Sir John Daniel, vice chancellor of the UK Open University, introduced his remarks with a summary of his involvement in the early days of COL. Despite the political tensions and economic problems that prevailed during COL’s genesis in the late eighties, COL was born from the desire of Commonwealth countries to share the benefits of open and distance learning with each other, to enable those without existing ODL structures to establish them; in other words, to use the Chinese proverb, to teach people to fish, rather than give them fish.

The world of the late 1990s is not the world of the late 1980s. The tensions of those days live on but there are new realities. It is in this context that I address the theme of open learning at university level. What is new?

First, distance learning is now the height of fashion. After toiling for years in obscurity, as the pioneers of open learning did, it’s nice to see the field become a la mode. Remember, however, the Chinese curse; ‘may your fondest wishes be realised’. Once something becomes fashionable its currency gets devalued. Today everyone is jumping in, claiming that they are doing distance learning and inventing new terms to make their own activity distinctive.

Second, the hot technologies have changed. When COL was born the satellite star was in the ascendant. Today, if you are not living and breathing the Web you are a technological cave dweller. Three years ago, in the United States at least, distance learning meant video-conferencing. Today, in the United States at least, distance learning means the Web. Since the vast majority of population of the Commonwealth have never engaged personally with either videoconferencing or the Web that is a problem.

The third new element compounds the problem. We now live in a global world. You may have thought that we always did, at least since the astronomers and navigators of the Renaissance decided that the world was round. But today it is a Global World, capital G capital W. Imperial fantasies about the Virtual Corporate University of the Universe are rampant. What are we to do? I suggest to you that we should renew and reassert the values of the Commonwealth of Learning, both capital C capital L, and small c, small l.

Let me comment on that challenge as it applies to open learning at the university level. This Forum has divided education and training by level. That is helpful because education and training is a multi-faceted reality. If you try to treat it all at once you are reduced to platitudinous boilerplate.

What is special and different about university-level education? I talk about ‘university level’ rather than about universities because much of what universities now do is not university-level work.

I do not blame universities for this. Our societies have urged us to inculcate simple skills and to transmit well-codified knowledge and we have eagerly complied. Such activities have, however, obscured the core role of universities and encouraged a host of new players, who may well be better than established universities at teaching straightforward skills and knowledge, to call themselves universities and move into the field.

So, let me tell what a real university is. My reflection on university-level education has been nourished by the Dearing Committee that reviewed higher education in the UK in 1997 and inspired by my colleague Diana Laurillard who was a member of the Dearing group.

The Dearing Committee said that the role of universities is "to enable society to maintain an independent understanding of itself and the world". Let’s unpack that statement.

It focuses on society, not the nation, because this is a global world. University teaching can now cross national borders in the way that research has always done.

It talks about maintaining an understanding, not communicating an understanding because things change, each society is in flux, theories evolve, understanding develops.

The definition talks about ‘understanding of itself’ because the understanding reached must be widely owned and disseminated. Understanding is not the preserve of an elite, but of a learning society.

The word independent is there to capture the unique role of universities as creators of understanding. In a knowledge society many claim the right to help us interpret and understand the world. However, most of those claimants — the media; industrial and government research centres; and the new breed of corporate universities — cannot be independent of commercial interests. The individualistic and disinterested nature of the true university remains unique.

Finally, understanding means going beyond information, it means going beyond knowledge, it means knowledge acquired with the sense of responsibility for how it comes to be known that can make it a foundation for action.

If that is the role of the university what must be the style of university learning? It must not stop at the transmission of information, nor at the communication of knowledge. It means the development of understanding. That is an iterative process involving a dialogue with oneself and others that moves toward a shared understanding. That shared understanding carries with it a critical distance leading eventually to a personal perspective from which learners take responsibility for what they know, how they came to know it and where they may properly apply it. Put another way, knowledge alone is insufficient, university education implies an understanding of the nature of knowledge.

The implication, valid for both classroom and distance institutions, is that university learning requires students to engage actively with the operational aspects of the subject matter and to articulate its theoretical aspects. This is best captured in a conversational model of learning that involves students with academic teachers who are also engaged in critiquing and developing knowledge in their fields.

This ideal of conversation has been the basis of the model of distance education that we at the Open University call Supported Open Learning (SM). It has four key ingredients: 1) excellent learning materials; 2) individual academic support to each student; 3) effective administration and logistics; and 4) teaching rooted in research.

