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Why universities need technology strategies - Cover Story

Change - July 1, 1997

Editor's Note: The following article was adapted from a speech given to the AAHE National Conference last March by Sir John S Daniel, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University in Milton Keynes, England. It is based on his 1996 book, Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (London, Kogan Page).

In most of the world, higher education is mired in a crisis that mixes three issues: access, cost, and flexibility. Unless we resolve this crisis, billions of people in the coming generations will be denied the intellectual liberation of the academic mode of thinking. The United States has the world's strongest university system but seems ill-equipped to guide us out of the crisis. This is because the U.S. system is peculiarly wedded to the technologies of real-time teaching and to the outmoded idea that quality in education is necessarily linked to exclusivity of access and extravagance of resource.There is today, however, a new type of university that is providing answers to the crises of access, cost, and flexibility - the "mega-university." In this article, I will explore the implications of this new phenomenon for U.S. higher education.

I aim to convince you of six propositions. Each proposition will give you more difficulty than the last, so I must be increasingly persuasive as I lead you upstairs. I shall describe developments that will make you uneasy, and challenge you with a world perspective. I hope that my burning issues light fires for you. As academics, are we not citizens of the world? Anyone's ignorance diminishes us all, for we are involved in humankind.

Although I once worked in the United States, I now look at U.S. higher education through foreign eyes. They are friendly eyes. I have spent most of my academic career crisscrossing Canada, and in constant communication with universities south of its border. As the only non-American trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, I have had the inspiration of learning from the late Ernie Boyer and the privilege of working with some of the leading U.S. academics. I greatly admire your higher education system, so my critical comments are made with affection.

I say this because Americans are sensitive souls. The British and the Canadians are natural masochists and love to be criticized. But you Americans can be reluctant to accept that your way of doing something may not be the best way, let alone the only way. As a further challenge to my persuasive skills, honesty and good pedagogy oblige me to list my six propositions up front. (You can marshal your defenses now.)

1. Universities are in crisis. The crisis has three strands, which weave together variously around the world.

2. The recipe for coping with the crisis has only two basic ingredients. Individual universities must blend them to taste.

3. Technology provides the most fertile ground for growing these two ingredients. We must understand what makes our technological garden blossom.

4. Despite an enviable infrastructure, U.S. higher education is not using technology intelligently. That is because, even more than elsewhere in the world, your university system is driven by teaching rather than learning.

5. Today's knowledge media, a term I shall explain later, change the relationship between people and knowledge in a fundamental way. That affects the way we should address the other propositions.

6. We will aggravate the crisis if our approach to new technology is simply to let individual faculty members and departments do their own thing. We need universitywide technology strategies.

I. HIGHER EDUCATION IN CRISIS

First, higher education is in crisis worldwide. The ingredients of the crisis are access, cost, and flexibility, and they blend differently as you move around the globe. In the developing countries, there is a crisis of access. Right now, one large, new campus would need to open every week, somewhere in the developing world, just to maintain present participation rates. Did a big new university open somewhere last week.'? Probably not. Is another one on schedule to start next week? Probably not.

At the end of the millennium in which the idea of the university has blossomed, population growth is out-pacing the world's capacity to give people access to universities. Half the world's population is now under 20 -three-quarters in countries like South Africa and Palestine. Our traditional concept of the campus university will deny higher education to nearly all these young people. Yet providing them with education and training is not just a pressing issue for the countries concerned. This is a time bomb ticking under our collective security. Without vigorous action, many of these young people will grow up to be unemployed, unconnected, and unstable. In a global world, that is a global problem. We require mass training for employability and mass education to inspire the human spirit.

In some developing countries the situation is desperate. Listen to what the World Bank has to say about universities in Africa:

Unfortunately university 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, and outmoded programmes.

African libraries have suffered immensely as collections have become out of date and laboratory equipment is old and in disrepair. ... It is thus highly questionable whether university 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.

Not an encouraging picture! Access to universities - even to the impoverished institutions evoked in those words - will not keep pace with the aspirations of growing populations.

Why not? The answer leads us along the second strand of the crisis: the model of the university that we know and love costs too much. Africa simply can't afford more campuses with more classrooms and more student dormitories. But affordability is not just an African problem. Figures from that invaluable identifier of trends, USA Today, show that for a U.S. family the cost of sending a child to college - tuition, room, and board - is approaching 15 percent of the median family income. That's up from 9 percent of median family income 15 years ago. Moreover, 15 percent of income is the cost of sending your offspring to a public university. If you pick a private university, the figure is nearly 40 percent of median family income - up from just over 20 percent in the same 15-year period. Your fellow Americans are asking whether this considerable personal investment in higher education returns value for money. Does that send frissons down your spine?

It should. A lesson of this century is that any industry whose costs increase faster than inflation over a long period is heading for trouble: either for complete collapse or for unpleasant upheavals. If universities wish to avoid such turmoil, we must exorcise our hang-ups about reducing costs. We academics are uniquely resistant to the idea that cheaper is better. The definition of quality as "fitness for purpose at minimum cost to society" does not resonate with us. Why not? Three reasons - one noble, one simply human nature, and one ignoble.

The noble reason is that with current campus instruction, there is a good correlation between available resources and the rankings of universities on teaching quality. For instance, Britain's nationwide teaching quality assessments show, with one notable exception, that the number of "excellent" ratings universities receive broadly match the funds available to them. That is not surprising. Higher education is still a craft industry. It's the exception in the British data that is interesting. That anomaly is the Open University. Although its public expenditure per student is about the lowest in Britain, the Open University ranks in the top 20 universities for teaching quality. The significance of this exception is that the Open University is a technology-based learning system. Technology is the way to reduce costs and enhance quality. I infer that all universities need a technology strategy.

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