Author: dkernohan

I admit this is just a silly example, but imagine – if you will – you are a major multinational publisher with substantial interests in education. You have a need for skilled employees who have a background in business, but such is the strength of your company culture you are increasingly finding that graduates do not have the precise mix of skills and obedience you so desperately need.

Corporate training is expensive, both in terms of providing the actual learning, and in covering the salary costs of employees undertaking it. This is especially galling when you train new employees who might subsequently leave to travel, have children, start rock bands, sit motionless in a darkened room muttering “leverage” under their breath for 23 hours every day – all those funny things that young people who don’t understand life like to do.

You’ve tried using internships, getting people to work for free, but there’s been a little bit of a public backlash. And the ongoing collapse of capitalism has left you short of ready money – as unlike your competitor you’ve not had the foresight to buy an international financial rating organisation.

But then in comes that saviour of market-driven efficiency – the government. Slyly it whispers:

“What if your new employees paid for their own training via a low cost loan from the government? And what if you didn’t need to pay them a salary whilst they were training? And what if you were under no obligation to employ them, even after they completed their training? And what if they could work for you, for free, whilst training?”

“But sir,” you gasp. “Surely this is too good to be true?”

“It is true,” comes the reply, “it is higher education.”

“Universities?”

Incredulously, you pace the room.

“Don’t you need to adhere to complex regulations about quality assurance processes to be a University?”

“Ah, well, we’re working on some legislation to fix that. But in the mean time you could just enter an agreement with an existing institution, who would handle all that quality stuff.”

“Excellent? But wouldn’t our students get a degree they could use anywhere – couldn’t they just walk away and work for someone who pays them fairly?”

“They could,” comes the response, “but your degree is likely to be so enmeshed with your corporate culture that it would be difficult to use it elsewhere. And there are so few graduate jobs around these days that they probably wouldn’t get the opportunity”.

“No wages, training costs from the government – this all sounds brilliant? Maybe I could use a  former NUS chair to add a patina of legitimacy to the whole sordid enterprise?”

“Yes, you could. But you’d have to find one with a very open mind…”

In other, unrelated, news, Pearson have started a college.

Warning: depressing. 

I really don’t want to link to this post (from @popenici – and from which I have borrowed the title of this post), but feel I have to so you can have some context to why I’m writing this. I read quite a lot (OK, an awful lot) of HE and technology related blogs in my position as wonk-in-waiting, but I do tend to choose the vaguely politically and socially aware ones – many of which can be seen in an unsorted list to your right.

This is an example of one of the “others”.  Rather than pull it apart line-by-breathlessly-technodeterminist-line, I thought I’d write my own alternate version.

By 2050 “traditional” on campus attendance is increasingly rare. Not because of any explosion in technology-supported learning, but because the price of fossil-fuel derived energy is such that travel is essentially the preserve of the super-rich. So, largely, is the internet – with increasing attacks on net neutrality leaving the speed of non-commercial traffic unusably slow, even the ubiquitous, cheap low power devices left over from before the plastics rush are primarily used with offline storage.

A little over 2% of young people in the UK attend one of 20 or so traditional institutions. The benefits of doing so are primarily social, these are the sons and daughters of the elite, networking and pairing off. Most regular people experience post-compulsory education via employer training – which is increasingly rare and is very seldom accredited for transferable use. Low wages and long hours have effectively killed the personal learning culture (though the resurgence of trade unions has begun to correct this), and following the growth of corporate-owned schools since the launch of the “Free School” movement in 2010 few people have the skills or intellectual curiosity to learn outside of work.

Globally, the picture is broadly similar to the UK – though only in England does government spending on Higher Education top 5% of GDP. Nearly all of this is used to write off student loans against fees, taken out more than 30 years ago: due to mass unemployment and low wages very few of these were ever paid back. This led to sharp rises in initial fees for students, driving the majority of institutions out of business. Anyone who does study at a University does so in one within their own country – international travel is rare and very expensive.

For a while in the mid-late teens, there was an explosion in online learning, but this tailed off as a tightening of financial margins in traditional institutions meant that the largely voluntary content development and student support processes stopped being supported. Increasing corporatisation of internet connectivity rendered online discussion prohibitively expensive, with both Facebook and Twitter closing accounts belonging to low net-worth individuals in 2019. The demands of advertisers drove this threshold up sharply, until the Second Great DotCom Bubble of 2020 and the collapse of Google rendered the old “free” internet largely unviable. Most connectivity these days is via single use applications able to link to resources on only a small number of severs.

In the corporate training world BlackBoardSharePointPearsonNewsCorp is the dominant provider, delivering an end-to-end managed hardware and software ecosystem for direct delivery of information to staff. It’s very much on a just-in-time basis, with content being key and having more in common with the manual than the textbook. BBSPPNC is most people’s only contact with online information other than paid-for access to traditional mass media (news, television, music) and email/IM.

