|
|
by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
Introduction
It is a safe prediction that in the UK, in the year now beginning we shall hear much discussion of education policy - perhaps particularly of higher education policy. Those of us who lead universities are in danger of talking ourselves out on the subject. We've made our own submissions to the Dearing Committee. We've contributed to the submission of the collectivity of universities through the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, ably led by Gareth Roberts from Sheffield. We've also tried to influence the submissions from other important bodies such as the Confederation of British Industry.
It's now up to Sir Ron to sift through this vast harvest of words and recommend what a new government should do. Whilst we wait for the white smoke to issue from his conclave, in this period of relative calm, I'd like to put our discussions of higher education in the UK in the context of a wider world.
The world crisis in higher education
Vice-Chancellors are given to loose talk about a crisis in higher education in the UK, by which they really mean that the amount of taxpayers' money that their university will receive in 1997-98 will be less that it got this year. The total amount of public funds directed at each student, adding together the funding council allocations and the fees subsidy that full-time students receive, has been dropping steadily for a number of years.
We may call this a crisis, but we should keep its magnitude in perspective. There are deeper crises in higher education in nearly every other country. Before coming to the Open University in 1990 I was president of a university in Ontario, Canada. This year all Ontario universities had their government grants cut by 17% and were told to double their fees. South of the border, in the United States, the alarm bells are ringing about the cost of university study. The most recent figures show that for an American family the cost of sending a child to college, when you add up tuition, room and board, is about 15% of the median family income. That's up from 9% of median family income 15 years ago.
That's the cost of sending your offspring to a public university. If you choose a private university the figure is nearly 40% of median family income, up from just over 20% in the same fifteen year period. Needless to say, Americans are beginning to ask whether such a large investment is worth it.
Looking east, to the rest of Europe, we see a different type of crisis. As in Britain, western European taxpayers shoulder most of the cost of providing university education. However, with rising numbers of students, other pressing calls of the public purse, and the struggle to meet the criteria for monetary union, European governments are trying to move more of the cost of higher education to consumers. We saw the fuss this created in Italy and France last year.
But those problems pale into insignificance if we turn to higher education in the developing countries. A World Bank report on Africa has this to say:
'Unfortunately tertiary institutions in their present form - overwhelmed with problems related to access, finance, quality, internal and external efficiency - are not up to the challenge. Enrolment levels are shockingly low. Limited space and declining budgetary levels prevent universities from servicing the growing demand for education. As a result, universities in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from low numbers of trained faculty, virtually non-existent levels of research, poor quality educational materials (e.g. African libraries have suffered immensely as collections have become out of date and laboratory equipment is old, in disrepair and out of date), and outmoded programs. ...It is thus highly questionable whether tertiary institutions can afford to continue to develop under this traditional model of higher education, particularly if the countries of Africa wish to expand - more than marginally - access to higher education while maintaining quality.'
That is the problem that makes our own concerns about higher education seem parochial. As we near the end of a millennium in which the idea of the university has blossomed, population growth is outpacing the world's capacity to give people access to universities. In the last seven days, somewhere in the world, a new university campus should have opened its gates to students. Next week, in a different location, another new university ought to begin operations.
A sizeable new university would now be needed every week merely to sustain current participation rates in higher education. New institutions are not being created at this frequency. A crisis of access lies ahead lies ahead in the developing world, which is where most of the world's children are being born and where most of the population is under 20 years old.
So universities have a crisis of access in the developing world and a crisis of cost in the industrial world. We may round out the trio by observing that throughout the world there is a crisis of flexibility. Are universities teaching the knowledge and skills that students need? Are they coping with the variety of student demand? Do teaching methods meet the expectations and habits of today's learners? Are universities confident about the quality of what they do? Most importantly, is the traditional campus model of a university appropriate for the era of lifelong learning?
Lots of important questions. But before we get depressed about this triple crisis let's look at it in Chinese. In Chinese lettering the ideogram for crisis is made by combining the signs for danger and opportunity. That contains a profound truth. Universities combine perceived weakness with potential strength. Universities often fail to live up to the hopes of the communities that support them. But those same communities look to their universities for help and leadership in the knowledge revolution that is changing the world.
How can universities provide that help and leadership? How can they seize opportunities out of crises? How can they be reconfigured, reconceived and re engineered to address the challenges of access, cost, and flexibility?
Technology is the answer, what was the question?
