Distance Learning at the Open University

The British institution’s success has inspired imitators in the United States

They arrive by the dozens, cramming into a community center in Leicester one recent evening to page through booklets on the Open University’s courses, and to buttonhole the advisers, stationed at the displays, about the demands of taking college courses from their homes.

A harried single mother wondering whether a college degree would help her get a better job. An exchange

student from Zimbabwe, aspiring to a career in law. A caterer, fresh from an Open University survey course in the arts and exploring other classes as she eases into semi-retirement, because, as she puts it, “I just fancy using the brain a bit more.”

Thirty years ago, British universities wouldn’t have had much to offer Michelle Moore, Jabulani Mondhlani, Sue Boulton, or any of the others milling about the festooned tables. And, until the Open University came along, there was little interest in serving them.

Much as distance education in America is creating new learning opportunities -- and threatening familiar teaching practices and faculty roles -- the Open University has for decades been challenging established higher-education traditions in Britain.

Unlike other British universities, which historically have aimed at high-achieving 18-year-olds, the Open University is non-selective in admissions and designs its courses for part-time students and working adults.

From its inception, it has depended heavily on technology -- first BBC television and radio, and now the Internet and CD-ROMs as well -- to help deliver classes to its far-flung student body.

Since 1971, more than two million students have taken a course using the Open University’s virtual-education model -- a model that spices up old-fashioned correspondence-course methods with multimedia materials, personal tutoring, and in some cases, a weekend or week-long class session at a residential school. More than 227,000 people have earned their degrees that way.

The Open U. changed “social perceptions of what higher education was for,” says Peter Scott, a former editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement who is now vice-chancellor of Kingston University, near London.

With its use of distance education and flexible standards, it “made higher education appear much more available to people,” says Mr. Scott.

The teaching approach was questioned at first, adds Mr. Scott, and may well still be, in some quarters. But he notes that the institution tends to rank high in national assessments. “I don’t think it has to prove itself anymore,” he says.

The Open University is also the success story that many American institutions cite when planning their own distance-education ventures.

Few if any of those American ventures, however, are run with the kind of sophisticated systems and resources that the Open University annually puts into its 215-million-pound operation. (One million pounds is worth about $1.55-million at today’s exchange rates.)

That is among the reasons why the institution is looking across the Atlantic to American shores.

Finding much lacking in the distance-education offered by American colleges, Open University officials plan to begin enrolling U.S. students in a new sister institution, the United States Open University.

“What we can provide is decent distance education, because you’ve not been very good at it,” Richard Lewis, the interim president of the United States Open University, says of Americans.

They get “hooked on one model as the answer. First it was television. Now it’s the Net.”

By contrast, Mr. Lewis says, the Open University model incorporates various media and an elaborate support system based largely on personal tutors. The university employs about 7,000 tutors, known as “associate lecturers,” and typically assigns about 20 students to each one.

It also spends considerable energy developing the products -- its 300-odd courses -- that go to students only after years of collaborative research, writing, and review.

Created with the support of a 1960s Labour Party government eager for a “university of the air,” the Open U. today is Britain’s largest university, enrolling more than 137,000 students from the British Isles and more than 20,000 from elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

It also annually sells more than 45,000 sets of books, study guides, and supporting multimedia materials to people who have not formally enrolled in its courses.

While no longer the only university in Britain to employ distance learning, the Open U. remains the pre-eminent player in the field.

Non-traditional, part-time students remain its core constituency: A third of its students already have a degree. The median age of its entering undergraduates is 34. One of five hasn’t passed the A-Levels, the post-high-school exams typically required for university admission. While not as ethnically or economically diverse as the nation, it leads other universities in numbers of older students and women.

That melting pot of students, however, is more apparent at events like the “course-choice fair” in Leicester than here at the university’s headquarters, about a 45-minute train ride from London.

The Milton Keynes campus is a utilitarian complex of faculty offices, administrative buildings, and laboratories, separated by covered walkways and small, flower-filled courtyards. The only students in residence are the few hundred graduate students who work with some of the university’s 900 full-fledged faculty members on their research.

