sure that technology is the answer. But what was the question? Starting from the ends we wish to achieve is likely to be more successful that starting from a means that can be used to achieve various ends. However, I do understand that the Internet does have its own dynamic. This is still a very new technology and without a willingness to experiment we may not discover its most promising applications to distance learning. I suspect that the route to success is to focus on learning rather than teaching.
We now face the challenge of a new generation of technology. I have tried to show that if we use the knowledge media properly we can further improve the quality of the distance learning opportunities that we make available. We must engage resolutely with these technologies so that we can set the benchmarks for their effective use, just as we have done with the previous generation of media.
I shall continue to follow the development of Anadolu University with particular interest. It seems to me that the time has come for Turkey to take much greater pride in its achievements in very large scale distance education and to lead the way in integrating a new generation of technology into its activities.