What happens in other areas of endeavour when the need to adapt to new circumstances creates a crisis? A common answer is to turn to technology, which has transformed many aspects of life in this century. It is, of course, a nice paradox that whereas academics have been the originators and developers of many of the technologies that have defined the 20th century, universities have been slow to apply technology to their own teaching activity. Technology on campus is suspect.
Often, I would add, deservedly so. Too often the proponents of technology are the starry-eyed inhabitants of fantasy island. The old quip, 'technology is the answer, what was the question?' captures the uncritical infatuation that successive communication technologies have inspired in same quarters. In 1840 Josiah Bumstead proclaimed that the inventor or introducer of the blackboard deserved to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind. Since then there has been no shortage of prophets to declare that each new invention: radio, film, programmed learning, television and computers was going to revolutionise education.
The least you can say, as we meet here in Sheffield, three years away from the millennium, to talk about education, is that the revolution has not yet happened. So I shall not be starry eyed about technology. However, I shall claim that the UK has done more than any other country to apply technology effectively to education and training for the benefit of the whole world.
I make that claim not in any spirit of jingoistic mondo-scepticism, but as someone who has been three times an emigrant to different countries. I came to my present job, having spent two decades applying technology to education in jurisdictions overseas, because it looked like the most interesting and important academic job in the world. It looked that way because the UK's achievements in blending education and technology provide a strong foundation for future development.
What has Britain contributed already, and what can Britain contribute in the future, to the application of technology to the crisis in education?
Technology: definition and development
The first important contribution is a sensible understanding of what technology is. The OU's level one course in technology defines it simply as the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines. There are some significant implications to unpack in that.
First, it recognises that there is more to technology than applied science. Non-scientific knowledge, such as craft knowledge, design, tacit knowledge and managerial skills are involved.
Second, the definition asserts explicitly that technology is about practical tasks - in contrast to science, which is about understanding.
Third, and very important, technology always involves people and their social systems, as well as hardware.
What this means, as we look for help from technology in education, is that rules, processes, approaches and ways of organising things are just as important as the devices with coloured lights we call hardware and the software that makes them run.
There is, however, one interesting parallel between scientific discovery and technological progress. Scientific discovery often happens, as Arthur Koestler noted in his book The Act of Creation, when two disciplines or two paradigms come together. The intersection of the two different planes yields new insights. I observe that the technologies useful to education have, similarly, grown out of the convergence of existing technologies. Let me draw a few lessons from history.
Convergence 1: Correspondence Education
The first major technological convergence of interest to education was the coming together in Britain, in 1840, of the older technology of printing with the new technology of the universal postal service. We sometimes say that educators are slow to adopt new technologies. Not so in this case. In a very short time Isaac Pitman was offering lessons in shorthand by correspondence. Suddenly it was possible to teach individuals, in large numbers, without imposing on them the constraints of time and place that go with attendance in class. Distance learning took a leap forward.
That's the good news. The bad news is that for well over a hundred years correspondence education had low status and often a poor reputation. It was seen as a second-rate form of education. Why was this so? You can list the reasons as well as I. First, higher education was, until about 1960, a minority sport. Existing methods could cope with demand. Second, the reputation that the public accords to any educational endeavour combines various factors. In most countries, there is a strong correlation between the reputation of an educational institution and its age. People tend to equate quality with exclusivity of access, so educational systems with small classes and plenty of human interaction are well regarded.
Correspondence education was a new approach. It did not seek to be exclusive and, although correspondence tuition can be thought of a class of one with very individualised interaction, that was not usually the reality. Indeed, like any commercial transaction where buyer and seller do not meet, there was a temptation, which some correspondence colleges did not resist, to cut corners and encourage drop-out.
Convergence 2: Remote Classroom Teaching
The second convergence of technologies to note here was the coming together of the old technology of oral presentation with the new technology of telephone conferencing. This happened in the USA, notably in Wisconsin, beginning in the 1960s. It was the origin of the remote-classroom method of teaching now in use by a growing number of universities. The original audio conferencing technology has evolved progressively to include satellite systems that use one-way video with two-way sound and multi-directional video conferencing equipment.
These systems provide useful opportunities for the universities that use them, but it would be a considerable exaggeration to call this a revolution in higher education.
Convergence 3: Multi-media Distance Education.
A third convergence of technologies occurred in Britain in the 1970s with the creation of the Open University. The older techniques of correspondence education were brought together with the new technologies of broadcasting.
