 It's just taking part of the Eden distance learning week, and the topic for this afternoon's webinar is the future of distance education universities. I think it would be perhaps an understatement on my part if I said that we had politically stable times at the moment. We're far from that. There's lots of change taking place, and I think we will inevitably see this reflected in the university level, political change, social change, and also technological change. I think we're very lucky today to have with us five experts who are going to share their views on this topic, and hopefully we'll have some time for debate as we go along. So we've got Antonio Teixeira from the Universidade Aberte in Portugal, who's an Eden senior fellow. Hello Antonio. Hello Tim. Thank you. We've got Tony Raites, who really needs a little introduction, although he has done that himself in the chat, so I won't repeat myself there. Hello Tony. Hi everybody. We've got Jose Mota, who's from the Universidade Aberte in Portugal. Hello Jose. Hi everyone. Nice to be here today with you. Nice to have you here. We have Alan Tate from the Open University in the UK, who's also an Eden senior fellow. Hello Alan. Wonderful. And we will shortly have Liz Ma, who's also at the OUUK, but will be participating in her capacity as the EADTU president this afternoon. So here we are. I mean, I was conscious that perhaps you needed a couple of minutes to get in and get settled before we actually started. But I think we're all really itching to get going and perhaps give us more time for questions and interactions. So what I'm going to do now is to change over to the presentation view and then hand over to my colleague Antonio and let him start our first presentation. Thank you Antonio. Well thank you Tim for the nice presentation. Well, welcome everyone. And also I would like to start by thanking the kind invitation to take part in this webinar, especially because it's not only a European webinar in this sense. It's also promoted by Eden, but it's really a global initiative as you know. Well, the topic that I was invited to speak about is directly connected with the situation of the distance teaching universities and in particular in my case of the European universities in Europe. And that is the topic that I would like to submit for our common reflection, our shared reflection. The title that I've chosen, Vive la différence, it's a way of already stating my position regarding this topic. So the subtitle reclaiming the uniqueness of open universities in Europe gives also an idea of what I will be sharing with you. As you know, we are in the midst of a complex process with a very powerful one of digital representation of the higher education system, not only across Europe, but across the world, across the globe. And as it is presented here in this slide, which actually I brought, actually I used from work at GIST in the UK, gives a clear representation of how this process is complex and involves all different aspects of our life. So of course, it's not the digital transformation at universities, at institutions as such, higher education institutions is not kind of a standalone process. It's part of a global and complex process of digital transformation of the society, of our own way of living. And of course, the way that not only we communicate, but also we share our thoughts, our expectations, we share our products, our productions, everything. And in this sense, the higher education system, to use an expression that has been coined by Alan Tate, who is here with us today, this landscape of higher education is rapidly changing as the system goes digital. And the question is how are, or are of course in this sense the open universities or the distance teaching universities keeping pace with this transformation, which is digital transformation. As we can see now, there are a number of important things that are changing, that are being transformed. One of them is the multiple variations and modalities that digital education is now knowing both as a single or a blended approach. We're talking about distance education, but also open education, network education, technology enhanced learning, and a number of other forms in which this digital transformation of education is assuming. On the other hand, the digital transformation of higher education institutions is also having a big impact on the organizational model and the organizational culture of the institutions as well. We're talking now of desegregative universities, network universities, public private partnerships, peer higher education institutions, and some other forms as well. Also an important aspect has to do with the change of the oppression models of the institutions. We're now very much promoting international child degrees, but also patchwork degrees, very much, of course, based on student mobility, on the promotion of student mobility. Also on this integration between informal, non-formal, and informal learning. Also talking about non-of degrees and this sort of new kinds of certification. And apart from this, we've also seen the first results of this movement, this process that started in the last decade of recentering on students the educational process, the learning process, and also widening their participation in the process as well. So we're now very much thinking about learning co-design, peer learning, peer assessment, personalization, and so many other things of this sort. On the other hand, we're also seeing, and possibly this is one of the biggest changes, as we speak, of the evolution and transformation of the assessment and certification models. We're talking not only about the mainstreaming of peer assessment, but also of the introduction of new forms of assessment as real, authentic context-based assessment, new other innovative forms of assessing and certifying conferences as, for instance, digital certificates, open badges, and so on. And so forth. On the other hand, learning flexibility is now paramount, not just for distance education, but in general. And we're witnessing the focus, the increasing focus on a synchronous communication in the part of, of course, online learning, but also the importance of learning for future skills, life skills, and all of this. Finally, there's also a transformation of the teaching and learning ecosystem as such. And we, of course, now bear witness to the impact of the use of the wide use of open and personal practices, PLEs, learning