Organisational Models for Distance and Open Learning PDF

ORGANISATIONAL MODELS FOR DISTANCE AND OPEN LEARNING Greville Rumble The Open University, UK Colin Latchem Open learning and educational development consultant, Australia INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of various organisational models used to provide distance and...

ORGANISATIONAL MODELS FOR DISTANCE AND OPEN LEARNING Greville Rumble The Open University, UK Colin Latchem Open learning and educational development consultant, Australia INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of various organisational models used to provide distance and open learning and why these have emerged. It concludes by looking into the future and at the emergent structures for e-distance education. ALL ON ITS OWN - THE SINGLE MODE OPTION In 1987, Perry and Rumble wrote A Short Guide to Distance Education and one of its chapters dealt with the question, ‘Which organisational model to choose’. Life was simpler then, and only three possibilities were considered: single-mode institutions, founded to provide either face-to-face education or distance education; dual-mode institutions, designed to teach both on- and off-campus; and distance education consortia of educational, publishing, broadcasting and other organisations. The authors concluded that: single-mode distance education systems ‘have a first loyalty to distance education’, battle against scepticism to achieve real standards and professionalism in distance education, are expensive to develop and therefore need to be big to achieve economies of scale; dual-mode institutions in theory offer courses of exactly the same standards on- and off-campus, but in practice have to overcome many difficulties to do this (not least the lower level of interest that academics often demonstrated towards the demands of their off-campus students, and the lower status accorded the distance operation within a traditional institution); and consortia ‘are a splendid idea which all too seldom work in practice’. The arguments for single-mode distance education institutions stem partly from the history of distance education, partly from beliefs in their inherent superiority, and partly from arguments about economies of scale. The first distance teaching organisations – the commercial correspondence schools dating from about 1840 when Pitman’s correspondence school for the teaching of shorthand was established – were single- mode institutions, created to provide training for those entering the expanding commercial and business world of 19th century Europe and America. The correspondence schools were run essentially as businesses and many pursued profit at the expense of quality. Students paid all or most of their fees up- front, tutors were paid on a piecework basis, and high dropout rates coupled with up-front payments maximised profits from what the industry called ‘drop-out money’ (Noble, 2000: 15). Of course, some commercial colleges were concerned to deliver on quality, and by the early 20th century voluntary regulation came into being with the foundation of the National University Extension Association (1915) and National Home Study Association (1926) in the US and similar bodies in Europe. However, poor quality ‘correspondence education’ gave the business a bad name and as a consequence, when the British Open University was first proposed, it met with considerable scepticism (Perry, 1976: 18-9, 32-3) as did the start-up of, for example, the Bangladesh Open University (Shamsher Ali, 1997: 153) and the Open University of Hong Kong (Boshier & Pratt, 1997). Concern for the quality of single-mode institutions leads some to suggest that standards are better maintained within a dual-mode setting, as discussed below. However, in a number of jurisdictions across the globe, as for example Perry (1976: 5) noted of the United Kingdom, and Leibbrandt (1997: 102) of the Netherlands, traditional institutions were originally extremely reluctant to teach adults (one of the main markets for distance education), or engage with distance education. Setting up new institutions thus proved to be an effective strategy for bypassing intransigent traditional institutions, although their success was always dependent upon strong political backing (Dodd & Rumble, 1984). As Hanna & Associates (2000: 134) observes, most of the open universities were established by national governments to serve goals that were more immediately political and overtly developmental than the other models of open and distance education. For example, establishing a single-mode open university: does away with the need to push change through traditional institutions which, as Lewis (1994), Bashir (1998), Lueddeke (1998), and Ellis (2000) show, requires institutions to rethink their priorities and change their cultures; means that there is no ‘wasteful duplication of effort and resources through co-operation and collaboration’, which was the concern of the British Columbia Minister of Education when setting up the Open Learning Institute of BC (Ellis, 1997: 87); means that there is no need to ‘bring together institutions differing in so many ways in their traditions, regional interests and political experiences under a national umbrella organisation which still has to be tried and tested’ – a course of action that the Minister of Higher Education and Research, in the government of North-Rhine-Westphalia that set up the FernUniversität, did not believe could work (Peters, 1997: 57). Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, writers such as Peters (1973: 310; 1983), Perry (1976: 55), Daniel and Smith (1979: 64), and Snowden and Daniel (1980), argued that the administrative structures of conventional institutions were not best suited for the development and management of distance education. The view was that distance education systems involved a number of quasi-industrial processes and that the best results would be obtained where the corporate culture encouraged adherence to production schedules, and where academics and managers understood the very different cost structures and hence budgetary needs of distance teaching methods. Strong arguments were also advanced that the needs of part-time, adult students were better served through institutions teaching wholly at a distance. The marginalisation of distance education students in dual-mode institutions lent support to this view, as evidenced by, e.g., the Indian Correspondence Directorates (Singh, 1979: 87), University of Zambia (Siaciwena, 1988: 201), and the US experience (Hall, 1991: 31). These arguments were also bolstered by the success of the UK Open University, whose much evaluated system showed that a dedicated distance education system could deliver high quality teaching materials, responsive and effective student support, and excellent administration and logistics. The case for separatism was further strengthened by arguments based upon the distinctive technology of distance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, the argument that distance education was a technologically based form of education with a distinct pedagogy was easier to make than today with the mix of on- and off-campus resource-based independent and collaborative learning. Since then the expansion of higher education, the failure of governments to provide commensurate resources, and