Sustainable distance learning for a sustainable world

First of all a warm welcome to this edition of Open Learning! You may not be aware but there have been changes at the Journal and we have a new Editorial Team with me Simon Bell as Editor and my colleague Chris Douce as Deputy Editor. We are delighted to be taking over at Open Learning and look forward to many future editions with exciting and groundbreaking articles for you to enjoy. As we begin our journey as editors, I would like to pay tribute to the outgoing Editor, Gill Kirkup. Gill has been with the journal as Editor since 2012 and has seen the journal develop and expand as the authentic ‘voice’ of distance learning. Her enlightening Editorials and wisdom in comments and suggestions to prospective authors will be much missed. Gill has passed over the reigns to us and we want to build on her legacy of excellent and timely editing with a smiling face and an open attitude to change, innovation and articles which push at the boundaries. Thank you Gill!

Before I set out my overview of the articles in this edition of Open Learning I want to introduce an innovative addition to the Editorials, one which you will note over the next few issues of the journal. Chris and I are deeply interested in the development of distance learning and the changes which are likely to follow from the disruptive technologies which appear to be relentlessly confronting the providers of distance education. We are also concerned with the sustainability of the distance learning (DL) model of educational delivery and the contribution that DL can make to the wider sustainability debate in society. We do see sustainability as the issue of our times and are concerned with understanding how DL and Open Learning journal in particular can contribute to planetary sustainability.

Open Learning and the great issues of our time

Open Learning is concerned with two of the great issues of our time: Firstly, sustainability, including the qualities and availability of higher education in a global setting – this setting being globalisation – the importance of which was made manifestly clear in the recent cut and thrust evident at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) deliberations in Paris in December 2015. Secondly, the disruptive technologies which are on the one hand providing the global learning community with the potential for more and more access to the wisdom of world scholarship and yet, on the other hand are disrupting the very models which are attempting to deliver this learning.

As Manuel Castells puts it in his 2001 book, we appear to be in a state of ‘informed bewilderment’ (Castells, 2001). Or, as John Naughton – Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University puts it in his seminal book: ‘From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg’, concerning the impact of the internet:

fears are so widespread and diverse that they almost defy summarising, but the main themes include: a conviction that the network is reshaping our intellectual, social, economic and political landscape in unpalatable ways, a belief that ubiquitous networking is changing our conceptions of art and entertainment – and blurring the distinction between news and entertainment; a perception that the Internet is fragmenting our culture into bite-sized chunks, overwhelming us with data, eroding personal privacy, polarising our politics. The network, we are told, is creating a world of atomized, isolated individuals who would sooner send an email to a colleague in the next-door cubicle than lean over to talk to her. (Naughton, 2012, p. 31)

With these thoughts in mind, we are undertaking some research with colleagues at other European DL universities – Universidade Aberta in Portugal, Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (the National Distance Education University) of Spain, and FernUniversität in Hagen in Germany. Our research involves asking the Vice Chancellors or Rectors of these universities six questions relating to the sustainability of the DL model and the likely impact of current disruptions in the future. Our six questions are as follows:

(1)	What is the current strategic vision of the University to meet the challenges of the next 20 years?
(2)	Is it ‘business as usual’ for HE or can we expect to see dramatic change?
(3)	How does the University’s strategy contribute to the specific international challenge of sustainable development in its many guises?
(4)	What are the likely futures for MOOCs?
(5)	Is distance learning going to remain the preserve of a few specialised agencies or do you think it will become more widely provided by other agencies?
(6)	As country and language boundaries change, how important is a sense of place to the University?

Over the next few Editorials I, and colleagues from Portugal, Spain and Germany: Sandra Caeiro, Rosa Martín-Aranda and Daniel Otto, will be writing up our interviews in which we will be asking these questions and setting out the responses and thoughts of DL University leaders. We plan to collate the responses and write a joint Editorial on: ‘Distance Learning and Sustainable Futures’ in early 2017.

We kick off this process with this editorial publishing Interview No. 1 with the recently appointed Vice Chancellor to the Open University in the UK, Peter Horrocks. I interviewed Peter on Monday the 7th of December 2015. Peter had not been with the Open University long at that point (his tenure began on the 5th of May 2015). His previous post was with the BBC. To understand his mindset, it is instructive to know a little about his various roles at the BBC. To quote the Open University web site on the subject:

Peter Horrocks joined the BBC in 1981 after graduating with a double first in History from Cambridge. Since then, he has edited a number of the corporation’s flagship news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight, before moving on to become Head of TV News. In 2009, he was appointed Director of the World Service, overseeing a global workforce of 3000 staff and delivering news to over a quarter of a billion people every week. During this period, he has led negotiations with Government over future funding for the World Service, driven a 50% increase in revenues of BBC World News and BBC.com and successfully implemented a change programme to deliver content on all platforms, including TV and online.

https://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=28376 So, we can see that Peter is no stranger to changing agendas or the challenges involved in developing world-reaching service. You will find my report on my meeting and conversation with Peter as the final section of this editorial.

