Technology Standards for Global Learning

An international conference to identify functional requirements for distance education

Sponsored by:
Western Governors University
and
National Governors Association for Best Practice

Salt Palace Convention Centre
Salt Lake City, Utah
April 26-28, 1998

Distance Learning: The Vision
and
Distance Learning: The Reality
What Works, What Travels?

by

Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom

E-mail: <j.s.daniel@open.ac.uk>
Website: <http://www.open.ac.uk/>
Tel: 44 1908 653214
Fax: 44 1908 655093

Introduction

This is a particularly opportune forum for such discussions. The key themes of this conference are technology standards and global learning. As we meet here today I suspect that the Open University, with over 40,000 students on-line from their homes, may be the world's largest single University user of the Internet for students taking degree credit courses by distance learning. So we know a bit about technology standards. Furthermore, with 25,000 students taking Open University courses outside the UK, we also know something about global learning. Last October, during our major annual examination session, we collected over 100,000 examination scripts from 400 centres in 94 countries. I'm pleased to say that only four scripts went astray!

I conclude that the partnership between the Western Governors University and the Open University will be a powerful force for technology standards and global learning.

Thank you, more generally, for inviting me back to Salt Lake City. I came here just two years ago when the Western Governors University was still called the Western Virtual University. Some people thought the change of name was sinister. I disagreed. The record of university innovation in general, and the history of distance education in particular, show clearly that political support is essential for success. I congratulate the Governors on backing this project by identifying it with themselves. I congratulate you all on the impressive progress that the WGU has made in two years.

When I was in Salt Lake City in 1996 I was in the middle of writing my book Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. My visit to the University of Utah came at a very opportune time and thanks to the kind help of UU President Arthur Smith and Vice-President Tony Morgan I was able to use the University of Utah as a case study of a leading campus university grappling with the strategic issues of our time. Happily the book has been very well received. Thanks, in particular, to enthusiasm here in the States it went through three printings in hardback before going into paperback. I believe the predictions I made in the book have stood the test of time and I'll come back to some of them shortly.

What Works, What Travels?

Under 'what works' I shall say a word about the 'functional requirements' for distance learning which are your first key theme. Under 'what travels' I shall comment on the ambition of 'global learning' which is your second theme.

What is your vision for the Western Governors University and is it achievable? I go back to the statement made by the Governors early in 1996 entitled, A Western Virtual University: from Vision to Reality. I quote from the opening section on the Governors' goals for the Western Virtual University and their analysis of the problem:

"All Western Governors are feeling the press of increased demand on their systems of post secondary education. ...the well-being of their states depends heavily on a post secondary education system that is visibly aligned with the needs of a transforming economy and society. At the same time the states' capacity to respond to these challenges is severely constrained by limited resources and the inflexibility and high costs of traditional educational practices and by outdated public policies."

• expand access to a broader range of higher education opportunities;
• reduce costs;
• give formal recognition for skills and knowledge, however acquired;
• use the competence of students as the measure of educational output;
• create tough performance standards for higher education;
• find new ways to assess students.

The evidence for saying yes to the first question comes from the large distance teaching universities that I call the mega-universities. These are unitary universities (i.e. not federations of campuses), that teach at a distance and enrol over 100,000 students each. There are now twelve of them and they enrol over 3 million students between them. They have increased access dramatically in their respective countries - not just in absolute numbers but in reaching the groups campus universities don't reach. They have cut costs sharply. All operate at less than half the average cost per full-time student of the campus universities in their countries. They have made study much more flexible - working people, housebound women and people with disabilities can now complete university degrees.

I tell this story, which to me is the most exciting development in academic life in the century now ending, in my book. Here because time is short, I'll just sketch the portrait of one of the mega-universities, the one I know and love best and the one which was the model for most of the others: The Open University.

The Open University was first called the University of the Air. It might then have been called the Prime Minister's University, because, like WGU, it began life as a political vision. I note that the most successful mega-universities, such as the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand and the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India also had strong political backing. However instead of being named the Prime Minister's University Britain's University of the Air was renamed the Open University and set itself the inspiring ambition of being open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. Thirty years on what has it achieved?

