Korea National Open University
Video Script
From Mega-universities to MOOCs
Prof Taerim Lee (TL) interviews Sir John Daniel (JD)
Section 1
TL: Sir John welcome to the programme. We are delighted that you have been able to
visit Korea for a month as a Fellow at KNOU. You are now a well-known figure in the
world of open and distance learning but could you tell us about your background and
what motivates you.
JD: It is a great pleasure to be here in Korea and I have had a most productive and
enjoyable time as a Fellow at KNOU. As to what motivates me I think that my
enthusiasm for open education came from my family background. Both my
grandfathers improved themselves by their own efforts, one from being a coalminer to being an inspector of safety in mines, the other from an agricultural family
to becoming a civil servant in the customs department. Both were gifted men who
would have done wonders with a good education.
Then my father died when I was six years old. Watching my mother bring up three
children on her own, very successfully, gave me a passion for pursuing the education
of women and women’s equality.
Let me take you through my career with those things in mind. For someone who has
worked most of his life in new and open universities I had a very traditional
university education myself at Oxford and the Sorbonne.
After completing my doctorate in Nuclear Metallurgy at the University of Paris and
becoming an assistant professor in the Engineering Faculty of the University of
Montreal, I enrolled in a part-time Masters programme in Educational Technology at
another Montreal University. I suppose it was the beginning of my personal
commitment to lifelong learning.
The programme required an internship, so I spent three months – the summer of
1972 – at the British Open University. It was then in its second year of operation but
already had 40,000 students. That summer was a conversion experience for me.
Everything about the University inspired me. There was the terrific eagerness of the
students, many of them women, seizing with both hands this first opportunity of
their lives to study at university. This eagerness was matched by the commitment of
the academic staff, who put students at the centre of their work in a way that I had
not seen before. Then there was the sheer scale, the reach into every corner of the
country. There was the use of media, particularly the brilliant radio and TV
programmes broadcast on national channels so that the public could take part as
well.
At the end of the summer I returned to Canada wanting to join this movement.
Teaching in a traditional university seemed a bit stale. I wanted to join the open and
distance learning revolution.
Fortunately I was able to do so very quickly and joined the open university – called
the Télé-université – that was being set up in Quebec province.
TL: So you had to work in French?
JD: Yes, of course. But I had become pretty much bilingual during my four years in
Paris for my doctorate and I taught in French at the University of Montreal. Learning
another language was one of the best things I did. And I worked in French again
later.
But first I went to be vice-president of Athabasca University, an open university in
Western Canada, just as that was beginning its phase of rapid development. I am
very proud of having been associated with the start-up of Athabasca, which has been
very successful.
From the unlikely base of a very small town in northern Canada Athabasca offers
programmes that are sometimes the largest in their subject in Canada. It has
students all over the world and is constantly pioneering new ways of doing things.
From Athabasca University I went as Vice-Rector, Academic to Concordia University.
Concordia is a large university in Montreal that serves working adults who want to
study part time. It operates by teaching in classrooms in the conventional way but
schedules most classes in the evenings and on weekends so that people can go there
after work. That was why I chose it for my Masters in Educational Technology.
From there I went to be President of Laurentian University in northeastern Ontario.
TL: That was your first experience as a university president. Can you say something
about it?
JD: Northeastern Ontario is a huge region. Just that part of Canada is about four
times the size of Korea, and our university had four campuses.
I want to say a word about the campus in Hearst, marked in green here. It is one of
the smallest universities in the world, serving a sparsely populated region near
Hudson’s Bay with an economy based on forests and mines.
When I was there in the 1980s a huge social change was taking place. Not long
before the young men of the region, even without much education, could get very
well-paid jobs in the forestry and mining industries. But that had changed.
These industries were becoming mechanized. They needed fewer people and bettertrained people. Some of the machines used in both forestry and mining cost a
million dollars each. This meant that the young men no longer had easy access to
well-paid jobs – or indeed to any jobs at all. Some reacted in a defeatist way, hoping
that good times would come again.
It was the women who responded with flexibility, enrolling in the university,
obtaining degrees and taking jobs in the government and service sectors. This
produced social strains. It was good that the women were bringing in money to
support their families, but this was often resented by the men, who used to be the
breadwinners but now had to defer to the women.
