Presented to ONLINE LEARNING

AMSTERDAM 3-4 TH NOVEMBER 1999

Dr. Gilly Salmon

Open University Business School

The UK Open University (OU) falls firmly into the category of single mode university (i.e. distance learning only) albeit one that traditionally has made extensive use of local services (Burt 1997). The OUBS utilizes the established and world-renowned teaching and learning methodologies of the wider Open University, which now has some 30 years of distance teaching experience.

The Open University Business School (OUBS) continues as a major provider in Britain not only in management development but also in the mass use of ICT for teaching purposes.

The OUBS offers a professional Certificate, Diploma and MBA. The Certificate qualification is open access, which means that no entry qualification of any kind is required, and is available in a number of parallel versions – one-year integrated, 3-modular, health services and voluntary sector. The Professional Diploma of Management requires either the Certificate or equivalent qualifications from other suitable institutions for entry. Successful completion of the Diploma gives entry onto the Stage 2 of the MBA. A route into the MBA for managers holding honours graduates is available as a ‘fast track’ entry course.

The OUBS provides its eight programmes to some 25,000 managers in more than 30 countries. 17,000 Certificate, Diplomas and MBAs have been awarded. The customers range from individuals through small businesses and non-profit organizations to large corporations and sovereign governments.

The OUBS has 15 centres outside Milton Keynes and operates directly in Western Europe. Partner organisations, which offer courses leading to OU awards and also provide student support, are in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Slovakia. In Hong Kong and South Africa, partner institutions offer OUBS programmes as their own awards.

200 OUBS central and regional academic and support staff and more than 800 part-time tutors support and teach students. Management tutors work with the materials provided by the course teams. Access by OUBS tutors to networked computers is very high (Kirkup and Abbot 1998) and some tutor-student contact now takes place electronically (Gray & Salmon 1999)

The characteristic feature of all OUBS learning is that it is 'at a distance'. This enables managers to learn and apply knowledge, skills and attitudes in their own immediate work context and through study in their own time without taking them away to train and be developed off-the-job. OUBS distance learning methodology also greatly enhances the degree of transferability of knowledge and skills development back into the workplace.

The OUBS teaching media mix typically includes:

• textual course materials
• BBC produced audio and video materials
• computer software, computer-mediated conferencing and Internet
• assessed tutor-marked assignments and projects
• face-to-face tutorials
• day and residential schools
• local self-help groups
• end-of-course examinations
• ongoing one to one and small group tutor support

The pressure on serious business schools to make more effective use of ICT in their curricula and teaching methodologies is now already apparent. There is sustained and increasing interest in high quality, relevant management development on the part of large national and multi-national corporations and a corresponding awareness among individual managers of the importance of the provenance and quality of their management education. ICT familiarity, even creativity in its future use, is an essential skill at all levels of management (Salmon 1999).

The OUBS, with its long history of and excellent reputation for supported distance learning is well placed to develop and incorporate the use of ICT into its media mix (Daniel 1996). The OU’s well-rehearsed distance learning methods ensure systems and processes provide for a very high level of quality assurance throughout teaching and assessment. To maintain these whilst responding to the ICT imperatives and customers requirements has been the challenge. Policies, strategies and resources have been carefully put in place to ensure that experiments become pilots, that pilots are evaluated, that successful worthwhile pilots are rolled out to thousands, whilst original or enhanced quality and academic integrity are maintained.

The opportunities for improving student support are increased by the ICT revolution. The OUBS is deeply involved in a number of experiments and large scale pilots in the use of multi media, Internet and computer conferencing (CMC) to enhance managers’ learning experiences and to explore maintaining the scalability and effectiveness of the OU distance methods (Salmon 1998).

• Use of asynchronous and synchronous ICT applications

• Reflective practice

• Peer support

• Building communities of interest & practice

OUBS is increasingly incorporating knowledge media into its pedagogic model using the following principals:

• Knowledge then becomes dynamic and constructed through collaboration

CD-ROMS are becoming an increasingly acceptable media for presenting information, with a considerable commercial sector supplying all kinds of educational material. This means that any OU in-house produced material has to meet increasingly stringent comparison on content and presentation quality. A new generation of CDs was deployed in MBA courses from November 1998. The first qualitative reactions suggest that OUBS CD-ROMs are moving in the right direction. The wider familiarity with CDs however does not mean that we can yet rely on the technology being transparent for OU students. There are still many problems with (for example) students not knowing the configurations of their home computers. Other CD deployments intended for use at home met with initial teething problems simply in getting the CDs to run.