The world’s largest distance teaching universities, which I have written about elsewhere as the Mega-universities, owe their considerable success to these principles of supported open learning which they have introduced with appropriate local variants. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help that the mega-universities have had from the Commonwealth of Learning, help that they have tried to reciprocate to COL in useful ways. By operating flexibly at large scale, with low costs and with good quality, the mega-universities have created a revolution in higher education.

How should the mega-universities and all universities engaged in distance learning react to the new technological forces of change? The response should begin by recognising that these forces present threats to universities as well as opportunities. What are they?

First, new technology makes it easier to access information. But we must remember that university teaching is much more than this.

Second, technology tends to drive the curriculum towards skills rather than knowledge and understanding.

Third, technology is best exploited by teams whereas universities emphasise the creativity of the individual academic.

Fourth, the market approach to education creates alternative providers who threaten the financial base of universities by picking off the cherries of basic skills development and skimming off the cream of basic knowledge transfer. True university learning for understanding must be linked to research, which costs money.

Fifth, government pressure to widen participation in higher education at low cost appears to threaten the close student-teacher relationship that university learning requires.

What is the best response to the opportunities presented by technology and the most effective answer to the threats posed by current trends? I distinguish first between hard technologies and soft technologies. Hard technologies are bits and bytes, electrons and pixels, satellites and search engines. Soft technologies are processes, approaches, sets of rules and modes of organisation.

My central conclusion is that if you want to use the hard technologies for university-level teaching and learning that is both intellectually powerful and competitively cost-effective then you must concentrate on getting the soft technologies right.

These technologies are simply the working practices that underpin the rest of today’s modern industrial and service economy; division of labour, specialisation, teamwork and project management. These are not the traditional working practices of universities. Although universities specialise and divide labour as between disciplines, the habit in teaching is for the same individual to do everything: develop the curriculum; organise the learning resources; teach the class; provide academic support; and assess student learning.

This robust, cottage-industry model does not require much organisation. However, it also does not allow us to reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access and higher quality.

The mega-universities have been able to reconfigure that eternal triangle and we should look to them for inspiration. Their achievements are remarkable. Costs per student are between ten and fifty per cent of those of conventional universities in the same country. They have expanded access dramatically — the dozen mega-universities enrol over three million students between them. They are steadily gaining a reputation for quality. Last year, for instance, the Open University achieved a maximum score of 24/24 in the UK’s national teaching assessment scheme and was ranked higher than Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College for the quality of its teaching of General Engineering.

The mega-universities have achieved this feat by adopting the soft technologies of modern enterprise that I listed. Division of labour means that some people develop learning materials, others support students, yet others provide logistic support, and so on.

Division of labour means specialisation, and this enables the university to focus special training and resources on each function. For example, the Open University spends at least two million dollars annually on training its 7,000 associate lecturers who provide support to individual students. They become highly skilled at that task and very dedicated to their students.

Once you have division of labour and specialisation, teamwork is necessary if you want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. But experience also shows that when academics develop courses in teams the outcome is superior, in both academic and pedagogical terms, to what an individual could do alone. This is because the work of the course team is a splendid example of the development of understanding that I stressed earlier.

The course team engages in an iterative process which involves academics and other professionals in a dialogue that moves toward a shared understanding. Instead of simply repackaging the current scholarly orthodoxy this process moves the academic paradigms forward. I cite a new Open University course, Understanding Cities, as a good example of this. In teaching students how to think about the mega-cities that will dominate the world in the next century, the course team found it needed radically to revise the standard thinking about cities. The impact of this work will be felt across the whole academic community and not just by the few thousand students who will take the course.

Finally, division of labour, specialisation and teamwork all require project management. The university itself has to take responsibility for seeing that it all hangs together.

How do I sum all this up? Very simply. Success in the coming era requires a radical change of focus. The tradition in universities is that the individual teacher teaches. The future is that the university teaches.

This may be a radical change of focus but it does actually take us back to the roots of universities in medieval times. If the future reinforces the notion of a community of scholars acting collectively to enable society to maintain an independent understanding of itself and its world that will be progress. Such a resurgence of the general notion of a commonwealth of learning — small c, small l — is a nice theme for this tenth anniversary conference of this Commonwealth of Learning.