the consequent scramble to compete for new fee-for service and national and international markets, has led ‘traditional’ institutions to adopt approaches that lessen the amount of direct contact between teacher and student and erode the difference between the ‘on-campus’ and ‘off-campus’ learning experience. Single-mode institutions have one distinct advantage, and that is their capacity to be very large indeed. All of the large-scale dedicated distance education systems, from India’s National Open School to the ‘mega-universities’– single-mode distance teaching universities with more than 100,000 enrolees (Daniel, 1996) such as China’s TV University System, the University of South Africa, Turkey’s Anadolu University, The Centre National d’Enseignement à Distance in France and the UK Open University – aim for economies of scale. However, such economies can only be achieved by restricting the scope of the curriculum. Single-mode distance education systems cannot offer the variety of courses provided by traditional institutions without: incurring heavy investment costs in courseware production and spreading their student bodies more thinly so that course populations come down; and/or adopting course design strategies that reduce the amount of in-house production of materials and require students to buy textbooks or other generic resources unsuited to remote learners. 2 Daniel (1996: 32; 1998) makes the case for the long-term future of the ‘mega-universities’. He points out that the eleven mega-universities, as a group, enrol 2.8 million students at an average institutional cost per student that is at most half that of the combined 182 higher education institutions in the UK (about $10,000 per student with 1.6 million students) or the 3,500 institutions in the US higher education system (about $12,500 with some 14 million students). However, this argument only applies to first generation (correspondence-based) and second generation (multimedia-based) distance teaching institutions which depend heavily upon materials-based learning, reduce the amount of direct contact between students and teachers, and enrol large numbers of students. Such institutions can achieve economies of scale because they replace traditional teaching methods, which are labour intensive (and have low fixed costs but high variable cost structure), with a capital intensive form of teaching based on high up-front investment in materials production but low teaching costs (giving high fixed and low variable cost structure). In the small-scale ‘cottage industry’ distance education found both in the public and private sectors, a few people can create the materials, tutor the students, and manage the administration. However, distance teaching institutions with significant curricula and large enrolments have to resort to divisionalisation and division of labour. Generally, administration is hived off to become a separate and powerful function that regulates what academics do – with the aim of achieving economies of process – while the traditional academic task of designing and teaching the course is divided between those who design and write the materials and those who tutor and assess the students. These differences are then reflected in the employment patterns with administrative staff almost invariably on permanent full-time contracts; the academics who create the material on full-time contracts (as at the UK Open University) or short-term authorial contracts (as at the National Extension College, UK); and the tutors on hourly contracts (for conducting tutorials), or piecework rates (for scripts marked). This reliance on part-time staff on the periphery is one of the key structural features of single-mode distance education, and a key factor in its cost efficiency. It may also be its Achilles’ heel because such staff may receive inadequate induction and training in the institutional values and practices, have no control over the course content and assessment criteria, and may not perceive themselves as stakeholders, all of which factors impact on the quality of their work. Until a few years ago, all single-mode distance teaching institutions were ‘correspondence’ or ‘multimedia’ based. The advent of third generation systems, based on interactive technologies offering the possibility of much enhanced teacher-student contact at a distance, has changed the cost structure of distance education, moving it from high fixed, low variable cost to a (potentially) high fixed, high variable cost. Institutions adopting the new interactive online technologies are likely to see their unit costs increase sharply once their teachers demand wages in line with the amount of time they put into supporting the students. The rise in unit costs pushes up the costs to the students, and/or of the governmental subsidies. The former will run into elasticities of demand, the latter into pressures to curb subsidies – and the only way that this will be done will be to reduce the size of the institutions, or to find some very different structural solutions, some of which are discussed below. The second problem with Daniel’s thesis is that he compares the 'mega-universities' with systems that are still highly traditional in their teaching methods. If the traditional system were to become fully re- engineered, adopting open and flexible learning methods to teach both off-campus and on-campus students, the comparison might be somewhat different. In the absence of proper research to inform decision makers, the better option is scepticism, not least because the studies that we do have suggest that the adoption of flexible learning and independent study within traditional institutions has brought unit costs down sharply. Scott (1997: 38), for example, points out that in the UK:... the massification of British higher education is demonstrated [by] the sharp reduction in unit costs. Overall productivity gains of more than 25 per cent have been achieved since 1990... This pattern, which exactly matches the expansion of student numbers, closely follows the cost curves in other countries where mass higher education systems developed earlier than in Britain. It supports the claim that mass systems have a quite different economy from that of élite systems. (our italics) One of the reasons why first and second generation single-mode distance education systems have been so successful in massifying education and reducing unit costs has been their adoption of industrialised 3 approaches to education. The thesis that distance education is an industrialised form of education was first advanced by Otto Peters who, drawing on Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, argued that it was a highly rationalised form of education involving mechanisation, standardisation, the use of capital-intensive technologies, centralised planning and control, division of labour, reduction in the autonomy of the academic producers, and an objectivisation of the production process leading to increased alienation (see, for example, Peters, 1973; 1983). The bureaucratisation of education is, however, by no means restricted to distance education: it is now endemic in traditional campus-based systems (c.f. Ritzer, 1993, 1998). Ritzer holds that in the United States education, including higher education, has been marked by ‘the culmination of a series of rationalisation