What about being open to people and increasing access? Tick that box. With 150,000 students the Open University is the biggest university in the UK. It awards over 100 Ph.Ds every year and will award its 200,000 bachelor's degree this summer. Its student profile is more like that of the general public than you find at other British universities. The proportion of students from blue-collar families is double. Gender is 50:50. Disability and ethnicity reflect the wider population. There are 7,000 OU students over 60 years old.

What about cost? A British government study showed that for bachelor's degrees the OU's costs per graduate varied between 40% and 80% of those of the campus universities depending on the subject. Comparisons of cost per credit completed are even more favourable.

What about flexibility? Tick that box too. Everywhere from oil rigs in the North Sea to submarines under the polar ice you find OU students. It is the only University I know of that has had a serving head of state do one of its degrees while in office (the President of an African country who completed the MBA degree two years ago after 4 years of study.

But, you are asking, what about quality? Isn't distance learning an inherently inferior type of study?

No, it is not. If you are to make a success of the WGU you must believe that it has the potential to be better for its students than other universities. Only in that way will you attract the staff and commitment that will make it better.

My predecessor, Walter Perry, applied to become the first Vice-Chancellor of the Open University from the position of Vice-Principal of the University of Edinburgh because he saw it as a golden opportunity to improve the lamentable quality of teaching in British universities. Other distinguished academics who joined the infant Open University were motivated by the chance to improve higher education in other ways. Most stayed until retirement because they had the opportunity to implement their ideals.

But the evidence for the success of the Open University is not just anecdotal. Britain now has national, government-sponsored quality assessment processes for its universities. Today the Open University ranks number 10 out of the country's 101 universities for the quality of its teaching. It has been judged excellent in disciplines like Earth Sciences and Music, where you would not think that distance learning had a natural advantage. Indeed, today the majority of all English students who are following programs rated as excellent in these two disciplines are at the Open University.

That touches on part of the second question I asked earlier. Are there credible ways of assessing the competence of students and the performance of universities. The British government does measure university performance and ranks the Open University in the elite upper decile.

Britain has also introduced, over more than a decade, a system of competency-based qualifications at all levels called National Vocational Qualifications. The Open University is a leader in the use of this competency-based approach in higher education. I am pleased that Bob Albrecht was able to see this work when he visited the Open University in February. There isn't time to talk about assessing competencies this morning but I can assure you that you have taken on an ambitious task. From our experience the task of defining higher level skills, the sorts of skills that WGU will be interested in, is more demanding - more intellectually demanding - than defining the knowledge associated with them. Furthermore the cost of assessing them in a credible manner is greater than the cost of setting conventional exams.

I wish you well. In this, as with your other goals, I urge all of you associated with the WGU to reach for the stars of excellence. They are within reach.

More controversially perhaps, in today's setting, I would also urge the WGU to have ambitions in research. The Open University is in the top third of UK universities for the volume and quality of its research and, with 1,300 doctoral students, plays a major role in training future researchers. For the OU being open to ideas does not just mean ideas for new ways of teaching. Because we teach on such a large scale our courses are often seen by the wider academic community as defining the state of the art in each discipline. We have a duty - and our scale gives us the resources - to move the intellectual paradigms forward. Research can benefit from networking just a much as teaching.

An accessible university, a cost-effective university, a flexible university, a quality university, an intellectually vibrant university, an Open University.

But many of you here are nerds, geeks, techies, and wonks. That's all very well you are thinking, but doesn't the Open University use the old media. Doesn't it have some courses that are not 100% delivered on the Web? Don't Open University students have to have a real mailbox as well as an account with an Internet Service provider? Doesn't it even use television?

Guilty as charged.