I mention this example because it has become a worldwide phenomenon.
TL: Your next job was as vice-chancellor or president of the UK Open University. This
must have been a homecoming because you had been there earlier as an intern.
JD: Yes, it was a homecoming in every way. I was born in the UK but by then I had
been away for 25 years. But the real thrill was coming back to those values of
openness and student service that had so impressed me 18 years earlier
The UK Open University is a wonderful institution. Its motto is Open to People, Open
to Places, Open to Methods and Open to Ideas. For example, many women took
advantage of the Open University to study at home for a university degree while
bringing up their young children.
While I was there a book was written, OU Women, documenting the amazing stories
of some of these female students and how they managed to combine child rearing
with study and sometimes a job as well. One would get up at four in the morning in
order to study before the rest of the family woke up. The subtitle of the book is
‘undoing educational obstacles’.
TL: Then you went off to be head of Education at UNESCO. Why?
JD: An Education Ministry official called me from London and told me to look at the
advertisement for Assistant Director-General of Education at UNESCO in Paris. It
sounded interesting so I applied and got the job. That was in 2000 and I had been
head of the Open University for ten years. It was a pleasure to go back to Paris again.
That was a quite different job from being a university president. My responsibilities
covered education at all levels. The urgent priority was the campaign to provide
Education for All that had been launched at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 and given
new momentum by the World Forum in Dakar in 2000. The Dakar Forum set out six
aims for expanding education at all levels. But our major focus was on two goals that
were part of the Millennium Development Goals set by Heads of Government at the
United Nations. One was to achieve universal primary education; the second was to
promote gender equality.
These goals were the major focus of my work at UNESCO. At the level of primary
education they were really one goal, because if you get all children into school then
by definition you have achieved gender equality – at least as far as access is
concerned.
In those years I learned a lot about the obstacles that prevent girls going to school.
Within the school it is helpful to have both male and female teachers, whereas in
some countries the teachers are either nearly all men or all women. The school
environment is very important too. Parents need to know their girls are safe, which
means having toilets in the schools and fences around them.
TL: Then you were off again – back to Canada?
JD: Yes, From UNESCO I moved home again, because Canada is my home, to the
Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver.
COL is a micro UNESCO. Its focus is helping Commonwealth countries to use
technology in education. Naturally, I brought my UNESCO experience with me and
talked a lot about girls’ education.
But education ministers from the Caribbean and southern Africa told me: ‘we do not
have a problem with girls’ education. By and large our girls all complete school. It is
the boys that drop out and underperform’.
TL: That is a remarkable career. Can we go back a bit a look a bit more at this concept
of open universities? What do we mean by open?
JD KNOU is part of a worldwide network of open universities that began with the
establishment of the UK Open University in 1969. Since then many other open
universities have been created. Thanks to the good start made by the UK Open
University, ‘open’ had become a fashionable term. In professional circles all these
institutions were referred to as ‘distance-teaching universities’.
At about the same time the terms ‘open learning’ and ‘distance education’ were pulled
together into ‘open and distance learning’ or ODL, which is the term that you and I
normally use to describe what we do. ODL is what makes KNOU different from Seoul
National University.
Open universities have created a revolution in higher education. This is particularly true
of the large open universities like KNOU.
TL: Didn’t you invent a new word for those universities?
JD: That’s right. In 1996 I coined the term ‘mega-universities’ for these large institutions
in my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher
Education.
My definition of a mega-university was a distance teaching university with over 100,000
active students. There were 11 at that time in the mid-1990s and KNOU was one of them.
Since then the number of mega-universities has more than doubled, to about 25, and most
of the early mega-universities have become much bigger. KNOU now has 180,000
students, the UKOU has 250,000, UNISA has 300,000, IGNOU has over a million, and
the student numbers in the institutions of the Chinese Radio and TV University system,
some of which are now called open universities, add up to many millions.
The mega-universities have created a revolution in higher education. One aspect of that
revolution is the use of open and distance learning, ODL, but the second, and very
important aspect, is that mega-universities are big.