processes that have been occurring throughout the twentieth century’ that are best exemplified in the practices of the McDonalds fast food chain (Ritzer, 1993: 31-2). He points to: the pressures for efficiency (larger classes, reliance on resource-based learning and particularly customised textbooks, and the use of machine-graded multiple-choice questions for assessment); calculability (use of Grade Point Averages to summarise in one figure a student's achievement, quantified examinations to filter applicants, and student rating forms to evaluate professors); predictability (imposed by the format and grading of multiple-choice questions, thus eliminating subjective judgement on the part of professors); control (training students to accept highly rationalised procedures such as objective testing, timed lesson plans, and the definition of what is to be taught in particular lessons); and, as an outcome the growth of irrationality, with many staff and students put off by ‘the huge factory-like atmosphere of these universities’ where education can be ‘a de-humanising experience’, and in which it is difficult for students to get to know other students, and virtually impossible for them to know their professors (Ritzer, 1993: 55-7, 73-7, 115-6, 141-2). Thus education – including distance education – is perceived to have succumbed to a characteristically 20th century form of administration based upon large-scale hierarchies and large-scale mass production, both of which are encompassed within the concept of Fordism (Campion, 1995). Some distance educators have been deeply critical of the implications of Fordism for distance education, namely, the increased administrative control and disempowerment and deskilling of academic staff (see, for example, Campion, 1991; Campion and Renner, 1992). Fordist structures are also seen as resulting in low levels of product variety and process innovation (Campion and Renner, 1992: 9). Given such criticism, it is not surprising that post-Fordist models involving product innovation, process variability, and labour responsibility have proved attractive to academics, both as a means of retaining autonomous control over their courses (ibid.: 11), and providing a rapid response to the demands of the consumer. Third generation distance education, giving power to the academic to control and change course content and pace, and providing a more constructivist learning environment, approaches a post- Fordist ideal by reducing ‘the need for reliance upon bureaucratic structures and practices’ (Campion, 1995: 211). These ideas will be explored further below. LOCATING DISTANCE EDUCATION WITHIN THE EXISTING INSTITUTION – THE DUAL- MODE OPTION There are basically two ways in which dual-mode institutions can teach both on-campus and off-campus students: through asynchronous ‘correspondence’ methodologies using print, correspondence, multimedia and the Internet/Web (which can encourage autonomous and constructivist learning), and by extending the traditional classroom by using face-to-face instruction via satellite TV and other connective technologies (which tends to reinforce teacher-centred approaches). If some jurisdictions have found the single-mode approach more appropriate, others – for example, Australia and Sweden (see Dodd and Rumble, 1984) – believe that the dual-mode approach provides a more satisfactory outcome. The first American university to widen access through an extension service using correspondence methods was the Illinois Wesleyan University which in 1874 introduced undergraduate and graduate courses at a distance. The real expansion, however, began in the 1890s following the leadership of the University of Chicago. Other US institutions – notably the state 4 universities – followed Chicago’s lead, and by 1919, 73 colleges and universities were offering distance education courses (Noble, 2000: 15). Similar developments occurred in Australian, Canadian and Soviet higher education. At the schools level, correspondence education was also introduced Europe, Australia, Canada and the Soviet Union to support home-based learners or learners in small disadvantaged schools, typically in remote and rural areas. The quality of these programmes was again a matter for concern. In the US, although the universities were not-for-profit organisations, they were caught in the same economic web as the commercial colleges, so that: Before long, with a degraded product and a dropout rate as bad as the commercial firms, they had come to depend on dropout money. At the end of the 1920s, … Abraham Flexner, a distinguished and influential observer of higher education, excoriated the universities for commercial preoccupations, for compromising their independence and integrity, and abandoning their unique and essential function of disinterested critical and creative enquiry (Noble, 2000: 15, reporting Flexner, 1930). This reads like a critique of the university of the late 20th century (see for example, Halsey, 1995; Smyth, 1995; Barnett and Griffin, 1997; Readings, 1997; Barnett, 2000). However, it was essentially a criticism of the values of the departments set up within the universities in the earlier decades of the 20th century to extend the teaching and learning beyond the physical boundaries of the institutions, and this view has never been totally countered. According to Noble (2000: 15), some 30 years after Flexner’s criticism, ‘the General Accounting Office was warning Vietnam veterans not to waste their federal funds on such [distance education] courses’. More recently, Perraton (2000: 199) reminds us that while distance education has had a measure of success, a harsher view is of an approach to education that is ‘regarded as a second-rate system used to offer a shadow of education while withholding its substance’. Perraton ends his survey of distance education in the developing world: Paraphrasing Gandhi, my answer to the question ‘can we make open and distance learning as good as conventional education?’ will be ‘I think it would be a good idea’. (Perraton, 2000: 200) The different approaches to the organisation of dual-mode systems have been exactly this – attempts to make distance education as good as conventional education. Distance education programmes could be set up by individual departments (as happened at the University of Waterloo in Canada) or by the institution as a whole. In the latter case, a central administrative unit might be set up to co-ordinate the distance teaching activities of a number of departments – as at the University of Zambia and the University of New England – while in other cases, a separate unit was established to both teach and administer the distance programme, as occurred at the University of Queensland, Deakin University (until 1982), and in the Indian Correspondence Directorate system. This second model, isolating the distance system from the mainstream university, tended to reinforce the second class status of distance education; in India, for example, the Correspondence Directorates were accorded low status (Singh, 1979: 87). Integration along the lines of the ‘New England model’ was seen as the solution to this problem (Smith, 1979: 200). However, this model has also been criticised because it ‘tends to transfer an internal teaching model to the external teaching situation’ (Ortmeier, 1982). Certainly, integration has