Here I must do something rather naughty. In Britain it is considered in rather bad taste to quote back to politicians things they said a few years ago. But I am going to take the risk of quoting from a speech that our host, Governor Leavitt made in 1995. He told the following anecdote:

'A Utah higher education official asked a high school senior: "Would you rather go to class on campus with other students or take courses alone via computer or television?"

"I want to be on campus, go to class, meet people and have fun." the student said.'

That is the challenge for distance learning. Technical standards are fine but they are a means to an end, not the end itself. The real challenge, the key purpose, is to imbue distance learning with all those active verbs. Beware, in this context, of the language of the literature for this conference. It talks repeatedly about the delivery of education and the delivery of instruction. Taking delivery of anything, whether it be clean diapers or pedagogically-sound instruction is a passive act. Successful distance learning means getting into the active verbs.

I've held senior posts in four universities engaged in distance teaching for over twenty years and I've been a distance learner myself. But this year I have a chance to observe it in a new light because my wife has become an Open University student, taking one of our German courses. My overwhelming impression is of how active she is.

When I see her working with the course materials on the dining table it's all go. She moves from writing, to listening to cassettes, to grappling with grammar to watching videos. Last weekend she was out both days: on Saturday to a five-hour tutorial group in Oxford, which is forty miles away, and on Sunday for three hours to a self-help group organised spontaneously by four local students at a coffee shop just a few miles away. Her course materials go into the suitcase when we travel. Her main regret is missing meetings of the self-help group because of travel and other commitments. In no way is she the passive recipient of deliveries of instruction. She is an active member of a learning community and the beneficiary of a learning system that facilitates her study in various ways.

What are the components of that learning system? What works?

The success of the Open University rests on four pillars. These are the essential functional requirements that you are looking for:

One: high quality, multiple media learning materials, preferably developed by teams of academics and experts;

Two: personal support to each student from a living, breathing human being who knows the student's name and aspirations;

Three: efficient logistics and administation. If you can't get the right material, information and people in the right place at the right time forget it, because the students will.

Four: as I've already mentioned, teaching rooted in research. It sounds like an optional extra but it's not. It makes the courses intellectually active, which is an important way to be active in a university.

Likewise, there are over 40,000 students on line from home. Some courses, whisper it quietly, are 100% on line, but in most the networking is just one learning medium in an integrated multiple media package. But in the aggregate it is non-trivial. Yesterday, Sunday being one of the busiest study days for OU students, they sent and read, between them, over 200,000 messages on the 6,000 plus computer conferences in which they are involved.

But this is not the delivery of instruction either. Student-to-student communication far outweighs that between faculty and students.

So what is my message? Simply to encourage you to concentrate on using technology in ways that facilitate learning and communication. Forget about the magic medium that will be the total answer to teaching and learning. That is tomorrow's technology and always will be.

That is not to say that we shouldn't try to minimise incompatibilities between technologies but let's not exaggerate their importance either. In a few minutes I will conclude by showing you a video. It was recorded using the PAL standard and has been converted to your NTSC standard - but I don't think you'll notice that. People will always develop ways of converting things they really want to use from one standard to another.

We are working today with a new technology, the Web, that is in its infancy. Let us avoid the hubris of thinking that, in this age when innovation is the watchword, we can condemn future generations to using our standards.

That is not to say we should encourage a free-for-all. By all means let us work together to maximise the chance to trade learning materials. The Open University is pleased to be the lead institution in the UK's association with the Instructional Management Software (IMS) project that has brought together some leading US organisations in the development of common standards for instructional software. You should support that project as we do. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that technical standards will allow you to bypass the hard work of creation, imagination, and communication that underpins successful teaching and learning.

To have value technology must enable the student to do more. If we simply use it as a new means of presenting information there won't be much learning from our advanced technology-based learning, just as there hasn't been much demand, so far at least, for video on demand.

The most important computing developments of the 1980s were not those that allowed humans to communicate with computers but those that allowed humans to communicate with humans. That makes sense. It also explains why computer conferencing seems to be a potential killer application. We've had great success with it in our teachers' training programme. The programme takes in 1200 new students each year and the OU equips them with computers, modems and the FirstClass conferencing system. They can take part in a whole series of sub-conferences: by subject, by region, by tutor - or create their own.

