Asian Association of Open Universities 25th Annual Conference Penang, Malaysia 28-30 September 2011 Keynote address
Transforming Asia through Open and Distance Learning Sir John Daniel Commonwealth of Learning Abstract The state of Penang is an example of successful transformation in Asia based on strengthening the rule of law. Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is an important vehicle for the education that can underpin this process by expanding the freedoms that people can enjoy. Using technology can not only cut costs but also enhance the quality of education and therefore yield important benefits. The development of eLearning has encouraged many conventional universities to offer ODL but research in North America suggests that few are doing it very well. Private forprofit providers are more successful. Research also shows that the notion of a divide in attitudes to eLearning between young ‘digital natives’ and older students is a myth. Technology-mediated learning encourages all students to engage more deeply with their work. Finally, the Open Educational Resource University is described as a potentially radical transformation in higher education. Introduction It is a pleasure to be here with you and an honour to be giving a keynote address, once again, to the annual conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities. I am delighted that the AAOU conference is back in Malaysia! I am proud to say that I was here when AAOU met in Malaysia in 1997 and again in 2007. Those conferences were held in Kuala Lumpur and this time we are in Penang, which is a perfect place to hold this meeting. Some of you may have seen an article in The Economist newspaper last month that began with the line: ‘If you are going to have a heart attack, have it in Penang’. Just one of the hospitals here in George Town will admit 70,000 medical tourists this year. ‘It specialises in heart procedures and it will perform roughly 23,000 of them this year, including 550 open-heart operations. Such is the demand that the hospital is doubling its number of beds.’ I hope that my keynote address will not give anyone a heart attack but the article goes on to explain how Penang, the most dynamic of Malaysia’s states, is also the perfect expression of Malaysia’s tourist slogan, ‘Malaysia – Truly Asia’. ‘Founded as a free port in 1789 and occupying a position between India and East Asia, the island of Penang drew merchants and middlemen keen to make their fortunes. Chinese, Indians, Armenians, Arabs and more all traded alongside 1
each other. With its racial and religious mix, and dedication to the pursuit of free trade, Penang was in many ways the first custom-made city of globalisation.’ I cannot resist quoting a bit more of the article, simply to make the point that Penang is an ideal meeting place for the AAOU to explore the conference theme of Transforming Asia through ODL. The article continues: ‘Penang’s own “Silicon Valley” companies know that the rule of law in Malaysia gives them the sort of protection for patents and intellectual property they would not enjoy in China, and an ease of doing business that they could not find in India… The federal government has also spent liberally on bridges and the airport, making Penang better connected to the rest of Asia… The result is another boom. Last year more investment poured into Penang than into any other state in Malaysia. Scores of new electronics firms have swooped in to join the pioneers, along with an expanding cluster of 20 or so medical-device manufacturers. Crucially, most of the new jobs are in research and development rather than assembly. An American chip-designer, Altera, has a new facility with 1,100 workers in Penang, 800 of them engineers. Its head says that almost all the engineers are locals—which is good for Malaysia.’ So we are in a pace-setting state, Penang, in a pace-setting country, Malaysia. I would add that the Asian Association of Open Universities has long been a pace-setter in the worldwide community of ODL. The AAOU is the professional focus for the most significant concentration of distance-teaching and mega-universities in the world (Daniel, 1996). One of your strengths is the great variety of institutions represented here. Some of your institutions are very large, some are much smaller. Depending on your technological environments some of you offer online learning whereas others use the mass media. Some AAOU universities have already acquired a reputation for quality whilst others are working to achieve it. This diversity creates extremely rich interactions at AAOU conferences. I am a long-time admirer of the AAOU and it seems that the sentiment is reciprocated! For some years now you have acquired the habit of inviting me to give a keynote speech at your conference. I don’t think I have missed many of the AAOU conferences since that meeting in Malaysia in 1997! When our colleagues here in Penang invited me to address you I hesitated before replying because I was afraid that the members of AAOU must be tiring of listening to me. However since you have renewed the invitation I must try to be worthy of your confidence. After making so many speeches to AAOU conferences what can I say that is new? Indeed, should I attempt to say new things? Perhaps the reason that you invite me back is that each year I do try and address the theme of conference, and that is what I shall do now. And I shall come back to The Economist article, because it illustrates some of questions raised by the theme ‘transforming Asia’. It is both presumptuous and pretentious for someone from another part of the planet to pontificate about how a region as huge and complex as Asia should transform itself. So let me start with some of the transformations that have taken place right here in Penang.