not always worked well. Siaciwena (1983: 70), reporting on problems encountered at the University of Zambia where the New England structure was adopted, said that ‘the system of assigning the same lecturers to both internal and external students has, in fact, been disadvantageous to the correspondence programme’ because overworked staff tended to use the available time for internal teaching and ignore external teaching, which they found exacting and difficult. Such negative attitudes, he concluded, ‘undermine both the status of correspondence education and the very concept of parity of standards’ (ibid.: 71). The integrated model developed at New England nevertheless retained a degree of separation, inasmuch as the external students were administered through a separate unit. However, when in 1982 Deakin University adopted the integrated model it integrated the administrative services as well as the academic into the mainstream structures of the university. Although this change was criticised by those who thought ‘that off-campus students need a special unit of their own because “out of sight, out of mind” can all too easily become true’ (Jevons, 1984: 27), the fully integrated approach worked well. Nevertheless, it is worth interjecting a note of caution here: what works well in one setting may not do so elsewhere, and 5 particularly where there is no shared vision and support from senior management and distance learning is still perceived as marginal activity diverting scarce resources, embraced by a few and threatening to time- honoured roles and practices. These different approaches – once deeply contentious – are ceasing to have relevance in a number of countries. In Australia, for example, as in many other countries, higher education has been confronted with changes in student demographics, the need to provide for nontraditional students and demands for expansion while experiencing severe cuts in government funding and staffing. The universities have had to search for cheaper ways to teach these greater numbers of more diverse students and new ways of generating income, and with the mainstreaming of technology into teaching and learning. The answer has been seen to lie in flexible resource-based learning. Thus on-campus teaching has become more distant – not in geographical terms, but in transactional terms which is a function of two variables, dialogue and structure (Moore, 1983:157). Dialogue involves interaction between the learner and the teacher. First and second generation distance education systems, and de-humanised forms of ‘traditional’ higher education such as Ritzer’s McUniversity, permit little dialogue. Structure is a measure of the programme’s responsiveness to individual needs – what is sometimes referred to in the UK as ‘openness’ (Lewis, 1990). Fordist distance education systems – rationalised, predictable, and formalised – are highly structured. These features, combined as they are in first and second generation distance education systems, make for highly distant systems. The distance in these systems can be mitigated to a degree by increasing the amount of dialogue and loosening the regulatory tightness of the systems – but both of these strategies cost money. The current tendency, as Scott (1997: 38) reminds us, is to drive down costs. Australian universities have realised that they can reduce the costs of their on-campus provision by using the same methods and materials to teach their on-campus and off-campus students, replacing the labour-intensive lecture with the videotape, self- instructional text or Internet/Web material, and generally reducing the amount of contact time between students and teachers (see Taylor and White, 1991). Moreover, they can do this without cutting back on the curriculum. Rumble (1992) argued that this ability to deliver a wide curriculum cheaply gave dual- mode institutions a distinct competitive advantage over their single-mode counterparts. Renwick (1996: 59-60) suggests that traditional universities adopting dual-mode approaches may have an edge on single- mode providers because ‘they already offer a wide range of degrees and qualifications that rival open universities, could diversify at less cost, would not necessarily have to rely on large numbers of enrolments to be viable as providers of distance programmes, and could offer a wider range of options to potential students’. In the process, the distinction between distance and traditional education, on-campus and off-campus, is blurred and replaced by flexible learning. COLLABORATION – THE NETWORKED ALTERNATIVE As mentioned earlier, Perry and Rumble (1987) suggested that consortia ‘are a splendid idea which all too seldom work in practice’. This judgement derived from such ill-fated consortia as the University of Mid- America and the Universita’ a Distanza in Italy, both of which demonstrated the inherent instability of collaborative ventures in distance and open education. On the other hand, the National Technological University (NTU) in the US provided an early example of the potential benefits of collaboration, even though it ultimately failed to achieve the graduate enrolments originally envisaged (Cunningham et al, 2000). NTU was established as an independent university with its own accreditation and degree programme authorisations and functions as an administrative and co-ordinating unit for the engineering departments of over thirty participating universities that provide graduate and non-credit distance education programmes for such major corporations as IBM and Motorola by means of live, satellite video courses uplinked from the originating universities. Today, the imperatives of global competition, the opportunities provided by telecommunications, and the need to leverage complementary strengths for greater market share and geographic coverage are leading to an increasing number of inter-institutional, inter-sector and international consortia such as: The Scottish Knowledge global higher education consortium, comprising Scotland’s fourteen universities, Australia’s Edith Cowan University and other providers, plus News International plc, 6  which is targeting the corporate sector in the US, Middle East and Asia with its postgraduate distance education courses. Twelve UK, Dutch, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and American universities which have formed a partnership with Hong Kong-based online education company NextEd and other corporate providers to deliver programmmes into Asia, Europe and America. The University of Melbourne-led consortium, Universitas 21, which aims to establish itself as a major force in international distance education by partnering with elite universities across the globe and capitalising on their brandnames. Illinois-based Internet university UNEXT.com and its newly-created Cardean University which is partnering with leading academic institutions such as Columbia Business School, Stanford University, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and other high-profile universities to sell business-oriented online MBA courses to multinational and overseas corporations. The National Universities Degree Consortium (NUDC) which enables 11 accredited US universities to collaborate in offering well over 1,000 certificate, baccalaureate degree and graduate degree programmes, and facilitates substantial cooperation