I think the large size of the class is one reason for its success. There is a law, which some call Metcalfe's law and others the law of the telecosm, which says that the utility of a network is roughly proportional to the number of users squared. That suggests our network would be several thousand times less useful if there were only twenty in the class. The effect is noticeable. I think of the student who posted a note on the network one evening asking for help because she had lost her voice during teaching practice. The same evening another student replied from the other end of the country and attached two pages for advice from her sister, who is a speech therapist.

Global learning

In my experience people who say that the course they have developed is international and can travel anywhere simply have not understood the issues. My colleague Robin Mason is about to publish a book called Global Education. It consists of case studies of a range of technology-taught courses from various sources around the world that each claimed to be international. She found that very few of them were genuinely international. Most were merely standard national courses with a few students overseas.

We are very conscious of this challenge at the Open University. We have 25,000 people taking our courses outside the UK and 10,000 of them are taking them in their local languages: Russian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Bulgarian. I am sure that as these courses evolve they will become less like, rather than more like, the UK version.

My colleagues tell me that they are finding it very academically enriching to have students of different cultures and languages in their courses - especially when those students remain in their home environments. When I went to the University of Paris for my doctoral studies I expected to adapt to the French academic environment. But a student who remains at home and takes a course from another country is much less patient with all the unexamined cultural and intellectual assumptions that it carries.

I remember one day, soon after the Open University had started to enrol substantial numbers of continental European students in its courses, sitting next to the Head of our Economics Department in the cafeteria. I asked her what she had been doing that morning. She replied that she had spent the morning with a course team going through one of our Economics courses and challenging every assumption of normality that contained. I thought that was wonderful. The basis of academic life is to challenge what is normal. Going global forces us to do that and enhances the acuity of our thinking.

I suggest to you that such grinding and difficult intellectual work is much more important for the future of international education and the life of the human mind, than an obsession with the technical standards of the medium through which our unexamined assumptions and prejudices are channelled.

When you invited me to come here I looked back at the address I gave here in Salt Lake City two years ago when the WGU was still in its infancy as the WVU. I finished that talk with ten recommendations drawn from my reading of the history of universities, the development of distance education and the success of the Open University. They remain valid today as the WGU moves towards implementation.

Number One:

don't think of technology as a way to deliver instruction. Think of it as a way to create the university, in all its richness, in students' homes.

Number Two:

don't innovate on too many fronts at once. Competency-based assessment is a good idea but remember that it requires more face-to-face contact than conventional exams.

Number Three:

remember that the key to the economic success of distance education is scale. Taking the Western states together you can operate on a large scale. Exploit that to the full.

Number Four:

conceiving the Western Governors University as a network glueing existing institutions together is fine. But it's tough to make consortia work. Make sure the WGU has degree awarding powers and enough independence for it to call some shots if it needs to.

Number Five:

if you're serious about enhancing access remember that students can't engage in advanced technology-based learning unless they have the advanced technology. Don't believe everything you read in the papers about everyone now being on-line and wanting to live most of their lives two feet from a computer screen.

Number Six:

remember that students must want to use the technology. Does it allow them to do exciting new things or is it just a complicated and inconvenient new way of presenting the same old content?

Number Seven:

it is perfectly possible to find good courses elsewhere and offer them through the WGU. You just have to face down those who say it's no good if it's not invented here.

Number Eight:

Providing good personal tutorial support to distance students is as important as having good courses. New technology allows good tutors to have an impact over a wide area.

Number Nine:

learn from the traditions of distance education, both the individual home study tradition and the remote group classroom tradition. There's a lot of wisdom there and some bitter experience of things that didn't work.

Number Ten:

think of your Western Virtual University as a real, flesh and blood academic community. Universities have been around for a thousand years, inspired by the timeless academic ideal that knowledge is important. Aim for evolution, not revolution from that proud tradition.

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