2
Penang is the first state in Malaysia to open up all state tenders to competition. This has entailed dismantling the special preferences for ethnic Malays that have underpinned national policies for forty years, but Penang claims that reforming the system has ended the cronyism and corruption that wasted money under previous regimes. Ending old systems of patronage allows money to be spent on social programmes instead. These are popular with voters and the assault on corruption pleases foreign investors. ‘Little wonder, then,’ The Economist concludes, ‘that Penang has become a political weathervane as much as a lesson in economic development’. This may all seem a long way from open and distance learning, but I shall try to show that it is not. Here is how I shall proceed. First, I shall assume that the most important transformation needed in Asia is to continue to expand the rule of law. I shall argue that, broadly speaking, the more educated a people becomes, the more it will insist on living under the rule of law. In this context the first virtue of open and distance learning is that it allows you to expand access to education rapidly at low cost. I shall spend a little time on the question of cost, especially as it affects higher education, because if we can make good education less costly then more people can benefit from it. Second, I shall stress the significance of the word ‘open’. There is an affinity between the concept of openness in open and distance learning and the practice of openness and transparency that goes with the rule of law. That will get us into the pedagogies and the technologies of ODL. The key question, it seems to me, is whether new approaches are transforming learning styles and, if so, whether this is a good thing. Third, I shall explore how trends in ODL are changing the ways that higher education is organised. I was going to say ‘changing the ways that we organise higher education’, but the point is that current trends are transforming patterns of provision in ways that are often more spontaneous than planned. We should ponder these transformations and Malaysia, which is a pace-setter in this area too, is a particularly good place to do so. Finally, since our theme is transformation, I shall describe a radically new approach to ODL, the Open Educational Resource University that is being developed by a number of public institutions around the world. Education for All So let me turn first to education and the rule of law. I presume that you all think education is a good thing – otherwise you would not be at a conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities. But what is it good for? Since we earn our livings as educators we ought to be particularly rigorous in the claims that we make for education. Just because higher levels of education appear to correlate with many desirable features of societies does not mean we can assume a relationship of cause and effect. Are educated societies richer because education makes them richer, or because richer societies can afford more education? In the last 20 years the notion that education contributes to economic growth has become a truism. But is the truism true and what level or kind of education are we talking about? I have
3
explored this issue in my recent book Mega-schools, Technology and Teachers; Achieving Education for All (Daniel, 2010). William Easterly (2001:84) performed a service by reviewing the relationships between economic development and a number of measures of educational expansion. Having found little correlation between economic growth and the expansion of primary education, he tested a claim for a stronger correlation with the expansion of secondary enrolment but showed that this did not hold up either. In 2008 a 50-year summary of research on the relative importance of various levels of education to economic growth suggested that early childhood education was now the key factor (Pscharapoulos, 2008). Easterly concluded that ‘education is another magic formula that has failed us on the quest for growth’. Other researchers are less dismissive but suggest that what counts is not a particular level of schooling but the quality of education on offer and the learning outcomes achieved (Hanushek & Wössmann, 2007). Amartya Sen (1999) has urged a more holistic perspective on the role of education in development. For him the search for a single magic bullet to destroy poverty and create steady economic growth is an illusion. He argues for taking a broad and many-sided approach to development. Development as freedom Sen’s approach is based on the concept of development as freedom. For him development is a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. This broad process embraces all narrower views of development such as growth of individual incomes, facilities for education