Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#298 THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE AND THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITIES

Folks:

The posting below looks at the role open universities and open learning are
likely to have in higher education in the coming decades. It is the last in
the series taken from the "Improving University Learning and Teaching, 25th
International Conference, that I attend last in Frankfurt, Germany. The
excerpt is from the keynote address, "The University of the Future and the
Future of Universities," by Sir John Daniel, vice-chancellor, The Open
University, and president, The United States Open University.

The full speech, which is available at
[http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/], contains the following sections:

(1) Introduction
(2) Open Learning: the legacy of the 20th century
(3) The Changing Circumstances of Higher Education
(4) What should open universities teach?
(5) Conclusion
(6) References.

I have reproduced below sections 4, 5 and 6.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Student-Assisted Teaching

Tomorrow's Academy

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THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE AND THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITIES

Sir John Daniel

How should open universities teach?

So much for what we teach. What can I say about the topical subject
of how we teach and how we expect our students to learn? Others at
this conference are addressing this subject in more detail so I will
make some general comments. What are we to make of e-learning and
what are we to do about it? Here are five observations.

First, particularly in the United States, the Internet has changed
the concept of distance education in the last few years. Until as
late as 1997 distance learning, for most American academics, meant
using broadband networks to teach simultaneously and synchronously to
a number of groups at distant locations. The focus was on
reproducing the classroom teaching that is at the heart of the
university experience in the USA. That has now changed. Today
distance learning means asynchronous teaching on the web.

Second, this takes academics away from the teaching model they are
most familiar with, so in using the web they tend to revert to the
older pedagogical model of correspondence education. At its
simplest, and it often is very simple, this consists of loading up
the course notes in html and using the web to turn the pages and
administer a quiz at the end of each section. My colleague John
Naughton calls this shovelware.

This reversion to the model of correspondence education can also
bring with it the temptation to adopt some of the sharp commercial
practices that gave correspondence education a bad name. If you want
to defraud people the net holds much more promise than the post
office box.

Third, this simple and rather impoverished model of e-learning seems
to produce a backlash among students. Today the trend is to embed
teaching on the web within a wider range of activities and to use the
term web-enhanced courses rather than web-based courses.

Fourth, our own Open University experience of the use of the net and
the web at scale indicates that its most powerful and popular use is
for communication between people about the course rather than for
dumping the content of the course on each student's computer.

Fifth, getting best value out of this communication on the internet
and empowering our 8,000 associate lecturers to use this teaching and
learning medium cost-effectively is not straightforward.

I refer you to a new book by my colleague Gilly Salmon, E-Moderating:
the key to teaching and learning online, for some of the lessons we
have learned.

The advice I give to the open universities, as they engage with the
e-world, is neither to lose their nerve nor to abandon their
principles. Those who are jealous of their success will, of course,
try to suggest that they are now old-fashioned institutions using
obsolete technologies. It is easy and self-serving for people who
sell servers and networks to suggest that any university that doesn't
do all its teaching on the net is doomed to extinction.

Faced with this sort of nonsense I urge you all to keep your nerve
and focus on the students. The students will be our best guides to
what works and what doesn't, what they like to have e-delivered and
what they would prefer to study in other ways. We must develop our
tactics for e-learning with them in mind. I recommend two
particularly helpful concepts at the level of tactics.

The first is the technology adoption life cycle. Here the work of
Geoffrey Moore is exciting and I provide a summary of his stimulating
books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado in my own
Mega-universities text.

The key idea is that the behaviour of the early adopters of a new
technology may not tell you much about how the mass market will
respond to your innovative use of technology.

There is a wealth of practical advice about how to cross the chasm
from the early adopters into the tornado of the mass market.

The second concept is the Innovator's Dilemma, the title of a closely
argued book by Clayton Christensen. The basic concept is that new
technologies come in two types.

First there are sustaining technologies which, as the term implies,
sustain and advance our current work in an evolutionary manner. But
then there are disruptive technologies which cannot be integrated
into our current operations in a straightforward way. They require a
different organisational structure in which to flourish. If they do
flourish, however, they can transform the whole enterprise.

The challenge, it seems to me, is that for universities the internet
is sustaining in some areas and disruptive in others. At the Open
University, for example, the net is sustaining in that it extends the
opportunities for students to communicate with each other. But it
is disruptive in that it does allow a distance learning system to be
reconceived from scratch.

The Open University has 160,000 students and clients online at
present, which may make us the biggest university in cyberspace for
whatever that is worth. It does mean that we are learning a huge
amount about effective e-learning and I expect you are too. We must
pool this information.

Where should open universities teach?

My final question is where? Where will universities be teaching and
what principles should guide us?

The Open University now has some 30,000 students taking its courses
outside the UK with a presence of some kind in 43 countries. That
rises to 111 countries if you count the places where we arranged
exams for students last year. It is already a substantial
international operation but it is only recently that we have started
to create policy for it in a systematic way.
Now, thanks to e-learning, all universities have the potential to
operate globally - or at least in countries where you can work on the
net cheaply and reliably, which is not quite the same thing.

I expect that the current enthusiasm for going global will calm
slightly as institutions get into some of the tricky questions of
student administration that have to be addressed if you intend to
operate at scale. There are also some even more important issues of
curriculum that need to be thought through when we operate outside
our own borders.

In her study of the development of global higher education my
colleague Robin Mason (Mason, 1999) found that few institutions had
really addressed these questions.

I suspect that open universities may find themselves at the forefront
of these global developments as traditional universities that seek to
offer a few of their programmes around the world look to us for help
with the necessary infrastructure. My colleague Geoff Peters calls
this the Railtrack model by analogy with the structure of Britain's
now private rail system.
There may also be some exciting opportunities for the open
universities and the traditional universities of the world to work
together in providing a world-wide infrastructure and tutorial
services twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Conclusion

I conclude that open universities and open learning will have a
central role in higher education in the new century. Social,
economic, political and technological forces are all pulling this
form of education to the centre of the policy stage.
But they must remember, above all, that their first duty is to their
students.

We have a democratic educational mission to reach and enthuse an
enormously diverse student population; to insist that critical,
informed, reflective engagement with the human condition is not a
matter for elites or professional experts alone.
By urging students always to be sceptical, always to ask questions
and never to take things for granted we aspire to lead them beyond
information and knowledge to understanding.

This understanding then illuminates their actions as they fulfil
their roles in a complex, democratic society.
That is how open universities will encourage all universities to be
more learner-centred.
References

Brown, J S & P. Duguid (2000) The Social Life of Information, Harvard
Business School Press.
Christensen, C M (1997) The Innovator's Dilemma: When technologies
cause great firms to fail, Harvard Business School Press.
Daniel, J S (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology
Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page
Klein, Naomi (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Flamingo
Mason, R D (1998) Globalising Education: Trends and Applications, Routledge
Moore, G A (1991) Crossing the Chasm, HarperBusiness
Moore, G A (1995) Inside the Tornado, HarperBusiness
Salmon, G.K. (2000) E-Moderating: the key to teaching and learning
online, Kogan Page

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