Articles in this edition of the journal

But what about the articles in this issue of Open Learning? The articles span a considerable range of issues and concerns presented in case studies and more conventional research items. In this issue of the journal, you will find a coherent range of writing – taking us from digital learning as a means to provide education in a war zone to the calmer world of discussion forum innovation. All provide something of a snapshot of the plethora of issues facing Open, Distance and e-Learning.

‘A cross-national study of teachers’ perceptions of online learning success’ by Elena Barberà, Pilar Gómez-Reya and Francisco Fernández-Navarro is broad in scope and ambitious in undertaking. The authors have studied 322 online teachers from four different universities in four different countries and question some of the preconceptions of what constitutes learning success. To some extent, this article echoes the underlying concern which we express in this editorial concerning the international variations to learning. If our editorial focuses on the views of the Leaders of Online Education Institutions, then this article is much more grounded – focusing on the experience of teachers. It would seem that context is vital and technology is not always the key issue – in fact, what we might refer to as the ‘soft’ factors related to teaching and learning experiences (who teaches, how they teach, the context of learning) are all of key importance in the wider learning context.

If Elena Barberà, Pilar Gómez-Reya and Francisco Fernández-Navarro are providing us with insights into learning context, then our next paper ‘Syrians’ acceptance of digital lectures: a case study’ by Reem Ramadan of the Faculty of Economics, Management Department, at Damascus University gives us an insight into the micro level. The Editorial team is deeply grateful to Reem for providing us with this keyhole view of the workings of her Faculty in Syria at this time. If education is part of the answer to whatever the global crisis issue question is, then we can find all kinds of positive and powerful stories in Reem’s account. How can you teach when the teachers have gone away – for very good reasons in this case? How do you provide hope and education to students in this context? Well, here is a paper which covers the ground as a case study but with data to back up conclusions. This paper is both courageous and inspiring in its scope and message.

In ‘Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues’ Karen Kear, Allan Jones, Georgina Holden and Mark Curcher of the UK Open University review technologies – in this case wikis, a photo-sharing environment and a social bookmarking tool. To some extent, this article is a companion to that by Elena Barberà, Pilar Gómez-Reya and Francisco Fernández-Navarro in that it looks again at the importance of sociocultural factors in relation to the value and impact of education. Technology does not have a neutral position in learning nor is it deterministic of learning outcomes. Again and again (as we have seen in this journal over the years) reality is much more complex with a myriad human and contextual factors impacting on effectiveness.

Another case study is contained in: ‘Individual and collaborative technology-mediated learning using question & answer online discussion forums – perceptions of Public Health learners in Dubai, UAE’ by Niyi Awofeso, Moustafa Hassan and Samer Hamidi of the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University, Dubai, UAE. In this paper, evidence is supplied to improving the quality of online learning making use of question and answer discussion forums. In what the authors claim to be the first study of the utility of Question and Answer Discussion forums in self-regulated and constructivist online learning, they point to weaknesses with Online Discussion Forums and find to some extent that Question and Answer formats provide value which might otherwise be missed – with both individual and collaborative online learning.

Our final paper is ‘Cutting through the hype: evaluating the innovative potential of new educational technologies through business model analysis’ by Yoram Kalman. This is a refreshing paper which will talk to the anxieties of many of us involved in distance learning. So often, a learning technology will be presented as a means to do wonders, and yet what is the need? Where is the innovation and how do we value the benefits – real or imagined? Yoram’s paper provides something of a step forward in our assessment of the values of technologies of this kind. Looking at the MOOC situation in particular Yoram provides a business model analysis framework as a means to make a coherent assessment and maybe save a lot of wasted effort.

There are two book reviews in this edition of Open Learning and we are grateful to Anne Gaskell and Natalia Smirnova for their reviews.

‘Online distance education: towards a research agenda’, edited by Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Terry Anderson. The book is something of a handbook for those who have an interest in research in distance, online or e-Learning and this makes it of key interest to the readers of this journal. Anne Gaskell notes that the editors are modest in suggesting it might provide a ‘contribution to advance the research agenda of distance education’. Such an aim will no doubt be enhanced by the availability of the book which can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons Licence.

