 Good day to you all. It's a pleasure to be asked to make some introductory comments to this important meeting on the Open Educational Resource University. Openness in higher education is very close to my heart. Next year it will be 40 years since I reoriented my career and committed to the Open Education movement by joining Quebec's Teller University where we opened up higher education by providing distance learning over the vast territory of Quebec. I then moved to Athabasca University where we opened up higher education by introducing Canada's first degree program without a residency requirement, meaning that if you had acquired the necessary credits by study in other institutions, Athabasca would award you a degree without requiring you to study any of its own courses. We also, and it seems a small thing now, but it was radical in the 1970s were the first university in Canada to allow students to pay for their courses by visa or other credit cards, and we are also allowed enrollment every month at the beginning of every month, which was a new concept in public higher education, although of course long established in the commercial correspondence school world. Later I served as president for the International Council of Distance Education just as we had changed the name from the International Council for Correspondence Education and the word open was introduced into the title in the following years. And then for most of the 1990s I had the immense privilege of leading the world's most iconic open institution, the UK Open University. So the brief advice I'm going to give you is based on four decades of experience of open education as an observer and as a practitioner. I start with a simple engineering analogy. If a structure is too rigid it will break under stress, but if it is too flexible it will collapse when you put stress on it. So engineers therefore seek toughness in structures, structures that will take stress and bend without breaking, and I recommend toughness as a principle for designing open education. You're trying to make education more flexible, but the system must be tough enough to withstand pressures of all kinds. My second point is from Walter Perry, the founding head of the UK Open University, and his book simply called The Open University should be required reading for anyone interested in open education even today. Lord Perry's key point was that if an institution seeks to be credible it should not innovate on too many directions at once. The UKOU had abolished admission requirements, introduced a massive multimedia distance learning system, and switched the academic year to the calendar year. Perry thought that those changes were enough for students and the public to digest for starters, and that therefore the OU should be relatively traditional in matters of curriculum and assessment, but just do it a lot better than other institutions. Indeed Perry's personal motivation in getting involved in The Open University was not so much to use technology or to serve adult students, but to use the course team approach to improve what he believed was the lamentable quality of teaching in British universities. At the same time in the early 1970s on the other side of the Atlantic, Ernie Boyer created Empire State College to open up higher education on another dimension. Even in those days, most people in the US could find somewhere to study at higher level. Admission was not a problem, but Boyer thought that the curriculum was too rigid and fossilized, so Empire State College opened up the curriculum so that students could design their own course of study. But, and this is very important, the resulting degree had the authority and credibility of the State University of New York behind it. So my central message to you today as you think of how to open up higher education further is to remember that students want credible credentials. I imagine that all of you have credible credentials and that some of you, particularly the Americans, give touching demonstrations of insecurity by proudly writing PhD after your name when you sign letters. If any of you have credentials from degree mills, I invite you to talk about the experience candidly during the day with the group. But as you try to design more flexible arrangements for examination, assessment and accreditation, remember that people want to have credible credentials. The public is conservative when it comes to education and the idea of the do-it-yourself university is fine for independent study, but not for certification that the public will take seriously. Martin Bean, the current Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University, expresses our purpose well when he says that we should use technology to lead those who are interested out of the vast cloud of informal learning and put them on the path to formal study. The UK EU is doing this brilliantly and has tracked the way that 28 million downloads from its iTunes U collection, 11 million users of its OpenLearn website and 210 million viewers who watched Open University BBC television programs last year, how all these people have led to 6,000 students enrolling in formal courses of study. Your challenge, it seems to me, is to provide other routes for the same kind of transition from informal to formal and I wish you well. My final point is to remind you that while there are new technologies there are few new principles. 150 years ago London University launched its external program for people all over the world on the radical principle that it didn't care how you had acquired the knowledge that you had provided you could pass the exam and that program which has produced five Nobel laureates over its existence demonstrates the two key principles that I recommend to you. First, give students every element of possibility in drawing on the rich environment of knowledge in their learning but second make sure that you offer them routes to credible certification so that they and society can have confidence in the robustness of their knowledge and skills. So have a good meeting, I wish you well and I thank you for inviting me to say these words to you.