But the complex in Milton Keynes is the intellectual heart of the university, where the pride of the Open U., its courses, are developed.

The design of an Open University course “differs very fundamentally” from a typical American course, explains Richard Maidment, a professor of political science. So, too, does the role of the faculty member, he says.

A 16-year veteran, Mr. Maidment recently chaired a 40-person “course team” for a new class, “Pacific Studies.” (A version of the course is among the first seven the United States Open University plans to offer this fall.)

One difference, he says, is that the courses are broader, usually designed for an entire Open U. academic year, which runs from February to November.

“They’re also very expensive to produce,” he says, and can take two to three years to develop. “It’s a very, very complex package.”

The materials for “Pacific Studies,” for example, include four books, several study guides, five specially produced half-hour television shows, and a set of audiotapes.

The books include contributions by paid writers from within the university and by academics from Australia, Canada, Japan, Thailand, and the United States. The television shows were created with help from two producers detailed from a BBC center located on the campus. The course’s estimated cost: more than $2.5-million.

The Open U. prides itself on the quality of its TV shows. The “Pacific Studies” crew, for example, shot scenes on three continents.

Generally, the programs are aired on the BBC during off hours, and students tape them or get videotapes from the university. But sometimes, Open U. courses make it into prime time; several of the shows for a science course, for example, drew more than a million viewers, even while airing opposite the popular Friday night soap opera, Coronation Street.

But the core of the classes is their written material, Mr. Maidment says. “The books drive our courses.” Published in collaboration with outside publishers, the books are often used at other universities.

The Open University, not individual faculty members, owns and keeps all the intellectual-property rights from its course materials, as well as any royalty income.

Courses are generally designed for an eight-year life span, with major revisions planned at three-year intervals. The course team also meets regularly to create new examinations and assignments.

Usually, that is adequate to insure that the prepackaged material is up to date. Sometimes, though, events undermine the schedule, as they did with “Pacific Studies.”

“The major problem we had last year was, obviously, the economic crisis,” in Asia, Mr. Maidment notes. To adjust, the course team produced several new audiotapes that pointed students to sections of the books that presaged the economic weaknesses of the region.

Once courses get under way, tutors become the main bridge between the university and its students. They are the students’ translators and guides, grading the papers devised and prescribed by the course teams -- those papers are called “tutor-marked assignments” -- and helping to explain material and answer questions through regularly scheduled tutorial sessions, by telephone, or, increasingly, via e-mail.

Tutorial sessions are optional, but university officials strongly encourage students to attend them, especially in introductory courses, where they are offered fortnightly.

Students “get a whole range of academic resources, plus me to expand on them, sort them out, and troubleshoot,” explains Di Honeybone, a tutor in language and linguistics who works in the region around Nottingham.

Marking assignments, she says, is a “teaching exercise.” It is also a way to personalize the experience, with comments such as one she gave a student: “You’ve managed very well to get this done despite the twins having the flu.”

Tutors, many of them professors moonlighting from other universities or professionals in fields such as business or social work, are hired under eight-year contracts, to encourage continuity. They are paid 13 pounds for every assignment they grade, plus more for tutorial time. Typical pay for a full-year, 60-credit course is about 2,500 pounds.

If they hold other jobs, tutors won’t be assigned more than a 60-credit load. That keeps them from spreading themselves too thin and shortchanging students, says Juliet A. Bishop, a former tutor who now supervises the training of Open U. tutors in the area around Nottingham. “It’s time-consuming to support students at a distance.”

Tutors recognize the limitations on their jobs. “The whole lot is strictly paced,” says Dave Geary, a tutor since 1971 in mathematics and computer science. Except for a little on-the-spot help, there’s “not a lot of opportunity to do your own thing,” he says, especially in his fields. “To me, it’s a tarted-up correspondence class. But it’s high-class because of the materials.”

That doesn’t mean tutors are robots. Several years ago, as a tutor, Ms. Bishop says, she disagreed with a course team’s conclusions about the value of integrating students with disabilities into regular classrooms. Her own research on deafness suggested otherwise, and she told her students so.