Natalia Smirnova has reviewed ‘Literacy in the digital university: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology’, edited by Robin Goodfellow and Mary R. Lea. This thought-provoking book challenges much current thinking on digital literacy/ies. Natalia also notes the ambition of the book, providing points of focus on the implicit, hidden and ignored aspects of literacy.

Peer Reviewing and Open Learning’s ethical position

I wanted to alert you, the readers of Open Learning, to an innovation we are implementing in our Peer Review system. As you will be aware, peer review is a vexed issue and one that concerns us at the journal deeply. Our publisher, Taylor and Francis published a White Paper in October of 2015 (Taylor & Francis, 2015) in which they note:

faith in peer review’s integrity is of on-going and increasing concern to many. It is imperative that publishers (and academic editors) of peer-reviewed scholarly research learn from each other, working together to improve practices in areas such as ethical issues, training, and data transparency. (Taylor & Francis, 2015, p. 3)

Peer reviewing should be, to our minds, respectful help among equals, or a helping hand to an inexperienced academic colleague, or an opportunity to make something good better, or a privilege to praise that which is interesting, intriguing and innovative. In the White Paper, particular attention was noted on the matter of ‘Providing polite feedback’. The paper notes a ‘reality gap’ between author expectation and what is actually received. One respondent to the research behind the White Paper noted: ‘The worst reviews are short, snitty, patronising and not remotely useful. The best are critically engaged, add something and improve the quality’ (Taylor & Francis, 2015, p. 11). At the Roundtable¹ some Editors were vociferous in claiming such ‘snitty’ reviews would not get past their editorial processes. The fact that these unkind reviews regularly do get to authors (according to the White Paper) indicates a level of double blind in the editorial community but not in a good way. With respect in mind and, developing from a practice I was involved with at a previous journal I worked with (Systemic Practice and Action Research) I have initiated ‘Spirit of Refereeing’ which I hope our reviewers will observe in their reviews in future. This is the ethical position we now send to all reviewers following their acceptance of the reviewer role:

‘In undertaking a review, I try to apply the following guidelines.

To be honest, but to always temper my honesty with a degree of kindness. I try to apply a self-guard of “How would I feel if I received this review?”

To be constructive; I try to take the attitude that any paper, developed over time with effort and representing the thoughts of a dedicated practitioner or academic should be read with sympathy and honour.

To be fair; to comment on what I like, as well as what I have more problems with.

To be humble; to say when I do not understand something and not to present myself as a world authority on a subject.

And therefore:

To see myself as a co-worker with the author, trying if possible to improve upon what is and contribute to a wiser and more exciting script.

In this spirit I try to say:

If I like the text.

If I would publish the text.

If I think changes could be made to make the text more enjoyable.

If I think the author needs to adapt/change/re-assess the text in some more challenging manner’.

The Editorial Team take this ‘Spirit’ very seriously and we will be seeking to ensure that all our authors, receive refereeing in this spirit in future.

The next section contains a summary of my interview with Peter Horrocks, Vice Chancellor of the Open University. In this editorial, I am focusing on some of Peter’s headline responses to the questions outlined at the beginning of the editorial.

Interview 1

Interview with the Vice Chancellor of the Open University: Peter Horrocks

Before we got started on the questions I asked Peter about his impressions on joining the Open University, on his experiences over the first few months. He said he found it: ‘Inspiring, emotionally uplifting, maddening, hard work and contentious’. I was intrigued by his response. Peter noted that the University carries a tradition and this means that those who work for the University: ‘see the way the organisation is as being synonymous with the mission and that’s not necessarily the case’. This issue of segregating the university tradition, its historic agency, from the ongoing mission of the university appears to be a key element of Peter’s strategy and we will come to that and maybe gain a deeper understanding of the ‘uplifting, maddening’ conundrum in due course. But let’s first consider the main questions:

Firstly I asked, ‘What is the current strategic vision of the University to meet the challenges of the next 20 years?’ Peter differentiated two futures – the immediate future and the longer term. In terms of more immediate challenges, he suggested that the Open University’s role was: ‘to focus on current students and serve them more effectively in terms of their learning outcomes, their employability, to focus on their social outcomes’. Peter noted this is only the short term. As he explained: ‘But that is very much sorting out the current model’.

This ‘current model’ blends into a longer term view and this is more the concern of our interview. Peter elucidated as follows:

for a 20 year vision in terms of creating communities of learners, communities of learners that can be enabled by technology and advanced communications to be able to support each other’s learning outcomes throughout their lifetimes and moving from a model of delivery of knowledge to something that is much more iterative and collaborative and that is a resource or a community that is available to learners throughout their lifetimes and to try to do that globally as well as in the UK.