In many ways, the world of 2050 has more in common with the world of 1950 than any intervening time. Years of austerity have depleted public services and social mobility, and standards of living are broadly similar. The expected growth in new industries was stifled by continued economic stagnation – most jobs in 2050 would be recognisable to a visitor from 1950, with manufacturing, small-scale farming, mining, heavy industry, and service industries (including security and medical roles) being primary employers in the UK. Welfare is next-to non-existent, and extended family living is now normal, with most people born in 2050 expecting to die within 25 miles of their place of birth, 50-60 years or so later.

It may be already clear that only those who are not in thrall to the dying myths of the age will be able to see the 2050 as anything other than a slightly enhanced version of life a century ago. Institutions (and countries) aware of their supposedly crucial importance to knowledge generation, innovation and their overall contribution to society and economy have no time to waste if they want to be part of the scene in 2050. This is why vision – and knowledge to achieve this vision – may be one of the most valuable commodities in 2012.

Buzzing beyond the shock doctrine, floating far beyond cultural hysteresis. Welcome to the age of panic – the slew of instinctual, animal, responses to threat, real and imagined. Above our cities and towns, a vast industry learns exactly how to provoke specific activity in our minds. Mood music = mood response.

Panic ideology: “[…] It is the psychological fuel which produces a mass-based politics of emotional needs, referenda on happiness as the essence of electoral politics, and scapegoatism of vulnerable out-groups.[…] As the epicentre of the meeting of the outer anxiety and the inner anxiety, the bourgeois individual is envisioned as suffering a dramatic loss of ego and abandoning himself to states of fantasy, delirium, and illusion. […] Voting analysts now call this phenomenon “mood politics.””

Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” suggests, fundamentally, that the market-led solutions prevalent in our world are forced upon us by the carefully managed appearance of crisis.  I would argue a panic ideology demonstrates that these market-led solutions are both symptom and cause of crisis. Not only can a “good crisis” spark a desired response, the response itself can be designed to engender an even better crisis.

Just as, classically, human beings have inate responses – “fight or flight” as those evolutionary behaviourists would say –  so do our organisations and structures.

Universities in the UK, faced with instability, have reacted in similar stereotyped ways. Reale and Seeber (2011) described the behaviour of Higher Education Institutions during changes to the Italian HE sector using a range of theoretical concepts. Most pointedly:

• isomorphism – the tendancy for organisations to copy the activity of similar organisations in similar situations. This can be seen in the “peer comparison” activities that many UK institutions are currently undertaking. Whilst this activity can lead to the dissemination of appropriate practice, it is equally likely to lead to similar – and avoidable – mistakes being made.
•  Their reference to institutional theory makes me think of rational myths – the idea that phenomena are predictable and can be mapped to carefully designed mathematical or physical models. Similar to the myth of a rational market, which is still prevalent in some strands of c21st economics. The creation of a rational myth involves the gathering and analysis of a great deal of data, often of variable quality and completeness… and at substantial cost to institutional resources.
• To their grab-bag of approaches I would add the stereotyped responses – which are, quite simply, the things that HEIs normally do when faced with a crisis – namely to reorganise, abandon resources (staff, capacity…) without quantifiable short term value, and to offer the appearance of austerity by making highly visible but essentially (in a whole-institution sense) meaningless changes to terms and conditions.

Reale and Seeber go on to analyse the performance of individual research units faced with a funding crisis – it’s a fascinating little paper and well worth a look. But what they don’t do is examine the ways in which the behaviours above actually heighten the crisis.

• isomorphism and rational myths encourage senior staff to attempt to solve problems for an ideal institution in an ideal environment. The dissonance between the model and the actuality promotes demoralising comparisons between the two – and the gathering of data for comparison becomes an attempt to adhere to the imposed reality rather than reflect the perceived reality.
• stereotyped behaviours are doubly unsettling, both in terms of their signification of the state of crisis (“we are reorganising, hence we must be in a bad way”) and their effect on staff at all levels is one of upheaval and misery.

A demoralised, unhappy organisation is far less likely to weather any kind of crisis than one where organisational well-being is paramount. New entrants to a market know this, thus their modus operandi is to provoke the kind of behaviours described above. You can see this in some of the language around the Second Great Online Learning Bubble… “education is broken“, “college is too expensive” and the classic “employers are unhappy with graduates”. Each of these attacks is calculated to promote and accentuate a state of crisis. And the heavy hype around new models (even those that look in worse financial shape than the current ones) is another strand in the polyphonic educational mood music.

All of this plays upon insecurities within institutions – just as wily politicians play upon insecurities within voters. Even if you don’t want to believe the world works this way – what if it did, what then? Even the act of entertaining some of this nonsense is a self-inflicted wound.

I hate business books, specifically those ones that you see in airports that have titles that give away the “insight” you would get from reading all 400 pages of dribble. And I’ve seen this idea on the garish covers of several. So I’ll quote – as advice to all VCs who are in to Senser, and anyone else to whom the above hits home – from Douglas Adams:

“”Who said anything about panicking? This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I’ve settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I’ll start panicking!”