However, there were other ingredients of a less technological nature that made this convergence particularly successful. First, there was a very strong political and idealistic drive behind this initiative. The political founders and the staff were determined to bring more and better higher education to many more people. Second this drive to create a genuine academic experience of quality led to the creation of a new and unique student support network, with individual tutors available locally to each student and the opportunity for face-to-face sessions and residential schools.
This has been a revolution. Let's fast forward and look at what that 1970s convergence of technologies has produced today. You already know about the Open University in the UK so I won't dwell long on that. Some 130,000 students in 1997 including over 10,000 postgraduates. A University in the top 20% of universities for quality, with most of its teaching programmes rated as 'excellent' by the funding council. The first UK university to win the Queen's Anniversary Award for a teacher training programme. It's a good story.
But the impact on the rest of the world is even more interesting. Here I don't mean the 20,000 people in other countries now studying with the OU but the impact of the OU on higher education policy elsewhere. Since the 1970s nearly 50 open universities have been created around the world. Ten of them enrol over 100,000 students. I researched them for a book I wrote last year and called them the mega-universities. All of these universities are more or less directly inspired by the model British Open University and they have made a massive difference to the crisis of access, cost and flexibility in their countries. They are located in France, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea and China.
By the standards of some of them the UK Open University, with only 150,000 students, is rather a tiddler. The Chinese and Turkish mega-universities each have over half a million students and those in India and Thailand have reached a quarter of a million. This great increase in the provision of higher education in these eleven countries has been achieved at low cost
One set of figures sums it up quite well.
The 3,500 colleges and universities in the USA have an enrolment of 14 million students and annual spending on higher education is around $175 billion. This represents an average cost of $12,500 per student.
The UK has 182 higher education institutions, 1.5 million students, and a spend of nearly £10 billion. It works out at around £6300 per student, or about $10,000. Not quite as expensive as the United States but, as they would say, in the same ballpark.
Now look at the eleven mega-universities as a group. They enrol, between them, some 2.8 million students. Their budgets aggregate to around $900 million. This works out at less than $350 per student. There is more than an order of magnitude difference between this and the US or UK costs. This is why the practices of the mega-universities will help to satisfy part of the burgeoning demand for university education in the next century at costs affordable to individuals and governments. This is why a country like India wants to channel a large part of the growth in higher education into its growing network of open universities and the distance education programmes of its conventional universities.
You may argue, of course, that to aggregate the costs of the British OU together with the Indian OU is a gross misuse of statistics. It's a fair point If you make comparisons within each country, including the UK, you find that in all cases the cost per student is at most about half of the average for the campus universities in the same countries. The conclusion is clear. These mega-universities, a British invention, are, for the time being, the most effective response to the crises of access, cost and flexibility. I've given you the figures for access and cost. Because they operate by distance education each also offers its students greater flexibility than the conventional universities in the same country.
I said the mega-universities were the most effective response to the crises in higher education 'for the time being'. Because, of course, technology moves on. What other convergences will determine the shape of higher education in the next century?
Convergence 4: Dual-Mode Universities
One very important convergence is between distance education and campus education. Campus universities are full of bright people and, of course, they noticed that the distance teaching universities were stealing a march on them in terms of access, cost and teaching quality. For this reason, in the OECD countries at least, there has been a 'rapid, recent and substantial change in numbers of universities providing distance education'. In Canada, for example, where 42 of 69 universities are now providers, this represents a 50% increase in eight years.
The proportions of universities offering distance courses in some other countries are: France - 40%; Sweden - almost all; USA - almost all. For the UK the figure is around 75%. Indeed, a recent survey by the International Centre for Distance Learning could find only 13 British universities that were not doing any distance teaching. It's clear that monopoly that the mega-universities may once have had in distance education is now gone. Most universities offering courses at a distance are now dual-mode institutions - which is the jargon for universities that operate both in classrooms and at a distance. However, there are interesting questions about the academic economy of the dual-mode institutions. Are they cost-effective? What is the quality like?
These are controversial questions, but that is not the reason I shall duck them here. The basis of distance education is about to change again. Another technological convergence is taking place, which may prove very important.
Convergence 5: Computing and telecommunications
I need not insist on the convergence of computing and telecommunications that is creating a new generation of information technology. Our view at the OU is that this one, like the process that led to multi-media distance education, involves lots of technologies and more than just technology. My colleague Marc Eisenstadt coined the term knowledge media to designate the results of the merging of telecommunications, computing and the learning sciences. He wasn't just trying to be cute in inventing this new term. It reflects his belief that these new media have the potential to change fundamentally the relationship between people and knowledge and also his desire to put the concept of knowledge at the centre of our use of the media for teaching.