TL: Why have these institutions created a revolution in higher education?
JD: First, higher education faces the same key challenges everywhere. I have met many
Ministers of Education in the course of my work at UNESCO and the Commonwealth of
Learning and they say similar things about the challenges they face.
Governments want three outcomes from their higher education systems:
-
Access: to be as wide as possible
-
Quality: to be as high as possible
-
Cost: to be as low as possible
The nature of the challenge is clear when you create a triangle of vectors. With traditional
methods of face-to-face teaching this is an iron triangle. You want to stretch the triangle
to give greater access, higher quality and lower costs.
But you can’t!
Try extending access by packing more students into each classroom and you will be
accused of damaging quality.
Try improving quality with better learning resources and the cost will go up.
Try cutting costs and you will endanger both access and quality.
This iron triangle has hindered the expansion of education throughout history. It has
created in the public mind – and probably in your own thinking – an insidious link
between quality and exclusivity. This link still drives the admission policies of many
universities, which define their quality by the people they exclude.
But today there is good news. Thanks to globalisation successive waves of technology are
sweeping the world – and technology can transform the iron triangle into a flexible
triangle. By using technology you can achieve wider access, higher quality and lower
cost all at the same time. This is a revolution – it has never happened before.
How does it work? The fundamental principles of technology, articulated two centuries
ago by the economist Adam Smith, are division of labour, specialisation, economies of
scale, and the use of machines and communications media.
These principles have been applied successfully to higher education by the large distance
teaching institutions – the mega-universities – like KNOU.
Let me give the example of the UK Open University as an institution that has stretched
the iron triangle. With over 200,000 students and more than a million alumni it has
substantially widened access. It is also a top quality university. At the end of England’s
Teaching Quality Assessment system the Open University placed 5th out of 100
universities, above Oxford. It also comes top in government surveys of student
satisfaction in all English universities. And the Open University operates at lower costs
per student or per graduate than conventional universities.
Because of these advantages distance-teaching universities have become a global
phenomenon. The number of open universities in Commonwealth countries has more
than doubled over 20 years. Some Asian open universities like AIOU in Pakistan,
IGNOU in India and China’s TV University system each have over one million students
TL: So what is the secret of success?
JD: The success of the mega-universities is to apply the principles of technology to
higher education. With specialisation, division of labour and information and
communications technology they can offer students learning materials and the possibility
of interaction at a distance and have achieved a revolution: wider access, higher quality
and lower costs all at the same time. They have achieved not only economies of scale but
also the higher quality that scale can create because of larger investments in materials and
systems.
This is something that educators have wanted to achieve throughout history.
TL: One new manifestation of openness is open educational resources and I know you
have been very involved in that development. Please tell us about it.
JD: Yes Open Educational Resources are a very important development. We haven’t yet
succeeded in getting them into the mainstream of education but we are making good
progress.
TL: How long have OER been around?
JD: This has been a very important year for OER because of the World OER Congress
that was held at UNESCO, Paris in June. You were there Taerim?
TL: Yes, it was a very exciting event.
Let me give the context of that great World Congress on Open Educational Resources.
For the last year UNESCO and COL have been conducting a project entitled “Fostering
Governmental Support for Open Educational Resources Internationally”. It has been a
very successful partnership.
The purpose of the project was to prepare the ground for this Congress by raising
awareness of Open Educational Resources among governments around the world. We
built on an earlier joint project, conducted in 2010-2011, called Taking OER Beyond the
OER Community: Policy and Capacity for Developing Countries. Under that initiative we
held workshops for senior educational decision makers in Africa and Asia and produced
two important documents, A Basic Guide to OER, and Guidelines for OER in Higher
Education.
That earlier work led directly into the current project with governments, which had four
elements.




A survey of the world’s governments about their use of OER
Holding Regional Policy Forums in six world regions,
Developing a Declaration to be presented at this Congress.
The World OER Congress
Let me make some general comments about Open Educational Resources, report on the
survey, note some key issues and then summarise what emerged from the Regional
Policy Forums.
Open Educational Resources are part of a wider trend towards greater openness and
sharing that has been gathering momentum for over twenty years. It is helpful to divide
its manifestations in education into three elements, all of which figure prominently in
UNESCO’s work and are inter-related.