“A programme is made up of a specific set of related projects identified by an organisation that together will deliver some defined objective, or set of objectives, for the organisation. The objectives, or goals, of the programme are typically at a strategic level so that the organisation can achieve benefits and improvements in its business operation.

There is a close link between Programme Management and project management because the programme is made up of projects and is only successful if the projects within it succeed. The concept of a programme is that it should deliver more than the ‘sum of its parts’. In other words, without Programme Management, the projects would probably still be able to deliver their particular outcomes but these would not be co-ordinated or integrated into the achievement of a strategic business goal.” (definition source)

A programme is what the delivery of a large contract such as the arrangements of security services to the 2012 Olympic games would be classified as. It comprises a range of projects, drawn together in order to provide more than the sum of their parts. MSP (“Managing Successful Programmes” – which is what I am trained in) provides an administrative structure for managing programmes that is what the UK government reckons is the best way to get programmes delivered.

First thing you need to deliver a programme properly under MSP is a “programme definition document”. Here’s a template from BIS which describes what you need to have prepared even before you are approved to start running the thing. Those of you used to bidding for projects could compare this stage to the bidding template you complete and send to us. In the same way that you have to convince the likes of me to fund your project, I have to convince my managers to let me run a programme.

There are two components in particular I can only imagine G4S didn’t do or did very badly. From the template:

“14. Summary of key risks and issues

 A summary of key risks/issues that will/might impact on achievement of programme objectives. An outline of and proposed risk mitigation actions, contingency plans and issue resolution proposals.

 References to the Programme Risk and Issues Registers should be included.”

and, an organisational plan

” A list or structure diagram with names against key roles. ” 

I’d say the most common reasons that I complain about bids, project plans and suchlike are the lack of a decent risk register and a lack of clarity regarding who would be doing the actual work. Both are management failings which, for me, can tip something between being viable and being unfundable. Of course, it’s OK (depending on the scope and nature of a project/programme) not to have all staff in post if you’ve (a) got reasonable looking plans to recruit them (pro-tip: not a 1 month open recruitment process, especially if that month is August) and (b) you’ve got some kind of mitigation in your risk register for when it goes horribly wrong.

From what I can tell, G4S had neither of these. Reading between the lines of comments made by the delightfully named Mr Buckles today they’ve been appointing staff on zero-hour contracts. Basically, by using just-in-time staff allocation and avoiding regular scheduling they can get out of fulfilling many of their standard obligations as employers (sick pay, leave etc) and thus save money. This is why Buckles was unable to say for certain how many G4S “employees” would turn up for any given task. Under a zero-hours contract an “employee” is not obliged to turn up – this may happen because an “employee” has taken up an actual decent job that supplies regular income, or even because they couldn’t be arsed.

Even with a description at that level, you could see that this is pretty risky behaviour on a contract that depended on a certain level of staffing. And there’s only really one mitigation that you could use – you have many (many) more staff on your books than you may need… which cuts out a lot of the savings you’ve made by treating “employees” like crap (eg not paying them for training time unless you decide to give them 5 days work)

Clearly G4S erred on the side of greed, and hadn’t got the required level of mitigation. This should have been raised in reports to the senior responsible owner (SRO). That it wasn’t (apparently) raised was a failure of programme governance – blame should be shared between who ever the portfolio owner was (either at DCMS or the Home Office) and the programme manager at G4S, but should fall primarily on the latter – as a programme manager you always escalate risks for the simple reason it means the risks are no longer just your problem! I guess the drivers are different in a public-private arrangement where organisational profits are at stake.

Those big “M” MOOCs, xMOOCs, “open-as-in-door” MOOCS, call them what you will are not going to go away, but neither are they going to take over the world. They’re a bit like dubstep (bear with me here). Basically:

–    A group of early pioneers based around a local scene begin interesting experiments.

–    Via the web it influences like-minded people globally.

–    Certain influences seep in to the mainstream

–    Big business sits up and takes notice, they attempt to sign up and create people who are more marketable than the early pioneers

–    The most obvious and striking features of the original underground are copied, over-used and drained of meaning. The subtlety and mood is forgotten.

–    People are ashamed to admit they like the style, because in most peoples heads it is associated with a multi-million-dollar product which has nothing to do with the early stuff they fell in love with.

– the now-mainstream style percolates into other areas

(if you want to an easy intro around how that happened in dubstep, try the BBC R1 “Generation Bass” documentary. Here’s the trailer.)

When, in February 2012, Global Industry Analysts Inc. suggested that e-learning would be a $107bn global market in 2015 (a little under half of the UK national deficit), they were examining a sector that seems far from the “cottage industry” derided by Sir John Daniel (Commonwealth of Learning) in 2010.  In a segment that extends from traditional higher education, through corporate training, to every aspect of adult learning and compulsory sector tuition, it is little wonder that one start-up has generated $16m of venture capital without even having a defined business model.