in marketing and student support. The American Education Consortium (ADEC) with sixty institutional and affiliate members sharing in providing specialised courses and programmes, internationalising their offerings and purchasing expensive satellite time (Poley, in press). What we are witnessing here is the internationalisation, competitiveness and commercialisation of distance education leading to plethora of mating calls and courtship rituals between public and private organisations as they reposition themselves in a volatile market and adapt to the realities of what Alvin Tofler (1980) calls the Third Wave economy. Tofler (ibid: 263) characterises the Second Wave organisations as: large; hierarchical; permanent; top-down; mechanistic; and designed to deliver repetitive products and decisions in a relatively stable environment. In the Third Wave economy, dominated by service organisations and transformed by new technology, he suggests that there is need for organisational systems rather than physical entities and that these new systems cut across traditional managements, departments and functions and operate through a variety of networks, partnerships and alliances which are interactive, interorganisational and international. These systems are ‘messily open’ rather than ‘neatly closed’, comprising temporary configurations of organisations that share common interests that members join and leave as opportunities rise and wane. Such network configurations are not restricted to postsecondary education. India’s National Open School (NOS), a system developed to serve educational dropouts and provide alternative foundation, secondary and vocational education, operates through its headquarters in New Delhi, regional centres in Calcutta for the eastern region, Pune for the western region, Hyderabad for the southern region, Agra for the northern region, and Guwahati for the north-eastern region, and 1,000 centres, comprising a mix of: Institutions committed to the poor and educational dropouts. Commercial or non-government agency centres. Institutions lacking the minimum necessary infrastructure and qualified teachers Institutions with good buildings, laboratories, libraries, workshops and qualified teachers to teach the relevant subjects. Private schools running a parallel fee-for-service ‘open school stream’ for regular day scholars who find difficulty with science and mathematics. Only through such networking and partnership can the NOS reach out to serve the huge numbers of pupils who drop out from India’s 112,000 secondary schools. In 1998-1999, the NOU had more than 500,000 students on its rolls and an annual enrolment of over 130,000, of which 35% was female. 7 Consortia, partnerships, strategic alliances etc. are formed by educational, training and corporate providers for a variety of reasons, but principally to: share costs or spread these over a larger number of students; share courses, resources and academic and commercial experience and expertise; share risk; form alliances with potential competitors and interlopers; attract funding opportunities (particularly in the European Union which makes inter-institutional collaboration a condition of funding); form public-private partnerships to provide online courses, as with Colorado’s community college system contracting with e-College (Bates, 2000: 173) and the global consortium using online education company NextEd’s technology to deliver programmes into international markets. achieve a competitive edge and greater market share; be fast to market or cope with major market demand by joint course development and optimising complementary strengths, as shown by Open Learning Australia in its earlier years of operation (Latchem & Pritchard, 1994), and the joint Master’s in Social Work developed by Cleveland State University and Akron University (Bates, 2000: 166). promote and operate credit transfer/recognition of prior learning systems, as with the three research universities and Open Learning Agency in British Columbia (Bates, 2000: 168), and the Australian universities involved with Open Learning Australia; jointly market and broker programmes, as with Open Learning Australia, California Virtual University (Bates, 2000: 171-172) and Western Governors’ University (Cunningham et al. 2000: 46); capitalise on partners’ knowledge of, and reputations in, local markets; accommodate other countries’ governmental requirements for local institution involvement as a condition of entry; ensure adequate provision of local services such as marketing, counselling, admissions, registration, and examination invigilation; de-bundle learning materials, tutorial support and course assessment to provide expanded market opportunities, as with Athabasca University’s partnership with TAC, a private Japanese company whose adult learners sit the American CPA exams and use AU’s courseware and summative assessment while TAC provides on-site learner support and tutoring (Abrioux: in press); achieve a franchise arrangement, as between University of British Columbia and Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico with its 26 campuses in Mexico and Latin America (Bates, 2000:164). Establishing consortia, partnerships and other such inter-dependent systems can be difficult and time- consuming for institutions, sub-groups and individuals accustomed to more autonomous ways of working and many consortia and alliances fail or fall short of achieving their potential. Neil (1981: 172-6) and Moran and Mugridge (1993: xiii, 5, 9-10; 152-7) identify a range of factors which may inhibit collaboration. These include: the existence of cultural differences between institutions; traditions of institutional autonomy; the ‘not invented here’ syndrome; poorly-constituted collaborative objectives; failure to articulate mutual benefits; lack of clarity in specifying the terms of an agreement; incompatible organisational structures and administrative procedures; inadequate funds to implement agreements; poor interpersonal relations; weak leadership; lack of real commitment on the part of one or more of the parties; and lack of trust. Bates (2000: 176-179) suggests that there are many potential advantages in collaboration and partnerships but that these depend upon: defining the strategic benefits; picking the right and best partners; gaining general support for the partnerships throughout the organisations; putting in the time and up-front investment; planning for both the short term and the long term; determining the relative roles of the institutions and their sub-organisations; sound project management with clearly defined tasks and agreed- on budgets; and formal agreements signed off by the CEOs. For institutions that can face up to these challenges, there may well be exciting opportunities for collaboration and paradigmatic change within the context of e-distance education. 