There are some divergent views on the experience of using them in courses. Tutors and some students at residential schools in spring 1999 reported very positive results from using a CD as a resource for part of a team exercise. There were however strong clusters of other opinions reported indicating impatience with having to use CD-ROMS and direct suggestions that the deployment was ‘trendy’. One view is that some students see the CD-ROM as a passive depository of material to be extracted (often printed out) so it ‘can be used’. They do not take the time (and lack of time is an important factor here) to explore beyond the bare necessities. The cost effectiveness of CD deployment to meet these modest demands is questionable.

A key feature in moving at least some students to exploit these wider possibilities is tutor awareness of the material, and sensitivity to individual students needs. This in turn depends on direct support for tutors to identify the possibilities and support students in exploration. Other students, and many tutors, saw the CD as an important primary resource that allows different ways of approaching key course themes. For example, OUBS students with a background of small businesses and self-employment found the video and sound material on the dynamics personnel policy of a large organization extremely helpful. They were able in some ways to experience the situations in the case study, not just note them.

Computer conferencing produced, as always, the most mixed responses with 18% of students giving the lowest rating of "not at all helpful" and 15% the highest "very helpful" with many strong positive comments, and a few strong negative comments. (After nearly 10 years of working with computer mediated conferencing in OUBS courses, the jury still is still out). Computer mediated conferencing is used extensively throughout the MBA (6,000 active users) and on a voluntary basis for Certificate. Diploma and Law programmes. From 2,000 the ceriticate and diploma students will become more active online. The main applications are for communications between students and tutors and students, tutors and course teams, updateable and sharable information exchange, online activities associated with assessment or to follow up face to face meetings, support and problem solving, all on a very large scale.

Based on our experience to date, we have agreed implementation of ICT must:

• Demonstrate market need and demand, attractiveness or usefulness for large scale distance management education
• Offer enhancements, alternatives or new opportunity compared to current teaching methods
• Be reusable (to enable openness and the building of digital assets, ability to disaggregate, modularize, to exploit different media, provide alternatives, versioning, tailoring and customization)
• Produce frameworks to simplify, reduce costs, and enable other courses/applications to follow
• Produce stable and scalable environments
• Produce user friendly, viable effective teaching and learning applications

OUBS’s focus in 1999 is on:

1. Embedding ICTs in teaching and learning by scanning and experimenting, evaluating and developing processes and formats as well as rethinking delivery methodologies, often radically
2. Developing a number of projects, which integrate, broadcast TV, radio and the web for existing and potential students and lifelong learners. These projects to be fully evaluated for relevance and impact.
3. Exploring and developing effective Intranet, Extranet and Internet applications for administration, presentation, communications and assessment online as well as teaching
4. Experimenting with integrated approaches using commercially produced software such as Lotus Learning Space and Microsoft technologies
5. Continuing to equip, train, and build capacity in all staff members
6. Equipping, training and developing the 650 Associate Lecturers of the OUBS ("course tutors") in working and teaching online
7. Providing Just in Time and Point of Need induction and training materials online for students so that they are comfortable and competent with new technologies at the time their course begins
8. Extending evaluation and research across all possible technologies and methodologies

OU/OUBS mission and pedagogic model is further adapted and realised :

• Training the remote Associate Lecturers ("tutors") in online methods is seen as a prerequisite of developing new methods and online applications in OUBS. A new tutor training approach, using the media itself was launched October 99 called "Educating Effective Managers".

• A recent experiment in linking specially produced TV programmes (Business Café) with an advanced interactive Web site to learn about integration of broadcast and Web technologies and reach a wide audience. http://www.open.ac.uk/businesscafe.

• University e commerce projects that will benefit OUBS. These include:

Online student reservation, registration

Online residential school reservation

Electronic submission and management of TMAs

Diagnostics and course choice- especially important for named degrees

Student choice of communication (in person, on paper, by e mail, by phone)

ICT offer huge opportunities for OUBS so long as the very best of the well established teaching methods are maintained. Over the next few years, as the OU becomes increasing global and the concept of on-line courses develops, ICT and in particular networked technologies are likely to assume a much more central role, in OUBS methods. A key challenge is whether ICT continues to enhance the distance learning media mix or whether it can substitute for some aspects- perhaps leading to full-scale on-line courses without the loss of academic integrity. Already, however, through online areas for tutor discussion and the monitoring/mentoring system, the sharing of ideas and resources across a wide distance teaching community has been greatly enhanced. Transferring well rehearsed and large scale monitoring, development and assessment systems, for tutors and for students, to the online environment remain for us one way of continuing to ensure high quality integrated student experiences in a challenging market arena.