That start-up is Coursera, spun out of Stanford and now offering more than 30 classes, in partnership with big names like UC Berkeley, U Michigan and Princeton. The catch is: the courses are offered for free to anyone in the world who wishes to take them. And Coursera are just one of many.

Udacity have secured significant venture capital and private investment around a similar model. Sebastian Thrun initially led an experimental open course (again out of Stanford), before moving to a start-up phase.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit that has secured $150,000 in donations alongside a $2m grant from Google. The initiative was kicked off by one former hedge fund manager making cheap videos for YouTube, and is now expanding faculty, offering summer schools, and accrediting learning – supported by a $5m grant from the O’Sullivan Foundation in Ireland.

Harvard and MIT have sunk a combined $60m into EdX, a not-for-profit online learning collaboration offering open learners free high-quality materials and tuition alongside the option to seek certification for successful completion.

StraighterLine does not offer free content (there’s a $99 fee for “all you can learn”). But it boasts content from many notable private US institutions and Pearson, infrastructure from Blackboard, and easy transfer of credit gained into a range of accrediting partner colleges. It aggressively markets itself as an alternative to traditional university study – “the shortest distance between you and your degree”. It has already raised $10m in venture capital.

The OER University (OERu) is a collaboration of a number of institutions internationally, intending to offer free materials and volunteer support, alongside supporting paid-for assessment and accreditation. It has not (yet) received venture capital, but has worked to closely integrate itself with influential international bodies.

Browser company Mozilla are developing a system of “Open Badges”, allowing learners to reliably “show what they know”, as validated by a range of non-education experts including NASA, Intel and Pixar/Disney.

And there are many, many other examples of start-ups and initiatives attempting to short-cut the existing Higher Education system using online tools.

So the question is not “how can open online learning succeed?”, the question has become “given open online learning, what should we be doing?”

But for all Peter Theil’s dire warnings, there’s only one group of people chucking millions of dollars at start-ups with no viable business models.

In the words of UMW Web Manager Cathy Finn-Derecki: “It looks like the anxiety-provoking media coverage about “the latest web thing that the cool schools are doing” speaks louder to these business-types than the actual business of teaching and learning, and that’s pretty darned sad.”

However, if money does talk – why do we hear so little in the mainstream press about the MOOC that raised hardware costs and more via voluntary contributions from course adherents?

Traditional higher education needs to be involved in experimenting with and analyzing this model. But no one would recommend a wholesale adoption at this stage. The business-backed MOOC movement will change the higher education landscape, but it will not obliterate it.

And even if you don’t think you like “dubstep”, you’re probably hearing the influence and effects of the early pioneers in the new music you *are* listening to.

(Similar thoughts from Pat Lockley on his blog, “Pgogy”) 

I’m just adding this to preserve the interview I did with Gabi Witthaus of the TOUCANS project, which is examining attitudes to the OERu initiative. It’s a very interesting project, and it’s worth having a look at some of the other interviews that she’s done – in a laudable instance of open practice they’re all preserved as blog posts!

‘We need to find a new model of supporting the work of academics.’

GW: I’d like to start by asking you, in very general terms, what your views are on the OERu.

 DK: In very general terms, I’d say I see it as part of a cultural trend around the changing nature of higher education and around the way in which open education is becoming a part of that. I think I see it as having the same strengths and weaknesses as models such as Udacity, Coursera or MITx, that it is – and I think I’m on record as saying this previously – fundamentally a parasitic model. Basically all of the content is coming from academics and volunteers who are employed by traditional institutions, and the aim of these kinds of initiatives is to draw students in who might otherwise participate at the host institution. So that slightly worries me in that it’s not a sustainable intervention; it has not solved the problem of how you actually reward academics for the work that they’re doing.

 GW: The term parasitic is quite negative and that obviously portrays your feelings about it. I’m not trying to sell the OERu but I think people within the OERu might refer to it as symbiotic, not parasitic, and certainly the way they are seeing the business model is it shouldn’t be undermining existing provision. They’re saying if each participating institution offers a little bit based on OERs they’ve already produced, and assessments that they’re already running for their existing learners, and they recoup the costs of that assessment and accreditation, then the more institutions that participate, the bigger the offering can be. I don’t think your point about it taking paying students away from mainstream provision is the way they would see it either. They would see the OERu as reaching a whole new audience that is currently unable to pay the fees.