This is a more radical shift. A shift away from delivering knowledge to empowering iterative learning communities. This sounds exciting, radical, disruptive but to my ears worryingly unclear. What would such a community look like, how would it provide revenue to a higher education institution and what would be the equivalent of the teacher/learner relationship?

My second question probed further in this direction: ‘Is it “business as usual” for HE or can we expect to see dramatic change?’ Peter’s answer was précised with the proviso that he was talking theoretically – then he noted:

You could see a world where lower cost, digitally delivered learning with some element of personal support could be delivered to more people at lower cost and therefore be achieving the university’s mission in terms of open-ness to people and ideas but that might mean a substantially smaller university.

This notion of the Open University sustaining or even increasing reach whilst reducing footprint recurred in the interview, Peter noted that in the future the strategy could involve ‘Preserving the values of the institution, preserving the academic excellence of the institution, absolutely, but not necessarily as it’s always been. So the delivery model might change significantly’. Images came to my mind of a call-centre format of a University – with student mentors on-call to respond to need. Less intimate than the current Tutor/Student model but maybe more robust as a model for scale and lightness of touch? The future might include a smaller university, making use of new technologies and new pedagogies in order to sustain reach to UK, European and world communities of learners. This was my conjecture and the next question provided the opportunity to expand on this.

The third question was ‘how does the University’s strategy contribute to the specific international challenge of sustainable development in its many guises?’ Peter’s thoughts around sustainable development revolved around enhancing human capacity:

the ability to be able to deliver education at distance at scale and to build human capacity … that is one of the ways in which the world will meet the challenges of sustainability and so the ability of the university through its open platforms, through open education resources, through OpenLearn, through FutureLearn and through specific education capacity building programmes – the things which we have done in Africa and India as an example, all of those contribute to human capital which will be one of the most important ways of tackling issues of sustainability.

OpenLearn and FutureLearn are online outlets led by the Open University (and in the case of FutureLearn including many other Universities linked to the initiative) which necessarily reach out only to those with an internet connection – an important precondition for most learning models being developed in the twenty-first century. The world may be out there – some of it a click of a button away but the Open University is the Open University of the United Kingdom. The mission for reach beyond the UK is still unclear. Peter commented:

whether we have a global mission or not is something which we are going to debate as part of the emerging strategy work and I think quite a lot of that … relates to the economic base of the university in the extent which we can or should use our support from our student fees – which are largely UK paid …

Clearly, there is an income model – largely derived from the UK base of the OU, and there are tempting global markets, but which would require investment from the UK base. Linking sustainability to concepts of social justice, Peter suggested:

addressing social justice in the UK I think is something which is necessarily part of the [university] mission and is something which we can directly relate to our students in their intentions in studying with the university. I think we need to understand better what students, what UK students would think about us carrying out a global mission on the basis of the fees that they have paid. It’s not to rule it out. It’s just to say that there is a different driver in relation to the global mission.

So, a global perspective from the OU is not at present a given priority although Peter went on to demonstrate the ways in which disruptive technologies are adding to the University’s reach: ‘through OpenLearn and FutureLearn, we have many more global learners than we would have done 20 years ago’. So, even without a clear strategic vision for a global mission, the university finds itself with considerable global reach. The question that came to my mind at this point was the extent to which the technology is creating the future strategy for all of us? The fourth question builds on this more specifically – what is the likely future for MOOCs?

MOOCs are probably the best known disrupter in the distance learning context. Peter suggests: ‘that there will be a segmentation of the MOOCs and it will become clearer which MOOCs are aiming at different markets’. Disruption lies around the corner for there is potential:

for some MOOCs to at least start to displace parts of Higher Education, I think that will definitely happen … I don’t mean … free degrees or anything like that at this stage, but you can see where learning that is free at the point of use starts to become a component of more substantial qualifications.

In a world where global, free at the point of engagement, mass student learning provision begins to displace, or replace, or at least change existing provision, my next question brought the story home. I asked: ‘Is distance learning going to remain the preserve of a few specialised agencies or do you think it will become more widely provided by other agencies’? Peter’s response was clear:

I think it’s got to become more widely provided. I mean that anything that is capable of being digitally disrupted can, and will be. And as the barriers to entry are relatively low at least as far as platform creation is concerned, I think that people who have the right quality content, (but that means that all sorts of people who have strong intellectual property), will be able to exploit it digitally at a distance so whether it’s about corporate learning, whether it’s about Higher Education, whether it’s about competency based learning, I think you can see a convergence with all those things with more providers, more fragmentation and more competition.