analytics, official intelligence, diverse teaching models, and so forth. In this sense, in this scenario, how are open universities or distance teaching universities in general coping with the transformation? How are they reacting? And how are they also taking part in this transformation? And I have here three main issues that I'd like to address. What still, which is the basic, the basic problem, what still differentiates open universities from other universities delivering distance education is the fact that they have a dedicated infrastructure, the fact that they are scalable or more scalable than the others. It's the pedagogical approach or model that they're using which is different. Is the flexibility that is increasing their case? Is the staff training expertise and experience? What is, what is the core of this difference? On the other hand, how are open universities or distance teaching universities managing to widen the participation and not only the access for learners by increasing personalization, by implementing assessment, by introducing learning co-design, what are the forms? Finally, how are open universities or distance teaching universities bridging formal, non-formal and informal learning? Is by the promotion of the recognition of competencies and skills, by non-formal certificates and badges, credit transfer, micro-prudentialing, e-portfolios, well, all of these forms actually, all of these formats of change in a sense are already being promoted by professional universities as well. So what differentiates the, or the open universities as such? We're seeing here on the slide on the picture on the left that actually refers to the 42, which is an experience that is now having quite an impact in which a university can be formed out of a community that simply shares their knowledge. So the community itself can organize in new models of higher education that can be, in a way, also in competition to traditional universities and also to open or distance teaching universities. A possible vision for the future of distance teaching universities can be this one that I'm suggesting here, and that have already addressed in a previous discussion that we had in a previous webinar organized by, even on this similar topic. On one hand, it is clear from me that open universities are not obsolete as such, as dedicated institutions and have still an important role to play, even if different from the past and with major variations according to which context, of course, political, cultural, technological, social, and so forth. Cultural and so forth. Open universities are specially designed institutions and this is a definition that I'm going to share with you with this proposal. Open universities are specially designed institutions which in this case they differentiate from others which use an open network organizational framework by such they dedicate or commit themselves to just research and innovation in technology enhanced learning but also dedicate to preserve and share their distance education legacy but in order to widen access and participation in higher education for all and quality higher education for all independently of context and condition in various. But mainly their prior mission is to assure that every social group at risk can have access to quality higher education opportunities and it is something that still makes a difference when we compare it with conventional universities even the ones that are much developed in terms of online delivery, online learning delivery. Because of their model and scale of design open universities are prepared, or distance universities universities are prepared to swiftly and organically adjust to continuously changing societal challenges and needs and in that sense we can already see an interesting example in the recent development in Portugal of how this can actually happen. How can this be organized? In Portugal there has been just last December, last September the publication of a new legal framework dedicated to distance education, higher distance education and it sets a holistic approach. So the Portuguese government has set a systemic goal in which 50,000 students can go in for more programs in distance education for more programs by the end of the decade and in order to do that, so to multiply by five the student population in distance involving distance education for more programs it has reorganized the system generating interdependencies based on the following conditions. First of all that the National Open University should not play the role of the National Content Center for distance education, assuring at the same time that it has conducts the advanced research and innovation so that it has that install capability in this field but it also shares that expertise, that knowledge, that capability with the other universities in the system so it's a kind of dedicated university that concentrates the national effort on this specific form of education. On the other hand it ensures the support to all other higher education institutions that of course also provide online learning by giving them access to infrastructure if needed, learning design, teaching training expertise, teaching training and so forth. All the others of course are in order to receive public funding are in a way encouraged to establish consortia or work in partnership with the National Open University but at the same time the National Open University has also to deliver most of its educational provision in consortia with the others so there is a kind of interconnection that is established by law in this sense. Of course when talking about legal frameworks there are opportunities but also risks If on one hand we can say that this as an example that is one of the first in Europe as you know there are only a few countries in the world that have dedicated legal frameworks for this education there is the note of the case of Brazil, Italy, Poland, not much so Putskow is one of the first cases in Europe even if the large lesson can be advanced in some way and follows the expertise and the best practices of course when we legislate such a dynamic and innovative field as this in education or non-learning we of course take the risk of imposing standards and criteria as it is said in the slide which are not flexible enough to accommodate technological change and technological innovation thus hindering the institutional capability to experiment which is a critical feature for this form of education. On the