Earlier I was scathing about the hype and swollen expectations with which some educators have greeted each new generation of communications technology since the blackboard. We should, therefore, subject Marc Eisenstadt's claim to close scrutiny. What is he saying? I think this passage sums it up:
'Now is knowledge the answer to what fits onto CD-ROMs, what "sits" on a file server, or what "travels" down the information highway? Most emphatically not! Knowledge is an emergent property which transcends the fixed-size-and-space concepts of media and information, just as it transcends the notion that you can impart it to students by "filling" them up from the teacher's "vessel". ...knowledge is a dynamic process, a vibrant, living thing, resting on shared assumptions, beliefs, complex perceptions, sophisticated yet sometimes crazy logic, and the ability to go beyond the information given. "Knowledge" is the correct abstraction for describing what people communicate to one another. "Content" is not'.
Eisenstadt is saying that with the knowledge media the conventional, rather static notion of 'content' will become less important than the dynamic means of accessing, sharing and creating knowledge that are now available. By providing a medium for conversation, a delivery mechanism and a means of circulating digital objects, the knowledge media honour both the idea of community and the role of conversation that are central to the idea of a university.
But is this real? To be honest it is too early to say. What I can say is that one very simple manifestation of the knowledge media seems to be a killer application at the Open University. This year we have 30,000 students who are networked to the OU from their computers at home. That's up from only 5,000 two years ago and 17,000 last year.. Students seem to value greatly the chance to communicate, above all with each other. Are these early adopters of technology typical of the mass of the student body? There again, it's too early to say.
What is clear is that most governments are convinced that the knowledge media are going to make a big difference to higher education. The term 'virtual university' is being used, mostly by governments and agencies like the World Bank, to describe the networking of existing universities into a new kind of mega-university. The idea, caricaturing only a little is that, with a few clicks on your mouse, you can take courses from any of the hundreds of universities in the western United States as if they were a single institution called the Western Governors University.
As you would expect, the universities in the western USA are not sure what to make of their governors' enthusiasm for this idea. They think some of the assumptions behind it are naive, but they don't want to get left behind. What are we to make of the idea? Britain invented the first generation of mega-universities, which have been a great success. Can we do equally well in the era of virtual, networked mega-universities? Will the British version of the virtual mega-university be adopted in other countries like the open mega-university has been?
The answer depends on us. We already know what the ingredients of success for this kind of enterprise are. They are four: good learning materials; rapid and useful feedback to students on their work; slick logistics; and the intellectual vitality of a profound commitment to scholarship. All easy to say. Rather harder to deliver. In my view the key to success will lie in genuine collaboration between our universities on each of these ingredients.
On the first, the evidence indicates that producing good learning materials with the knowledge media demands more academic staff time than older technologies. We can hope that part of that extra investment will be recouped in more efficient student learning. But we would also be wise to try to amortise the added cost over more students in more universities.
Student feedback and support - or rather the absence of effective provision of them - are the Achilles heel of most distance education systems. If we could create an effective world wide support system for British providers of quality distance education we could leave the competition in the dust. Of our key competitors I observe that the Aussies are aggressive but uncoordinated and the Americans are enthusiastic but over-priced.
The idea of working together on a student support system carries over into logistics. So far, many UK universities that have developed boutique distance education programmes in particular areas of academic speciality are content to operate with small numbers. But it's a big world out there with exciting opportunities to scale things up.
Finally, what about scholarship? Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the OU, took the job because he saw it as an opportunity to improve what he saw as the desperately low standards of teaching in British universities. When he left the job ten years later he said that the most important innovation of the OU was the course team process which had created the revolution in teaching quality that is now recognised in the OU string of excellent ratings.
Other countries, when they offer distance education overseas, tend to package the prevailing academic orthodoxy. As my Canadian daughter would say: 'bor__ing'. If we could bring the intellectual vitality of the OU course team to our collaborative efforts within a world wide virtual university led from the UK we would excite the world.
Let us not forget that the academic mode of thinking, which I contrast to the ideological mode of thinking, is probably Europe's greatest gift to the world. If we can combine a deep commitment to the academic mode of thinking with the know-how that made the first generation of mega-universities so successful, then I believe that we can make the idea of the virtual mega-university real. If so, it will provide hope for millions in the 21st century.
Reference
Daniel, J.S. (1996) Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London ISBN 0 7494 2119 3
4215