8 CORPORATE UNIVERSITIES AND CORPORATE TRAINING Some US corporations, for example, Aetna, American Express, Apple, Arthur Anderson, Cisco Systems, Dow Chemicals, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, McDonald’s, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Sears, Sun Microsystems Inc, and Xerox, have centralised their training under one umbrella and renamed these departments or divisions ‘corporate universities’. Despite their adopting such a nomenclature, few of these institutions have ever offered accredited degree programmes and of those that have, several have either withdrawn from offering these or have merged them with the academic programmes of more conventional universities. Many academics scoff at the idea of courses provided by the Disney University or McDonald’s Hamburger University and question whether these institutions meet the standards required to call themselves universities. However, the message from these corporate providers is loud and clear. Learning is important, needs to be given greater prestige and demands major investment. The corporate sector is in the market for programmes that are relevant to business efficiency and employee performance, that acculturate the employees into the changing environment, that develop the necessary skills and knowledge about the companies’ products and services, that help to recruit, retain and advance the best employees, and that are customised, flexible and appropriate to today’s fast-moving, knowledge-based economy. Meister (1998: ix) observes that the corporate university is established ‘with the goal of achieving tighter control and ownership over the learning process by more clearly linking learning programs to real business goals and strategies’. Corporate University Xchange (2000:S2) states that the corporations have the money, subject matter expertise and speed-to-market mindset to create a business in education. And an increasing number of these corporate providers are ceasing to be cost centres and operating as profit centres, generating revenue by providing training for customers, suppliers and distributors. The corporate university is largely an American phenomenon although the UK-based Unipart Group of Companies has established a ‘Virtual U’ to deliver electronic courses to its 10,000 employees which is part of the company’s ‘Unipart U’ corporate university. Some corporations such as IBM, Cisco Systems, Dell and Motorola, extend their training to employees throughout the world through networked/satellite learning systems. Motorola University, for example, delivers Web-based training to 142,000 employees in more than 70 countries and in 24 different languages. Cunningham et al (2000: 15) conclude that while it is easy to dismiss the more extreme examples of corporate universities, ‘organisations which seriously invest in their corporate programs have much to offer the traditional education sector in the professionalism with which they approach their teaching and learning programs, and the funds expended on these activities’. Worldwide, major investments are being made in the corporate education market and flexible learning is increasingly seen as an integral part of HRD or training policy. Another emerging model is the sector-based online university such as the US Real Estate University (Cunningham et al, 2000: 40). Many smaller companies also provide Internet, Intranet or other forms of flexible training, targeting priority areas of need and relating learning to the job. However, as Rowntree (1992: 23) notes, most in- company programmes may be ‘flexible’ in terms of time, place and pace, but are only ‘open’ to those who are eligible for such training within their organisations, and typically offer little choice in objectives, content, teaching and learning methods and assessment. Some private sector organisations offering their own courses seek credit from public sector institutions. For example, Microsoft and Novell have contracted with Tucson’s Pima County Community College, an arrangement which also enables the students to have their fees paid for by their employers or receive a tax break on their fees (Bates, 1995: 173). The alternative model is for corporations to contract with universities and colleges to provide courses matched to their needs. Thompson (1998), identifies three reasons for this seachange: a growing tendency of corporations to focus their attention and resources upon their core business and to ‘outsource’ corporate education; the demands of the accreditation process; and 9  a growing willingness of colleges and universities to assist corporations in meeting their educational needs. Thus, UK management consultants Ernst and Young partner with Henley Management College to offer their staff worldwide MBA and PhD programmes in business and leadership, an arrangement which both parties regard as mutually beneficial. Ernst and Young see it as a means of accumulating intellectual capital, retaining staff, and maintaining competitive advantage. Henley Management College staff look upon it as an opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of the issues currently confronting the corporate sector (White, 1999). And at the national level, through its Green Paper, ‘The Learning Age’, the UK Government has established a major public-private partnership, the University for Industry (UfI). UfI has not been conceived as a single, self-contained institution such as the UK Open University, but again as a system, drawing upon a wide range of educational and training providers to offer courses and programmes which stimulate and meet demand for lifelong learning among businesses and individuals through online delivery into homes, workplaces and 400 ‘learndirect centres’. Such developments are also being transacted through separate for-profit entities attached to existing universities and colleges, an arrangement which again may give rise to conflict within the academic culture of the more traditional institutions. THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK – FOR-PROFIT INSTITUTIONS For-profit distance teaching institutions are again largely an American phenomenon although this model seems likely to be replicated elsewhere across the globe. The prime US examples are University of Phoenix (UoP), DeVry Inc, Strayer Education Inc and Sylvan Learning Systems Inc, all of which are dual-mode. UoP now has the largest enrolment of any US private nonprofit or for-profit university (Sperling and Tucker, 1997: 36). Its undergraduate and graduate enrolments in the US, Puerto Rico and elsewhere have reached 65,000. UoP operates primarily through a network of learning centres but about 10% of its students are enrolled in UoP Online Division programmes which generate US$12.8 million a quarter. DeVry, through its undergraduate DeVry Institutes and postgraduate division, Keller Graduate School of Management, also remains committed to teaching through local outlets but is positioning itself in the asynchronous online market. Strayer has an aggressive strategy of programme and campus replication across the US, but in 1999 opened an online division called Strayer Online. Sylvan Learning Systems Inc provides personalised instructional services to students of all ages and skill levels through a network of over 640 Sylvan Learning Centers and adult professional education and training through its Caliber Learning Network. For-profit institutions arise through a combination of: dissatisfaction with the responsiveness of traditional institutions to the professional and vocational needs of working adults who require convenience, year-round compressed courses, and individually- tailored and individually-satisfying flexible learning; recognition of the enormous potential of the education market (US$772 billion per year in the US or 10% of the country’s gross domestic