and health care, civil rights, technological progress and social modernisation. Viewing development as the expansion of freedoms puts the focus on the purposes that make development important rather than on some of the means of achieving it. Freedom is central to the process of development for two distinct but complementary reasons. The first reason is evaluative: the primary assessment of the progress of development is whether the freedoms that people have are enhanced. The second reason is effectiveness, because the ‘achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people’ (Sen, 1999:4). Such a broad approach to development gives a vital role to education even if the expansion of schooling in a particular jurisdiction does not give an immediate economic pay-off. The history of Japan and other East Asian countries shows that universal education should be seen as a basis for economic development rather than its cause. Those economies greatly expanded education (and health care) before they broke out of poverty. But once other factors were favourable for economic growth the good levels of education and literacy allowed these countries to develop rapidly. Sen himself (1999:42) argues that once it adopted a form of market economics China grew more rapidly than India because it already had higher levels of education and health care. Today the examples of jurisdictions as diverse as Cuba and the Indian state of Kerala show that high levels of literacy and health care do not of themselves create economic growth. However, experience suggests that if such jurisdictions were to adopt economic policies that favoured 4
growth they would develop more strongly than others starting without such a base. Political and economic freedoms promote economic growth (Bhalla, 1995). Considering development as freedom makes education a constituent component of development as well as a means for promoting it. Education fosters some freedoms directly and, since freedoms strengthen each other, it has a knock-on effect that promotes development generally. The notion of agency also helps to change the concept of development from a process that is imposed on people by governments and development organizations to something that they do for themselves. Free human beings have their own aspirations. One of the really interesting questions in Asia, of course, is whether you can educate people for economic success without giving them a desire for more political freedom. I suspect you cannot – but you live here and will know better. But even education that gives people more economic freedom will also make them more eager to live under the rule of law so that they can use their economic freedom predictably. Cutting the cost of education If education helps to reinforce transformations that extend the rule of law, then expanding education is good. The first virtue of ODL, especially here in Asia with your large institutions, is that it costs less. With apologies to those who have heard me expound the iron triangle before, let me explain why ODL can not only cut costs but also raise quality. The goal of most governments is to widen access to education while improving its quality and reducing its cost. It is helpful to visualize this challenge as a triangle of vectors (Fig. 1-A). This makes the simple point that with conventional classroom teaching there is little scope to alter these vectors advantageously because improving one vector will worsen the others. Pack more students into the class and quality will be perceived to suffer (Fig. 1-A1). Try to improve quality by providing more learning materials or better teachers and the cost will go up (Fig. 1-A2). Cutting costs may endanger both access and quality (Fig.1 A-3). We call this the ‘iron triangle’. It has constrained the expansion of education throughout history and has created in the public mind an insidious link between the quality of education and its exclusiveness. However, technology is able to stretch this triangle to achieve the revolution of wider access, higher quality and lower cost (Fig. 1-B). Traditional distance education institutions, like your open universities, have been doing this for years. Not only do you enrol millions of students but some of you also achieve high ratings for the quality of your teaching. The most recent national quality assessments for teaching in England put the UK Open University in fifth place out of a hundred institutions, one place above Oxford (Fig. 2)1. The UK Open University has also come top – and never lower than third – in national surveys of student satisfaction conducted with a large sample of students in all English universities.
1
These national assessments of teaching quality were discontinued, at the request of the ‘elite’ universities, after this table was published, so there is no more recent data.