Open source software has a long history.
The term ‘open access’ is usually used to refer to open access to research results,
especially where the research has been supported by public funds. The open access
movement is thriving and controversies about access to research journals have been in the
news recently, with major universities refusing to pay the high prices demanded for
scientific journals.
Open Educational Resources are defined as educational materials that may be freely
accessed, reused, modified and shared. This includes materials in all formats. Nearly all
OER are generated through digital technology, but they are sometimes used in print
format.
This is the case, for example, in what is probably the largest international OER project,
Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, or TESSA, where OER are used by hundreds
of thousands of teachers annually in at least 12 African countries.
TL: Who invented the term Open Educational Resources?
JD: It was coined at a forum held at UNESCO exactly ten years ago. The topic was the
Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries and reflected
the growing movement to make educational materials freely available for adaptation and
reuse.
Participants at that 2002 Forum declared “their wish to develop together a universal
educational resource for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open
Educational Resources”.
The Open Educational Resources movement has gathered accelerating momentum since
that 2002 Forum thanks to the commitment of educational institutions, NGOs and some
governments to making educational material freely available for reuse, notably where that
material was created with public funds.
This World OER Congress was partly a celebration of the tenth anniversary of that
important UNESCO event, which created a global movement for the open licensing of
educational and creative works.
Since that first event UNESCO has continued to promote the OER movement globally.
In 2009 the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education brought together close to
2,000 participants representing higher education worldwide. In its Communiqué the
Conference urged governments to give more attention to the roles of ICT and OER. As a
result, later that year a resolution was presented at UNESCO’s General Conference,
requesting UNESCO to promote OER further, and arguing that the time was now ripe to
bring OER to the attention of governments.
That was the incentive for UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning to work
together in awareness raising and advocacy, starting with the project that I noted earlier,
and continuing into this work.
With awareness of the importance of OER steadily increasing, a first step was to discover
more about the expectations of governments for OER and whether they were developing
policies for their use. So we conducted a questionnaire survey of all governments. We
received responses from nearly 100 countries and questionnaires. The responses were
analysed by Sarah Hoosen in South Africa and her report is on the web.
Let me comment on two general issues raised by the survey.
First, she writes:
There appears to be great interest in OER across all regions of the world, with several
countries embarking on notable OER initiatives. Indeed, the survey itself raised interest
and awareness of OER in countries that may not have had much prior exposure to the
concept.
TL: Why do you think governments and institutions have this great interest in OER?
JD: When the OER movement began it was motivated by the ideal that knowledge is the
common wealth of humankind and should be freely shared. Most institutions that decided
to implement the ideal by creating OER relied on donor funding, notably from the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
But as the OER movement developed, questions about its sustainability became
increasingly pressing. It could not rely indefinitely on donor funding. Institutions and
governments began to review the economics of OER in order to determine whether there
was a business case for investing in them.
This project commissioned a report by Neil Butcher and Sarah Hoosen on The Business
Case for Open Educational Resources.
The authors situate the contribution of OER in the wider context of the challenges facing
education at all levels in this era of economic stringency. They argue that greater reliance
on resource-based learning, rather than large-group teaching, will be essential for wider
access to quality education.
The authors give compelling evidence that using OER can reduce the cost of creating
learning resources substantially. They also present some revealing analyses of the
economics of textbook production, which again show that systematic processes of
investing in OER can create considerable savings for governments and students. The
commercial publishing industry can play a part in this process.
A second quotation from the report raises other important issues.
…there appears to be some confusion regarding understanding of the concept and
potential of OER. Many projects are geared to allowing online access to digitized
educational content, but the materials themselves do not appear to be explicitly stated as
OER. Where licences are open, the Creative Commons framework appears to be the most
widely used licensing framework, but licensing options varies between countries.
It was not the purpose of this project to propose particular approaches to open licensing
but governments and institutions should give attention to this issue. It is not enough to
place materials on a website and say that anyone can use them.
Producers should understand that open licensing takes place within the framework of
copyright legislation, not outside it. Users need the assurance they can use the material
and be aware of any restrictions that apply.