 DK: I can take that on board. Certainly, symbiotic is an interesting choice of word. I would query however, precisely what the contributing institutions are getting out of it. They seem to be contributing resources and staff time, and not actually getting any benefit at the end of it. I would say that clearly there needs to be a range of models for the delivery of higher education to a growing population. You could argue I suppose that this is actually about a wider cultural issue; I mean, exactly why is higher education so unaffordable at the moment? Why is it that we need to fit higher education alongside work? Why is it that academic work needs to bring in revenue? As an idealist, I can see completely the aims of what they’re trying to do. But unfortunately when it comes down to it across the Western world, academics are kind of under attack in terms of their conditions – the contractual nature of their relationship with the institution. We’re moving towards the idea of short-term, hourly pay. The idea of academic tenure or an academic career is basically dying off. We need to address these issues if higher education is actually going to be sustainable. There is going to need to be some way of paying academics so they can afford to live. I can see that these models are good for students if they can cope with online learning, they can cope with independent learning, and they are comfortable with self-directed work. A small group of learners, I suspect mainly in the post-graduate area, would be suited to that kind of learning. I used to work in the University of Glamorgan, Wales, which is an institution that does a lot to drive up participation in the Welsh valleys – some of the most deprived areas in Europe. A lot of the time it’s very intensive on staff time and support. These students need a lot of support and guidance. They need a lot of introduction into academic ideas, ways to interact with information, and it’s incredibly intensive. I would query as to whether online learning is the answer for those people.

 GW: The OERu is hoping to get volunteers to support students. They’re hoping to get retired academics, graduates who’ve been through an OERu course and others who are just interested to join as volunteers.

DK: That’s a potential, but it’s still limited to people who have got the private means to afford to volunteer in this way. It’s like the Big Society idea – drawing on people who can afford to give, in Marxist terms, their labour. I’m probably one of the people in that target market. As you know, I’m involved with DS106, working with students around that MOOC. But it’s still a self-selecting group. It’s people that can afford to do this, and it’s people that can afford to be academics because they’re interested in being academics. That’s starting to happen already. Most postgraduates have got private means; most new academics have got some kind of resources outside of their academic employment just because it’s paid so, so badly that you couldn’t really do it otherwise. I suppose you could compare it to journalism as a profession that is essentially dying, because there are lots of people like me who are interested enough in micro-issues that they’ll happily devote their time to research and writing about those issues. And I think you can see the same kind of thing with academics. Now in many ways you could see that as positive. It’s democratising journalism, meaning you’ve not got the ideas of the proprietors and owners, and their friends and contacts being the thing that actually drives the agenda. 

 GW: A lot of people are concerned about quality when the question of volunteers comes up, whereas your concerns are more of a socio-political nature.

 DK: I think so, yes. I mean I love academics, I think they’re fantastic and I think they do amazing, amazing work. We need to have some way to pay these people so that we have a meritocracy for people who have reached academic positions because they’re talented teachers, because they’re great researchers, because they’re basically just bright, interesting people. I’m not certain that a volunteer model is the best model in terms of academia as a profession.

 GW: Now if we were just talking about a model for the UK or for a single country, we could proceed with that debate and say, well what should the government be doing? But this is an international model and it’s based on the premise that…

 DK: It’s an international problem.

 GW: Yeah, it’s an international problem, and it’s really aimed at, the ultimate point of it is a kind of altruistic attempt to support people in developing countries who have few resources, without hurting the better-resourced institutions in any way.

 DK: Yes, it’s a noble aim isn’t it, that you are trying to provide higher education to people that wouldn’t otherwise have access to it, but to my mind, that should be an aim of core academic practice. That’s something we should be directly paying people to do, rather than expecting people to do it in their own time.

 GW: When I interviewed people in the OERu network institutions, one person said: “The ideal OERu learner is a self-contained student who is going to resolutely keep persevering…”

 DK: There are quite a lot of students and quite a lot of independent learners outside of institutional system that are doing that, but I don’t think it’s a model that’s typical, especially not for those with previous experience of learning in this particular way. It’s quite difficult. I mean, even coming from compulsory sector education into higher education is a really difficult job. From having someone else being responsible for your learning to you being responsible for your learning is really difficult, even with all the peer support, the library, the study skills support that you get in a traditional campus university. I think online learning is a similar step. Going from campus-style learning to that, I think it’s a similar jump. And to expect people to make two jumps, if we’re talking about people who haven’t even completed compulsory education, that’s a big, big step.

 GW: Yes, I’m really curious to see if this model actually works. Going back to what you said earlier, that academics should be paid by their institutions to support students who can’t afford to pay the fees of mainstream universities, someone’s still got to pay for that – it’s either the student or the taxpayer.

 DK: Absolutely. It used to be a core part of what was expected of an academic. If you go back to Cambridge in the 17th century and look at contracts, the only tangible output that an academic was supposed to give was to offer a public lecture every year, and that was the reason they were employed, so they could provide a public lecture. Even these days in universities, there is a lot of outreach activity, which is what academics are at least partially paid to do. That can be really effective. If you look at what Viv Rolfe was doing in the DMU open day, just standing on a soap box and shouting about Biology – that was fantastic. If you look at the likes of Dr Alice Roberts on Coast on the BBC talking about geology and local history and biology, all the amazing stuff that she does, this kind of activity has long been part of an academic contract. A lot of the wonderful things about higher education have happened because academics have had it in their contracts to do that. It’s slightly fading away because increasingly we’re putting young academics onto hourly paid contracts or just paying them for the contact hours they do; they’re doing the preparation and marking in their own time, and they’ve just not got time to do the wider collegiate, as it used to be called, activities. Bringing in a model like this would work if we still had widespread academic tenure in the US and the UK, if we still had academics employed full-time to do academic “stuff”, but we don’t have that any more. We’re looking for efficiencies and that seems to be the priority rather than maximising the benefit that we get from the people that we do employ.