5
This revolution of providing high quality teaching to large numbers at low cost was achieved with the traditional distance learning technologies of the industrial era (print, audio, video and stand-alone computers). It was based on the principles of industrial production, which were identified two centuries ago by Adam Smith as division of labour, specialisation, economies of scale and the use of machines and media. Today there is a new generation of digital technology characterised by the concepts of networks, connectedness, collaboration and community. As well as increasing the economies of scale, since digital material costs almost nothing to distribute, this technology also speeds up and intensifies the interactions possible between students and their teachers. The result has been to take technology-mediated learning far beyond the confines of the open universities. Most traditional campus universities, at least in countries that have a basic IT infrastructure, are now dabbling in distance education online. More significantly, students are seeking out this form of teaching in larger and larger numbers. ODL going digital However, the evidence so far suggests that open universities will be more successful at providing eLearning than campus institutions. I back this assertion with research that my fellow Vancouverite, Professor Tony Bates, conducted across North America (Bates, 2011). In his report 2011 Outlook for Online Learning and Distance Education he identified three key trends in US higher education. You can judge whether it is fair to assume that Asian countries will follow similar paths as connectivity improves. The first trend is the rapid growth of eLearning. Enrolment in fully online (distance) courses in the USA expanded by 21% between 2009 and 2010 compared to a 2% expansion in campusbased enrolments. His second finding is that, despite this growth, institutional goals for eLearning in conventional public sector higher education are short on ambition. Bates argues, as I have just done with the Iron Triangle, that the intelligent use of technology could help higher education to accommodate more students, improve learning outcomes, provide more flexible access and do all this at less cost. Instead, he found that costs are rising because investment in technology and staff is increasing without replacing other activities. There is no evidence of improved learning outcomes and a failure to meet best quality standards for eLearning in some institutions. In general, the traditional US public higher education sector seems to have little heart for eLearning. Many institutions charge higher fees to online students, even though the costs of serving them are presumably lower, suggesting that they would like to discourage this development. A third finding, which should stimulate the public sector to take eLearning more seriously given its rapid growth, is that the US for-profit sector has a much higher proportion of the total online market (32%) compared to its share of the overall higher education market (7%). Seven of the ten US institutions with the highest online enrolments are for-profits. For-profits are better placed to expand online because they do not have to worry about resistance from academic staff, nor about exploiting their earlier investment in campus facilities. Furthermore, the for6
profits use a team approach to the development of eLearning courses and student support, whereas many public institutions simply rely on individual academics to create and support online versions of their classroom courses. Bates (2005:164) calls this the ‘Lone Ranger’ model and argues that it is less likely to produce sustainable eLearning of quality than the team approach. Finally, Bates notes that over 80% of US students are expected to be taking courses online in 2014, up from 44% in 2009. Clearly, the providers that are already established in this mode of delivery, i.e. the for-profits, will have the advantage. Indeed, a UK Report: Collaborate to compete: Seizing the opportunity for online learning for UK higher education, explicitly recommends that public higher education institutions should link up with for-profit companies in order not to get left behind in offering online learning. This is already a growing trend in the US. For example, Best Associates, a Dallas-based merchant bank with various investments in education, operates an Academic Partnerships programme with a steadily growing number of state universities. The basis of the model is to help these institutions offer high-demand and socially important programmes (e.g. M.Ed., B.Sc. Nursing) online at scale. The public institution sets the fees, of which it retains 20-30% with the rest going to Best Associates. The system can operate successfully with much lower fees than these institutions would normally charge. Some have reduced their fees substantially but others have not. Bates concludes his report by alerting Canadian institutions to a growing market that is not well served by campus-based education. In his view Canadian public colleges and universities are not moving into online distance learning fast enough to meet the demand. "If public institutions do not step up to the plate, then the corporate for-profit sector will". With access to broadband Internet connections spreading rapidly this statement may well have global validity and indicates how eLearning could transform higher education systems. Will they split over the coming years into a public sector focused on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching through eLearning? If so, does it matter? Some governments would like to see higher education divide itself into research universities and teaching institutions. Extrapolating the trends Bates has identified suggests that their wish may come true, with the added difference that most research will take place in publicly-supported institutions while most teaching will be done by for-profit enterprises. Is ODL good for your mental health? Before I explore the impact of ODL on the corporate structures of higher education let me first ask whether ODL is good for your mental health. If a purpose of education is to cultivate a taste for personal freedom and the rule of law, does ODL do this better or worse than classroom teaching? Let me first digress to explore a myth about digital natives. We have seen that students are seeking out eLearning in larger and larger numbers. However, in Bates’ survey many of these were young students. Some observers had forecast that digital technology would create a 7