In our regional policy forums we found no consensus on the restrictions that should be
applied to open licensing. A majority of countries seem to be relaxed about the
commercial use of OER but a minority is opposed.
That is why you will find the phrase ‘with such restrictions as they judge necessary’ in
the recommendation on open licensing in the Paris Declaration.
Let me recall that the aim of this project was to encourage governments to promote OER
and the use of open licences. The world tour that we conducted convinced us that the
time is ripe for this. The OER movement is developing fast but it needs government
involvement to bring it fully into the mainstream of education. Moreover governments
will be major beneficiaries thanks to the potential of OER to improve the costeffectiveness of their large investments in education.
TL: Are there other trends in educational technology that we should be watching?
JD: Let’s look briefly at current technological trends and their implications for
higher education in general and the mega-universities in particular. I shall
concentrate on just two trends, first by continuing the discussion of Open
Educational Resources, and second by touching very briefly on social media and
synchronous interactivity.
Open Educational Resources
I start with Open Educational Resources. Last year a group of universities met in
New Zealand to explore the idea of an Open Educational Resource University, a
concept developed from Paul Stacey’s The University Open.
The idea is to have students find their own content as OER, get tutoring from a
global network of mentors, be 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 has echoes of the simple University of London
External system already mentioned.
As regards the first step in this ladder, OER are already being used by millions of
students, are using the OER put out by MIT, the UK Open University, and others
to find better teaching than they are getting in their own universities where they
are registered.
The interest is considerable. The UKOU’s OpenLearn site has 28 million users and
hundreds of courses can be downloaded as interactive eBooks. Furthermore, with
nearly half a million downloads per week the UKOU alone accounts for 10% of all
downloads from iTunesU. And we must not forget the worldwide viewing
audience of millions for OU/BBC TV programs.
Martin Bean, the Australian-American who moved from Microsoft HQ to become vicechancellor of the UK Open University last year, 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 many millions of people
around the world first encounter the Open University through iTunes, its TV broadcasts
or the resources on its OpenLearn website. The thousands who then elect to enroll as
students will find themselves studying in similar digital environments.
So where does all this take us; how does it challenge KNOU? The institutions best
equipped to take advantage of OER are those that already work through ODL and
have the right mindset of openness. It would be difficult for a university that has
put scarcity at the centre of its business model suddenly to embrace openness.
Here at KNOU your formal courses were born digital and always intended for
online delivery. Drawing on the global pool of OER will enable you to make them
even better.
But let me take you back to Martin Bean’s remark about leading learners step by
step from the informal cloud of learning to formal study and ask whether you
could see an extension of KNOU’s mission in that direction.
The pool of OER is growing fast and the means of finding and retrieving them are
getting better and better. I am sure that Korean students are using them. Some
might like to use them to obtain a credential from you by climbing the OER
University staircase.
KNOU clearly has the resources and expertise to support such students, even if
their requirements are bit different.
Moreover social software, which is one of your strengths, is greatly enriching the
possibilities for student support and interaction. 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 far beyond
earlier behaviouristic forms of eLearning. Some of this social learning activity
involves various forms of informal assessment that can be most helpful in
preparing students for the formal kind.
This third step, assessment, is also familiar territory for KNOU, although perhaps
less so for curricula developed by the student.
Once there is credible assessment the granting and transfer of credit is
straightforward and leads to the top step of credentials.
I am not suggesting that KNOU is likely to adopt the Open Educational Resource
University model for its core operations any time soon but some universities, such
as the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, are testing the waters by
offering studies on this model initially as part of the community service function.
That seems a sensible approach.
Today’s students like to mix and match. Rather than go for an entirely open educational
resource degree students are likely to combine this type of study with some regular online
courses and even some attendance in class
TL: So there are lots of new ideas out there?
JD: Yes, and I have done my research paper at KNOU about another one. It is the
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that some well-known universities in the US are
offering this year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has offered a free course
online to over 100,000 students. You don’t get MIT credit for it and less than 5% of the
students finished the course, but it’s an interesting new development. But that is another
story for another day.
TL: Thank you so much. It has been a real pleasure to have you as a Fellow at KNOU