To me, this sounds like a disaggregated market and a fractured delivery service. The question that arose in my mind was: can an organisation provide scale and bulk and numbers in such a disaggregated and fractured model of higher education? How, institutionally, can this challenge be met? The sixth question takes this point. I asked Peter, ‘As country and language boundaries change – how important is a sense of place to the University?’ This is a question all about the institutional delivery of education. When I suggested that the Open University could become the university of everywhere, Peter said ‘Definitely’ – but the place may not be the traditional place, it could be: ‘anywhere and may not necessarily be a building in the centre of town but maybe, you know, somewhere in your local Further Education college or local university which is where the OU has its presence’. Peter returned to the idea of the change in education being a change from delivery to community: ‘we are seeing through the social learning features of MOOCs like FutureLearn that how learners interact with each other and learn from each other is an increasingly valuable part of their learning experience’. The significance of place as a key component of learning is reduced. Sharing perspective across geographies and sharing in a geography-free community is critical in this strategic view.

All of this implies change and innovation on a grand scale. Peter concluded the interview with strategic choices facing the DL community and referenced back to the challenges faced by the founders of the Open University when they considered the very different higher education milieu in the 1960s. Much more about this subject can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/about/main/strategy/ou-story. It is worth noting here that Professor Walter Perry was appointed the OU’s first vice-chancellor in 1969. The University originally had a staff of 70–80 people, at the main campus at Walton Hall, a country estate in the new city of Milton Keynes. As noted on the ‘OU-story’ website: ‘When the OU accepted its first students in 1971, 25,000 people enrolled and 20,000 registered on a course – at a time when the total student population in the UK was only about 130,000’. This was a radical re-framing of higher education provision. Considering this legacy of OU radicalism, Peter noted: ‘how prepared to challenge established norms the founders of the university were who are now venerated as the founders’. He suggested that the founders came up with an ‘inspiring ideal but they were prepared to uproot things to found the university and to challenge’. Talking about the mission, he said:

We’ve got to, I believe, we need to be inspired by them and be prepared to challenge things only this time some of that is going to involve challenging ourselves not just the environment which we are working in, but drawing that inspiration from the Founders of the university who were sufficiently determined, they took all sorts of stuff that was thrown at them for daring to change the way that our education was delivered.

This is a theme for Peter – the willingness of the original founders to push at the boundaries and set up an audacious project (which is what the Open University was), one which was loathed by much of the establishment and vilified by many (it was described at the time as ‘blithering nonsense’ by the senior Conservative Member of Parliament Iain Macleod). Radicalism with a sidelong glance to the founders is where Peter’s passion for the task came to the fore. He clearly sees open learning platforms as key to the future of education. Internet based and open to all – this is a really challenging model for all the inhabitants of the Ivory Towers. In his final words, addressing the ‘sneering’ of some in the academic community at the potential of open learning platforms he said:

of course they are not the same as degrees yet, but they are absolutely in line with the mission of a university like the Open University. They are free at the point of use. They are providing a learning for the whole world in imaginative and innovative ways and people are getting a huge amount from them. You know there are more people who have learned with FutureLearn than have learned with the Open University throughout its whole existence. Of course they are not comparable directly – the quality of the learning experience, the quality of the outcomes are significantly different, but it’s quite striking to me that people automatically assume that they are inferior, that’s not quite right, but that they aren’t prepared to be a bit tolerant for how they might develop, they say ‘that’s not us, not what we are about’ … well, free learning for the world sounds like quite an OU sort of thing to do …

Free learning for the world. Now that does sound like a challenging strategy which could really shake up the Ivory Tower and offers minds in all places globally the hope of quality education irrespective of income, culture or gender. A very twenty-first-century view of the mission of the Open University and possibly spine chilling to the DL establishment recalling John Naugthon’s vision of the internet challenges with: ‘fears are so widespread and diverse that they almost defy summarising’?

In my second Editorial, in Autumn 2016 we will publish two more interviews with the leaders of two of Europe’s most prominent DL Universities.

Have your say

Finally, the Editorial Team at OL are keen to hear what you think of our journal, the editorials and papers. We will be exploring various possibilities for incorporating our readers’ comments and questions into the journal website and aiming to have this set up for future issues.

Simon Bell

Notes

1. This was a meeting of the Editors of Taylor and Francis journals: Taylor and Francis UK Editor Round Table 2015: ‘Stay ahead of the curve’. Held at the Lowry, Manchester. 6th November 2015.