generation gap in higher education, with young ‘digital natives’ seeking out eLearning while older students avoided it. Research by the UK Open University on its own highly diverse student body shows that this forecast was wrong. It concludes that while there are clear differences between older and younger people in their use of technology, there is no evidence of a clear break between two separate populations. The research was conducted on an age-stratified, gender-balanced cohort of 7,000 students aged between 21 and 100. There were 2,000 between ages 60 and 69, 1,000 aged 70 and over, and, for comparison, four groups, 1,000 in each, from students respectively in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. All were surveyed by detailed and carefully constructed questionnaires. The overall response rate was 58% but with a remarkably uneven age distribution. 81.2 per cent of the over-seventies responded, but only 30.8 per cent of those in their twenties. Furthermore, in a challenge to common stereotypes, over 60 per cent of the over-sixties chose to respond online rather than by post, while only 46.4 per cent of those in their twenties did so. The results showed that while there are differences in attitudes to and familiarity with digital technology, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. There is no coherent ‘net generation’. However, one extremely important discovery was a correlation – independent of age – between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. Students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work: “Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying.” This evidence that, at any age, a good attitude to technology correlates with good study habits is very important. It gives the lie to the view that eLearning tends to trivialise learning. Instead, as we argued earlier, the intelligent use of technology can improve the quality of learning. If we believe in education for freedom and the rule of law, then education must encourage people to think for themselves. It should lead people to adopt a natural attitude of systematic scepticism, a habit of testing the evidence and reaching their own conclusions. No form of pedagogy automatically does this. It may be as easy to indoctrinate people through an ODL course as in a classroom lecture. However, my own experience is that where people study at a distance, using good materials produced by an intellectually honest and vibrant course team, they are more likely to be challenged to review evidence and make up their own minds. During my eleven years as vice-chancellor of the UK Open University I officiated at well over a hundred degree awarding ceremonies and spoke individually to 50,000 graduates. One of my great ‘eureka’ moments was the graduate who told me, as he shook my hand, that after doing a degree with the Open University he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question. I took that as a tremendous accolade to the UKOU! Stereotypes often have some validity and one stereotype about Asian learners is that they like to be spoon fed and have a habit of rote learning. Will eLearning change this? I suspect it will. First, until recently most western students preferred to sit in lecture halls and listen to 8
instructors. But, as Bates discovered, these students have found that if they are prepared to stir themselves and make a bit more effort by engaging in eLearning, they suddenly have much greater freedom to organise their time. I see no reason why Asian students would be any different. Indeed, since many Asian students have to combine their studies with earning a living and doing household tasks, they may be even more attracted to the convenience of eLearning. Second, the results from the UKOU that I just quoted indicate that technology-mediated study favours deep learning, which is the opposite of rote learning. This suggests another way in which ODL can transform Asia. Corporate structures for ODL Let me now explore further a development noted by Tony Bates, namely the rapid expansion of the for-profit sector into eLearning. Private providers of higher education play an important role in many of your countries. This is now higher education’s fastest growing sub-sector, with some 30% of students enrolled in private higher education institutions globally. Some countries (Japan, South Korea) enrol 80% of their students in private higher education institutions and in parts of Latin America these percentages reach 50%. The private sector includes for-profit providers and not-for-profit institutions. Our host, Wawasan Open University is an example of a private not-for-profit foundation. However, in some countries the legal framework does not make for a clear distinction between private-forprofit and private-not-for-profit institutions: both types are simply called private. In other places strong new institutions are emerging as public-private partnerships, an excellent example being the Open University