product and the fifth largest service sector export in Australia); e-commerce entrepreneurism. The major US for-profits are listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Cunningham et al (2000: 16) observe that such institutions have as their primary goal profit from selling education and training as a service, are run strictly according to strict business principles, offering niche client groups a limited range of educational ‘products’, and in Meister’s (1998: 231) terms, focus on ‘convenience, self-service and uniformity’. Hanna & Associates (2000:139-140) suggests that these for-profit universities are important in the mix of higher education models because they: have access to private capital and funds needed for start-up and expansion; can purchase, lease, or modify facilities quickly; 10  focus upon a specific niche of the adult marketplace for education, namely, those knowledge workers who require high levels of education and whose employees can afford to pay the tuition for them in many cases; stay close to their customer base, thereby producing a high-quality educational product; are managed as well as governed; are focused upon making necessary changes as needed rather than as mandated; operate year-round; are experiencing significant enrolment growth overall. Such institutions are borderless and have the potential to present formidable competition to the traditional universities. Cunningham et al (op cit: xvii-xviii) suggest that these new providers are not bound by the norms and ideals of traditional higher education such as collegial governance, linked research and teaching, or academic autonomy and control, and (op cit: 4) adopt a strategic and systematic approach to the professionalism of education and training that does more than pay lip service to the rhetoric of being a ‘learning organisation’. White (1999) suggests that these institutions ‘have the advantage of being able to hire and fire managers and teachers and offer them a share of the profits’, and notes that Wall Street analysts eye the multi-billion education sector as ripe for investment because ‘it is seen as a low-tech industry managed by amateurs’. However, the for-profits have fared poorly on the NYSE over the past few years and there are still serious questions about their quality, governance and treatment of staff (for example, see Cunningham et al., 2000). IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE? VIRTUAL INSTITUTIONS The ‘virtual institution’ has become the metaphor for online enrolment, distribution, tuition and administration. Cunningham et al (2000: 16) suggest that the virtual institution can be conceived of in two ways: as an institution which offers all of the conventional university services via information and communications technology (for example, NYUOnline or Jones International University, America’s only accredited private online university); or as a ‘hollow’ organisation which unbundles services conventionally provided in-house and subcontracts these to other organisations (for example, Western Governors University, brokering competency-based programmes). In a third model, the institution acts on behalf of a number of different providers (for example, the Californian Virtual University providing online catalogues and courses on behalf of its partners, and Britain’s emerging e-university which is envisaged as doing something similar for the entire UK higher education sector, while retaining the right to refuse to accept courses on quality grounds (see O’Shea, 2000: 10). Web searches will yield a number of ‘virtual’ or online institutions – for example, in the US, Athena University, Virtual Online University and Magellan; in Malaysia, Universiti Telekom (Multimedia University) and Universiti Tun Abdul Rasak; and in Korea, the Korea Virtual University Consortium. However, Cunningham et al (op cit.) found that despite all the rhetoric and hype, these institutions remain embryonic. Farrell (1999: 2-3) observed that the term ‘virtual’ is used broadly and indiscriminately, that there few examples of virtual institutions or campuses in the purest sense, that development is still experimental, unfocused, not necessarily matched to clientele learning needs, and that those using the Web, do so as a publishing medium rather than an interactive tool. However, he records a great deal of interest and activity in this area from four different sources: institutions that have historically been involved with single-mode or dual-mode provision; from within traditional institutions ranging from schools to universities, on a programme-specific basis and in order to add quality, increase productivity, reduce costs, increase revenue and attract new students; the corporate sector developing internal programmes based upon information and communications technology and marketing these under a virtual label; 11  individuals, who for reasons ranging from altruism to profit, have created online learning opportunities for anyone interested. Farrell (op cit: 8) suggests that there is also evidence through SchoolNet initiatives in Canada, South Africa and India and similar developments elsewhere across the globe that virtual education models will start to pervade primary and secondary education. However, here the technology may be used either to support the teacher, enable the teacher to teach across distances or networked schools, or deliver information, knowledge and learning opportunities directly to the learner. GAZING INTO THE CRYSTAL BALL The development of third generation distance education opens up new prospects for structuring distance education systems. The models described above are fluid, transmuting and converging. The question is, can new structures be established that will enable distance educators to make use of the new technologies to provide cheap, mass educational access or, on the other hand, profitable global enterprises? Like it or not, higher education has now been thoroughly ‘corporatised’ and is perceived as a mass business, with private investment from firms such as Merrill Lynch, Banc One, and a range of venture capitalists only likely to increase. Oblinger (2001) observes that e-learning has been described as the next Internet ‘Killer App’ (c.f. Peterson et al, 1999) and that net-generation companies, the new providers, global knowledge portals such as 1 to 80.com in Singapore, and global consortia such as Cenquest (Giegerich, 2000) are transforming open and distance learning. She foresees even more change in the wake of mergers and acquisitions among existing e-distance businesses, and by media, publishing and communications businesses currently outside distance education. Such consolidation will, she believes, ‘provide scale, and in education, scale matters … [enabling] leverage for research and development, curriculum development, sales efforts and overall operating expenses’ (Oblinger, 2001: X). The costs of online education are currently being investigated but it is already clear that the costs of putting suitable materials on-line may be very high, while the costs of supporting students online look as if they are going to cause the unit costs of distance education to increase substantially (Rumble, 1999). Against this, e-commerce practices such as online registration are likely to bring some costs down. Nevertheless, the extensive adoption of online