 GW: There’s something horribly ironic in that isn’t there: it’s because of the recession which is worldwide, we’re cutting down on our own institutional staff capacity, and this is exactly the time that people in less-resourced parts of the world are even more disadvantaged than before.

 DK: Absolutely.

 GW: Let me come back to something you mentioned earlier, when you said you couldn’t see what the benefit was for the institutions that joined the OERu. The people I interviewed who were in senior management were partly looking at it as a marketing exercise. They want to be seen to be out there, being innovative. But all of my interviewees, without exception said they had some curiosity about the OERu and they wanted to ‘dip a toe in the water’. They felt it was a relatively low-risk way of experimenting with taking OERs to the next level and seeing what would happen. Wayne Mackintosh, in particular, emphasised sustainable educational practice. You know there are statistics that show that India would have to build something like two universities a week to meet the demand for higher education. For me that raises a whole separate question, which is, do these masses of people actually need and want a higher education?

 DK: Yes, and if they do want higher education, do they want the kind of higher education that is sitting in front of a screen for a couple of hours in between shifts? Is that really what they actually want, or is that what we as the West have deigned to give them? I mean why shouldn’t India build loads of universities? Unfortunately we’ve decided that the expansionary stage of higher education is completed now, and so therefore we have to do something else. It kind of feels like we’re letting those people down in a way.

 GW: That’s an interesting way of looking at it. OK, something else that all the OERu members said to me when I interviewed them was that it was about social inclusion and widening participation.

 DK: It’s a nice easy way to meet that goal, isn’t it? They don’t have to go out there and engage with people. They can just tick the box and say this is for learners who are savvy enough and motivated enough to be online, be curious, to sign up for an online course. But I suspect those people would have found a way to get some kind of education anyway. It’s not actually widening participation; it’s just a cheaper way of reaching a student body. I mean, cynically, they could say, ‘Maybe this is a good way of exposing ourselves to the market. We can eventually bring the best of these incredibly motivated people back as post-graduates.’

 GW: A few people have said that.

 DK: The way we sell higher education at the moment is that if you’re not actually moving up in your career, there’s not much point in getting your degree.

 GW: In your slightly cynical view…?

 DK: It’s not that cynical…

 GW: I find it quite depressing! But there might be something in it. Most of the people I spoke to in the OERu network were at the grassroots, academics within their institutions who are making this happen, with a few exceptions of senior managers. I think that the people on the ground who’ve been tasked with implementing this are incredibly focused on the social agenda. I believe that if you get a critical mass of people like that in an institution, you can achieve things that you wouldn’t really imagine. You don’t really know what’s going to come out of it because of that.

 DK: Well, it’s a research project!

 GW: The OERu not really a research project; it’s an implementation project.

 DK: Shooting first and asking questions later?

 GW: OK then, it’s an experiment! Once you’ve put your hypothesis out there, you’ve got to pour all the stuff into the test tubes and see what happens…

 DK: Yeah… but, I suppose experiments usually start with thought experiments and then right at the end you can actually go in to the wet lab and start playing with stuff, but you’ve got some kind of a model of change in your head that says well this active group will combine with this active group, which will give the chemical in question the following pharmaceutical properties, wouldn’t you?

 GW: You would, yes.

 DK: You wouldn’t think, well let’s just pour some of this in and some of that in and then say, well let’s see what happens, and then drink it. That’s not science.

 GW: Well no… The hypothesis includes many ifs: if the OERu gets enough institutions involved, if they manage to recruit learners who are willing to give this a try, if the learners have got the staying power, if there are people willing to support the learners in the various ways that have been suggested, then who knows? Then… even if out of the hundred million people, one percent of them actually succeed, that’s a million people.

 DK: I think that the Open University might reach that number in China as well. You’ve also got the likes of Nottingham. You should see the university parks that they build out therein China. You’ve got, say, Sheffield Hallam and next door you’ve got Lancaster. It’s just about sending academic staff out there, having people on the ground.  That seems to be the way a lot of institutions are going, although unfortunately the Chinese and Indian economies are starting to slow down now.

 GW: Something else the OERu people said about the benefits: there was a lot of talk about the collaboration between member institutions in the network as being valuable. There are what are perceived to be world leaders in PLAR/ APEL/ RPL in this network. For them PLAR is matching up what a person can do against a graduate profile.

 DK: I remember working with a project looking at APEL in the University of Derby, and it takes substantially more time, for students and academics, than doing the course. There’s been a lot of defence of APEL because of the degree mill argument – you know the ones that send you these emails saying you can get a PhD now for 6,000 GBP without doing any work.

 GW: Otago Polytechnic  in New Zealand and the North American institutions are doing a lot of APEL work. They didn’t see it as being overly labour intensive. One person I interviewed was really happy that the OERu would provide a structure for PLAR applicants to prepare their portfolios that could then be mapped against course outcomes.