Malaysia, a private institution that pays dividends to its shareholders, which are Malaysia’s public universities. A key question is whether these changes herald a new – and less costly – business model that will substantially change the pattern of corporate structures within higher education systems as the private sector steadily expands. The study by Tony Bates that I quoted suggests that private providers offer eLearning more professionally than conventional public universities. The question for those of you from public-sector open universities is whether you can build on your tradition of doing ODL at scale to do a better job at offering eLearning than private providers. I leave that question with you. A radical transformation: the OER University This conference is about transforming Asia through ODL. I shall end with an example of a model that combines eLearning with lower costs and new corporate structures. This is the Open Education Resource University that is being explored by a group of public universities from several countries. Open Educational Resources, or OER, are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone. They may well be the most radical technology-based tool poised to transform higher education. How might they help to widen access and cut costs? 9
Some institutions already have policies that encourage the use of OER so that each teacher does not have to re-invent the wheel in each of their courses. Once academics at the Asia eUniversity, here in Malaysia, have agreed on course curriculum outlines they do not develop any original learning materials because they find that good quality OER for all the topics they require is already on the web – they simply adapt them to their precise needs. Likewise, Canada’s Athabasca University will not approve development of a course until the proposing department has shown that it has done a thorough search for relevant openly licensed material that can be used as a starting point. But some would go much further. Paul Stacey (2010), of Canada’s BC Campus, has outlined the concept of The University Open. He points out that the combination of open source software, open access publishing, open educational resources, and the general trend to open government creates the potential for a new paradigm in higher education. In February 2011 the Open Education Resource Foundation convened a meeting in New Zealand to operationalize the Open Educational Resource University, a concept developed from this thinking. The idea is expressed in Fig 3, which comes from Jim Taylor (2011) of the University of Southern Queensland. Students find their own content as OERs; get tutoring from a global network of volunteers; are assessed, for a fee, by a participating institution; and earn a credible credential. Such a system would reduce the cost of higher education dramatically and clearly has echoes of the University of London External System that innovated radically 150 years ago when it declared that all that mattered was performance in examinations, not how knowledge was acquired. That programme has produced five Nobel Laureates. As regards the first step in this ladder, open educational resources are unquestionably being used. Literally millions of informal learners and students are using the open educational resources put out by MIT, the UK Open University, and others to find better and clearer teaching than they are getting in the universities where they are registered. The 32 small states of the Commonwealth are working together within a network called the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth to develop open educational resources that they can all adapt and use (COL, 2011). The interest is considerable. The UKOU’s OpenLearn site (UKOU, 2011) has 11 million users and hundreds of courses can be downloaded as interactive eBooks. Furthermore, with 300,000 downloads per week, the UKOU alone accounts for 10% of all downloads from iTunesU. And we must not forget the worldwide viewing audience of hundreds of millions for OU/BBC TV programs. Martin Bean (2010), the UKOU vice-chancellor, argues that the task of universities today is to provide paths or steps from this informal cloud of learning towards formal study for those who wish to take them. Good paths will provide continuity of technology because millions of people around the world first encounter higher education institutions such as the UKOU through iTunesU, YouTube, TV broadcasts or the resources on various university websites. The thousands who then elect to enrol as students in these institutions will find themselves studying in similar digital environments. 10
What are the implications of this concept? The institutions best equipped to make a success of the Open Education Resource University are probably institutions in the public sector that already operate successfully in parts of this space and award reputable credentials. Such institutions must also have the right mindset. It would be difficult for a university that has put scarcity at the centre of its business model suddenly to embrace openness. In the coming years some universities will have to ask themselves whether they can sustain a model based on high fees and restricted access as other parts of the sector cut fees and widen access. To examine how the OERU would work we juxtapose Martin Bean’s remark about leading learners step by step from the informal cloud of learning to formal study with Jim Taylor’s representation of the steps in the Open Educational Resource University. The first step, namely access to open educational resource learning materials, is increasingly solid. The pool of OER is growing fast and it is progressively easier to find and retrieve them. The solidity of the top step, credible credentials, depends