learning by single-mode distance education systems is likely to push their unit (and total) costs up, thus undermining their efficiency relative to traditional educational systems. Dual-mode systems may, however, be able to use online teaching as a substitute for face-to-face contact without affecting their overall cost structures too much – particularly if they also eschew the development of materials in favour of using pre-existing textbooks, and if they keep course numbers down. The initial thrust within e-distance education may well be, therefore, to find less expensive ways of undertaking routine operating transactions, while the greatest overall success may come within dual-mode systems. If the latter is true, then single-mode institutions are going to face greatly increased and very cost effective competition. Technology and e-business approaches make it possible for integrated processes of open and distance education to be disaggregated into their constituent parts: curriculum development; content development; learner acquisition and support; learning delivery; assessment and advising; articulation; and credentialing. These processes can then be managed by different organisations. Conversely, e-distance education may enable academics to regain control over the teaching-learning process, provided that: course modules are small enough and so designed as to enable a single academic to develop them; the number of students following the course is no greater than one person can handle in terms of marking assignments, responding to students, etc.; and control over administrative processes is devolved to the academic, who reports the outcomes only to a central record-keeping administration (Rumble, 1998: 136). The emergence of such ‘reaggregated’ jobs could parallel the 12th century emergence of the intellectual – one ‘whose profession it was to think and share their thoughts’ (Le Goff, 1993: 1) and who taught in schools that ‘were workshops out of which ideas, like mechandise, were exported’ (ibid.: 62). During the 12 12th century these intellectual artisans began to organise themselves within corporations or colleges of masters and students, out of which emerged the universities in the 13th century. The salaries of these masters derived from two sources – the students, and stipends or scholarships from private benefactors, and civil and public organisations. Masters who could live off what their students paid them were free of temporal and ecclesiastical powers and private patrons. It is perhaps too fanciful to predict that the Internet/Web will enable the 21 st century ‘master’ to sell his or her wares in the e-marketplace, and be paid directly by the learner. With the possible exception of a few international ‘gurus’, most teachers will need to operate within a framework which advertises their availability, assures potential students of their worth, and provides acceptable and transferable certification and accreditation. Once accepted into such a framework, it will be in the interests of these teachers to ensure that the organisation as a whole succeeds. Systems ‘in which everyone takes responsibility for the success of the whole’ is the key characteristic of what Hechscher (1994: 24) refers to as post-bureaucratic organisations. Applied to third generation e-distance education, this would mark a significant departure from the way in which first and second generation systems have been organised. The function of the institution would be to provide learner acquisition, quality assurance, articulation, and credentialing. The academics’ function would be to develop and deliver the courses and support and assess the learners via the Internet/Web. Global alliances, and globalised credit accumulation and transfer schemes between organisations of a similar standard, would allow for the emergence of multi-cultural partnerships of globally distributed teachers serving students across a borderless world. Such organisations might be so re-engineered as to allow academics to be paid directly by their students, the university to be reimbursed for the registration and recognition of their learning (and possibly levy a charge on the academics for their continued recognition as accredited teachers) and grant academics the freedom to regulate their student load to suite their needs and combine this work in other fields or for other organisations. Having opened up these possibilities, Rumble (1998: 142) asks whether such models could happen. There is no clear answer to this – but what is clear is that the field of distance education is changing and will change even more as new players enter the field, exploiting the possibilities of e-commerce, and that time-honoured structures and systems may wither or be swept away. CONCLUSIONS All of the organisational structures described above have worked in particular cases; and all have been shown to have advantages and disadvantages. There can be no absolute policy guidelines, although it seems inevitable that most traditional institutions will become involved with mixed-mode provision, and that there will be an increase in alliances and partnerships, some of which will transient. The international agency offering community-based open learning programmes in HIV/AIDS awareness in developing countries will almost inevitably need to work in collaboration with various health, education, government, community and telecommunications organisations. The national government setting up an open schooling system will need to involve a range of partners, including the existing schools, to maximise scarce resources. College and university educators and trainers, telecommunications and media providers, publishers and the corporate sector will endeavour to capture each other’s primary strengths. However, each of these structures has economic consequences which will in turn determine what works best in given circumstances. It seems likely that the development of e-distance education will significantly affect the way in which distance education is structured. The one certainty facing policy makers is that the environment is changing, and that this will fundamentally impact on the structures through which distance education is delivered. The knowledge economy demands lifelong learning and the private sector is assuming a growing responsibility for this. There are calls for significant educational reform and greater accountability and an increasing number of institutions are now reinventing or realigning themselves to expand and enhance their education and training operations. Some will opt to maintain a local or national focus; others will aim to become global and multinational; most, if not all, will seek commercial benefit from their operations. The internationalisation of education is really only at what Davis and Botkin (1995) define as stage one: export, or stage two: setting up partnerships and in-country development and delivery. The 13 greater vision will be realised when institutions achieve stage three – truly two-way exchange and development of programmes and services through borderless education. All organisations have lifecycles which proceed from startup and experimentation to maturity and aging, during which process they become increasingly rigid and entrenched in their organisation and operations. 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