 DK: Then again, it does actually drive up their income. It means that they don’t have to employ many full-time academics to do full-time teaching.

 GW: That’s another question for me: if it is ultimately successful, imagine if every student could choose to do absolutely any programme either the mainstream way or the OERu way: then what do the institutions do – do they become licensing offices?

 DK: There has been a lot of talk about this around JISC  and CETIS. The linkhttp://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/mooc/ contains a short video showing an imaginary university called Universality that I invented back in 2010 to explore these models. I presented this at ALT-C 2010 (http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/oer–futures–and–universality–inc–altc2010), and what that suggested was basically a model largely based around peer support with extras like direct academic support, practical weeks and the exams and accreditation actually paid for. I didn’t like the idea at the time and I still don’t like it, but it appears to be becoming true. I mean, it’s a slightly over-the-top, slightly tongue-in-cheek investigation of that kind of model. Something in that model that I did like was that they actually employed academics. They paid academics so that their primary goal would be creating OER and recording lectures that would drive hits, and then students paid directly to have one-to-one tuition with them, or to attend intensive courses. I suggested that they would be paid according to the number of hits their courses got. So there was the anthropology lecturer that was making millions and millions of pounds… I’m not going to speculate on what exactly she was doing – it could be anything… That is one potential model. When I see Udacity, Coursera, the stuff that is starting to happen around TedX, not so much the OERu, I see elements of that coming in.

 This is slightly prefiguring mine and Amber’s presentation for the ALT conference this year, which is that there are a number of sub-cultures within the open education movement. One of these is the “education is broken” DIY movement that says nothing in traditional education is working; it’s all broken and we need to tear it up from the ground and start again, which largely for some reason involves the private sector. I think they can see a massive new market expanding. Much like what is starting to happen in the schools sector with academies and the New York state school system. I think there is a component within the open education movement which is directly antagonistic to traditional education, and that differs from the people who are just saying knowledge should be out there, should be shared, should be free – basically dodgy old hippies such as myself and the likes of Alan Levine, that kind of crowd. Brian Lamb as well has talked a lot about this. Then you’ve got the likes of David Wiley that are coming from the old tradition of reusable learning objects (RLO). It’s all about making the existing model more efficient; it’s using technology as a way of designing courses. It’s the old RLO dream of automatically populating a course with the required material, seamless sharing within a VLE framework.

You’ve got all those different traditions that are kind of mashed together in the open education sphere, and the tensions in there are really interesting.

 GW: You mentioned ALT-C – I’m also preparing something with Jonathan Darby and Megan Quentin-Baxter. It will be a symposium/ debate pretty much about these issues. One more thing I wanted to ask your opinion of. This slide has generated some really interesting comments from people I’ve interviewed. The image is based on a paper by Norm Friesen and Judith Murray.

 DK: I think that ties in with the argument I was making earlier; it’s a fantastic way of not providing student support and saving costs, and not paying academics and saving costs. So I could see institutions really going for that because it lowers their recurrent outgoings substantially.

 GW: I suppose, going back to the business model, which is that no institution in the network should put out more than half a percent of their total offerings through the OERu, this would only apply to that half a percent.

 DK: If these are the institutions leading on APEL, this could actually be their business model. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be hundreds and hundreds of OERus.

 GW: I suppose so, but a single OERu means more collaboration towards a single goal…

 DK: And branding. You can imagine. I think the big untapped market for higher education expansion is the kind of people that are posting on particular interest forums and blogs and tumblrs etc. If you think of the man-years, and I think it is actually ‘man’ years, of the stuff going on on wookipedia, the Star Wars fan site. People are experts in camera choices, scripting and sets, and they’re contributing all this stuff because they love Star Wars. There’s no reason at all why you couldn’t put together something called the University of Alderran that would directly market itself to people are contributing in this way. ‘Come here and learn about the musical principles in John Williams’ scores!’ By the way, I’d like to immediately dissociate myself from that idea.

 GW: [Laughs.] To some extent isn’t that what’s already happening with the P2P University and so on?

 DK: Yes, in the same way that people used to share on Slashdot in the old days, it would be Github or Stack Overflow now, that kind of thing. You can see Stack Overflow saying you’re doing all this incredible learning, why not get a badge for it? A qualification that people could actually use on their CV might be of interest to them. I think we could go for the Star Wars model – there’d be a big market for that one.

 GW: Yes, possibly even on other planets – we could really expand!

 DK: Absolutely: A long time ago in an institution far, far away… That’s no moon; it’s got degree-awarding powers!

 GW: (Laughs) Is there anything else you want to say about the whole concept of the OERu?

 DK: My primary concern is finding ways of paying academics. I think we need to find a new model of supporting the work of academics. This is probably going to be the big defining struggle of the next ten years of higher education. I mean, how do we support academics in the early years; how do we get the people who are best at teaching and researching actually doing the job?