on the involvement of existing, reputable, accredited institutions that resonate with this approach. What about the three intermediate steps? For the first, student support, distance teaching institutions already have the skills necessary. They manage extensive networks of tutors or mentors. SUNY’s Empire State College in the USA has unique skills for this task given that students will often not be working with material created by the institution but with OER they have discovered for themselves. Its unusual mentoring model is well suited to this. Jim Taylor envisages the emergence of a body rather like Médecins sans Frontières or Engineers without Borders, which he calls Academic Volunteers International. That may work in some places, but having students buy support on a pay-as-you-go basis would also work and might make for a more sustainable model. Furthermore, social software is greatly enriching the possibilities for student support and interaction. For example, the UKOU’s OpenLearn website is not just a repository of OER but a hive of activity involving many groups of learners. Digital technology is breathing new life into the notion of a community of scholars and social software gives students the opportunity to create academic communities that take us well beyond the rather behaviourist forms of online learning that give some eLearning a bad name. Some of this social learning activity involves various forms of informal assessment that can be most helpful in preparing students for the formal kind. When we come to step three, assessment, it seems to us that payment is essential. However, this is well travelled territory. It takes us back 150 years to the University of London External model with the difference, again, that some assessments would have to be designed for curricula developed by the student, not the institution. With credible assessment by reputable institutions the next step, the granting and transfer of credit, is straightforward and leads to the top step of credentials. The discussions around the Open Educational Resource University assume that it will not be a new stand-alone accredited institution, but rather an umbrella organization for a network of participating institutions with longstanding reputations and accreditation. Indeed, no established institution is likely to adopt the Open Educational Resource University model for its 11
core operations in the foreseeable future since the revenues – as well, of course, as the costs – would be much lower than they are used to. It will be necessary to test the waters and USQ, which has a strong track record in open, distance and blended learning and intends to test the waters by offering studies on this model initially as part of its community service function. That seems a sensible approach. I encourage your institutions to get involved. Conclusion I have argued that the most important transformation in Asia is the steady expansion and extension of the rule of law. Education is vital for this and ODL has a particularly important role since it can combine low cost with high quality. Furthermore ODL is more likely to develop independent thinking than classroom instruction. eLearning is increasingly popular with students and this is attracting many conventional universities into the field although few are making a success of it. As ODL contributes to the transformation of Asia it will undergo transformations itself including a growing role for private providers and, possibly, radically new models such as the Open Educational Resource University.
References Bates, A W (2005) Technology, eLearning and Distance Education, New York, Routledge Bates, A W (2011) 2011 Outlook for Online Learning and Distance Education, Ontario, Contact North-Contact Nord Bean, Martin (2010) http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2902 Bhalla, Surjit S (1995) Freedom and Economic Growth: A Virtuous Cycle? Background study for the 1991 World Bank Development Report. Retrieved from http://www.oxusresearch.com/downloads/Em150892.PDF COL, (2011) http://www.col.org/progServ/programmes/Pages/VUSSC.aspx Daniel, J S (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, London: Kogan Page. Daniel, J S (2010) Mega-schools, Technology and Teachers; Achieving Education for All, New York, Routledge.
12
Easterly, William (2001) The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, Cambridge: MIT Press. Hanushek, Eric A & WÜssmann, Ludger, (2007) Education Quality and Economic Growth, Washington DC: World Bank. Pscharapoulos, George (2008) Economics of Education: A 50-year recap, Slide presentation. Retrieved August 8, 2009, from http://elearn.elke.uoa.gr/2ndICEE/psach.pdf Sen, Amartya (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford. Stacey, Paul (2010) Musings on the edtech frontier, http://edtechfrontier.com/2011/01/04/the-university-of-open/ Taylor, J W (2011) Towards an OER University: Free Learning for All Students Worldwide, http://wikieducator.org/Towards_an_OER_university:_Free_learning_for_all_students_worldwi de UKOU, (2011) http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
13
Figure 1. The ‘Iron Triangle’ of Scale (Access), Quality and Cost
14
BRITAIN’S TOP NINE UNIVERSITIES Quality Rankings of Teaching based on all subject assessments 1995-2004 (Sunday Times University Guide 2004) 1 2 3= 3= 5 6 7 8 9
CAMBRIDGE LOUGHBOROUGH LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS YORK THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OXFORD IMPERIAL COLLEGE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON ESSEX
96% 95% 88% 88% 87% 86% 82% 77% 77%
Fig, 2 National rankings of teaching quality in England
The OER university concept. Adapted from Taylor (2007)
Fig. 3 The Open Education Resource University concept
15