“I presented it sensitively,” she says. “If you are too energetic in that contrary opinion, you can undermine the students’ confidence in the course.”

As it happened, the course was in an early stage, and she was later invited to write an article for a future version. For the most part, tutorials take place in person, although some associate lecturers rely heavily on e-mail and telephone to reach students, especially if face-to-face meetings are impractical. Only six Open U. courses are designed to be completely Internet-based, and all of them are in computing or in a program on distance education.

Mr. Geary, who teaches one of those Internet courses, says he hasn’t found it to be very successful. Many of the students lurk rather than participate, he says.

Although more courses are using software and CD-ROMs, the university is moving only slowly toward Internet-based courses. In part, that is because Internet access can be quite expensive due to high local phone charges.

Dominic Newbould, a long-time administrator, says the university also views computer-based teaching as appropriate only for certain kinds of courses.

“If you tried to teach philosophy like that, you’d be laughed out of court,” he says. An associate lecturer himself in the basic arts course, Mr. Newbould says he prefers the personal touch; he enjoys the tutor tradition of adjourning to a local pub with his students when the session concludes.

Students’ attitudes toward the tutorials are hard to generalize. John Williams, a computing administrator for the Bank of England and a candidate for an M.B.A. degree, says he skipped many of the tutorials, though he knows plenty of students who swear by them.

“The one thing I’d say is, you’ve really got to be motivated,” says Mr. Williams, who also received his bachelor’s degree, in computer science, from the Open U. He began college as a full-time student in Wales but, preferring to work while he learns, he’s been an Open U. student, almost non-stop, since 1986.

On a lunch break during a three-day residential session for his final business course, Mr. Williams says he considered other M.B.A. programs. But the Open U. seemed a better choice. “I know they’re good,” he says. That’s “what really swung me.”

Students do have their gripes. For one, many want more feedback on their final exams, says Alison Kirk, the president of the Open U.'s student association.

And some students feel the access to tutors is inadequate. For some European and Irish students, the tutors “might be in a totally different country,” she says. That is an especially touchy subject because students from outside Britain and Northern Ireland pay a surplus that can more than double their fees over what residents pay.

Fees for a typical Open U. undergraduate course run about 325 to 425 pounds, with additional charges if a residential school is required. (A week-long residential school runs about 200 pounds.) Officials estimate the average Open U. undergraduate degree takes six years to complete, at a cost of about 3,600 pounds. A full-time student at a traditional British university could now expect to pay up to 1,000 pounds a year to complete an undergraduate degree in three years.

University officials say they would have to charge more if they were to add more tutors or provide exam feedback that the students demand. Now, the institution is a worldwide model of financial efficiency, operating at about half the per-student costs of a traditional British university, some experts say.

But Tim O’Shea, an Open U. professor and its former pro-vice-chancellor, says the university is more notable for its social impact.

Mr. O’Shea, the first in his family to go to college and now head of Birkbeck College at the University of London, says he wishes the Open U. had been around generations ago. His father, a railway clerk, and his uncle, a farmer, could have gained from a college education. “There was no route that they could go to university, and that seemed to be wrong,” he says.

When it did appear, Mr. O’Shea recalls, the Open U. encountered some “not very well-concealed class resentment,” but little direct opposition. Places like Oxford and Cambridge didn’t fight the idea because they “really didn’t think it would work.”

They were wrong, of course, and for students like Michelle Moore, one of those at the Leicester event, that’s lucky.

A single mother with two young daughters, Ms. Moore is enrolled in the introductory course in health and social welfare. She tried to enroll a year ago, but didn’t get a grant from the university and couldn’t afford to go. This year, she sold her car to make the fees.

“I wanted to make a better future,” she says. The course is hard, she says, and child-care duties make it hard to attend all the tutoring sessions. “I knew what I was getting into. I can’t moan.”

She’s pressing on, trying to find a course for next year. She looks at a catalogue, and then at her daughters, Kara, 3, and Holly, 2, squirming in their side-by-side stroller. “By the time they’re 8,” she says, “I want to earn enough money to get a house and a garden.”

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