 GW: Good question. I think there are some people who are a bit fatalistic about that and they’re saying, well if the market shrinks for the kind of support for students that universities have traditionally offered, then academics must be creative and use all their grey matter to think of ways to move forward.

 DK: Absolutely, because it’s already starting to happen; I was writing about this in my blog. It’s a future designed by entrepreneurs that were brought up on pulpy fifties science fiction; it’s like a culture reaching back to the certainties of the black and white and the government as the Empire, free enterprise as the rebels, and shooting down the red tape. You look at the mainstream cultural growth of the likes of steampunk, looking back at previous ideas of the future rather than having new ideas of the future. There’s a big gap here in defining what the world is going to be like, and academics need to step into it.

 GW: I think I’ve taken enough of your time, although I’d love to continue! Is there anything else you want to say?

 DK: I think I’ve been quite cynical in places, but I’m absolutely not saying we shouldn’t try it. I think we should try it and see what happens but we need to be really self-critical in the best sense, and really aware of the politics and the implications of what we’re doing.

UNESCO is an unusual organisation with a a particularly unusual relationship with Britain.

We left, of course, in ’84, following the US out in an early War on Press Accountability which handily prefigured the results of the Leveson Inquiry. The “New World Communications and Information Order” (properly known as “Many Voices, One World“, sometimes the MacBride report) attempted to address the balance between the perspectives of the monied western mediarchy and those of the ordinary folks in the developing and developed world, and did so with the thoughtfulness and elan that you would expect from a group that originally boasted Marshall McLuhan amongst its members.

But clearly any idea that stops our noble news and media industry doing whatever the hell they want (as long as it pays) was an idea too far, especially to the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Rather even than be party to a non-binding declaration, they walked, taking funding that had been used to preserve sites of global historical importance, for instance those in Iraq that they destroyed in 2004. The UK eventually crept back on board the UNESCO train with Blair in ’97, another of those far reaching events of the momentous first 100 days of Labour power. And, again, after the US (this time in order to lower our subs by a couple of £ billion).

The Paris UNESCO building itself is a venue designed for such deliberations. Huge hallways, armies of support staff, priceless artwork lining the walls and a (very good) restaurant on the 7th floor serving wine with a thoroughly decent lunch, it couldn’t be more colonial if it tried. From the balcony you look over the carefully maintained Ecole Miltarie to the familiar shape of the Eiffel tower; you see the European enlightenment and you see the Industrial Revolution – science, beauty, business and marketing, empire and military force.

It’s a line that the OER movement has walked nervously, with the first rumble of concern being from Leigh Blackall over the cultural suppositions implicit within structured learning resources, usually at the low granularity end of the spectrum. But it is also a line that open-as-in-doorMOOCs seem still to pass without thought. One of the most common statistic-oids thrown into presentations was that to cater for projected global growth in HE enrolment, we’d need to build X campuses, holding Y students every Z weeks (the actual numbers here are extrapolations of guesswork and are entirely unimportant. The important thing is that they should be greeted with incredulity. That’s the pitch, see. The inevitable economic logic of OER.)

Clearly developing nations should be buying into experimental Western tuition models, rather than developing their own infrastructure and academic traditions. We don’t want them to become too competitive, after all. Why shouldn’t growing economies be building universities at such a rate? We’ve built a fair few during the 100-odd years we were a growing economy.

The language of the declaration (which, I should note, is non-binding on signatories) is very much “traditional OER”. The virtues of open access to knowledge, supporting the world. You know the deal. But everything in the surrounding seminar was OER plus. How can we offer accreditation, testing… to OER users. How can we make our materials more sticky, get more views, get more feedback (or “improve the experience”, as the pitch goes”).

Don’t get me wrong, to push OER to UNESCO declaration status is an incredible achievement – testament to the work of a small team based around Sir John Danielsof the Commonwealth of Learning. It remains to be seen what use is made of this opportunity – I know I’ve already benefited myself in being able to refer to a codified international policy statement around OER. But there again, I come from one of the great spiritual homes of Higher Education – I used it to prop up claims about the importance of the work I’m directly involved in.

For me the OERu undercurrent is a key indication of the way OER is moving, as my colleague Amber Thomas put it in an interview as part of the TOUCANS project led by Gabi Witthaus: “One of the things that annoyed me about the OERu was this pressure to join. That’s commissioning universities to join – saying we need specific stuff from you. That’s moving away from the talk about OERs being voluntary at the institutional level if doing that makes sense to you. If it’s about commissioning educational practices, I think it’s OK but I think you can extrapolate out of normal OER models too far. They’re sort of trading on the good will and momentum of OER under existing levels of release, and they’re saying if you don’t join in you’re a bit selfish. It’s the difference between sustainable development and commissioning.”

The OER declaration is a great opportunity to begin the growth of the next great wave of human thought. But if we just use it to take money out of developing countries in order to add another funding stream to support our institutions competing in an emerging market, it would be a profound loss.

Opinions expressed in this post are my own. Text available under a CC-BY license.