other hand there is this legal framework sets forward an important development which is the role that is given to the National Qualifications Agency this is something that goes in line aligns with the movement in Europe and this is a very important aspect but this also implies that this transmission on the part of the qualifications agencies is supported by not only the work of taking into consideration the specific features the unique features of this education and non-learning in general or in learning but also that are prepared to take that into consideration but also that their teams evaluating teams are made up of experts in this institution as well so that the evolution families also have experts so in the end we have just a very short amount of time to speak and in the webinar so just to make it as short as possible my idea the proposal that I submit to you is that of course open universities and business teaching universities have a role of course we're talking about the crisis in the western world in a sense but not all open universities are in crisis it depends on the local context on the regional context and the ones that are in crisis actually are the ones that are not connected with social needs in their specific culture specific context I submit to you the idea that of course open universities have a future have still an important role to play but they have to in a way reclaim their original mission statement which is of course to widen not only the outreach but the participation of learners in the learning process and on the other hand to fulfill its social mission which is crucial which is paramount and in some ways in the recent years open universities have in a way failed a little bit to follow that mission statement well thank you very much and I give the floor back to Timothy thank you very much Antonio for a very interesting conversation presentation sorry while I load the next presentation perhaps you could have a look at a couple of questions you got there in the chat one from Alan and one from Tony and give us some answers on those please so regarding Alan do treat the new law in poverty well does the new law in Portugal empower or threaten UAB okay you can say that both in a sense so it depends on the ability on the capacity of the university to actually tackle the challenges so on one hand it gives the university opportunity to play a crucial role in the system but on the other hand university needs the support of the government in order to have enough capability to fulfill that role so in a sense the law doesn't necessarily it sets a new horizon it gives you it opens a lot of opportunities but on the other hand could be quite harmful if the university is not able to fulfill those expectations so in this sense of course it can be seen either way never just to be with a short answer it's also important to state that this new legislation also opens the field clearly to the to the conventional universities so in both ways it's opening up the field for both UAB and also for conventional universities in order to explore these emerging territory regarding Tony Bates question how do the university feel about UAB role first of all the first reaction was not good they were afraid that UAB would be playing a dominant role in a sense that would be imposing to them standards and models and also in a way their own infrastructure but this has already been settled so there was a big public discussion a very interesting discussion on the law and the law was corrected in some points and so now they are starting to see these as also a very important instrument very important tool for their own development in the field so for their own capacity to develop their expertise in their provision so I think that of course it will now require some time in order for both UAB and the traditional universities to understand their common opportunities and to establish those consortia that will lead to the results that are expected in a way that are forcing by the new legal framework okay thank you very much Antonio very good and very concise answers so I think without more to do we'll go with Tony now if you'd like to give us your presentation please Tony but I don't think we can hear you you have to unmute your mic yeah is that better it's perfect yeah do you want to go back and start on the first slide sure I want to make it very clear from the beginning that I'm talking about the situation in North America here and I realise that it's very different in Europe and I think there are some lessons we can learn from the North American situation that will apply in Europe the second thing is I'm focusing more on the online and distance part rather than the open part here I could have spent the whole time talking about the implications of open in North America which are in ways very different from the view of open in Europe but I'm going to focus here just on the online and distance learning part and in North America we've seen very strong growth in distance education right across the systems there are annual surveys of online learning and US Babson and the Department of Education now have been doing surveys since 2002 of distance education and in Canada the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association have been doing annual surveys since 2017 and what we see is strong growth in both countries despite the fact that regular enrollments are actually flat in Canada or declining in the US and that's a demographic reason that regular enrollments are flat or declining some would say that distance education is beginning to eat the on campus enrollments because obviously if the overall enrollments are flat and distance education is growing then more students are opting for distance education than on campus teaching or more and more doing that in Canada online distance education is now offered by nearly all post secondary institutions 83% in fact offer distance education courses for credit that's parts of degrees this is not non-credit we're talking about here and almost all distance education in Canada is fully online it has been for about 15 years and 18% of all post secondary students take at least one online course during their studies on the undergraduate level and that amounts to about 8% of all course registrations it's equivalent of about 4 new universities and 12 new colleges if all those people are campuses so although it's relatively small it's still significant and what's very interesting is that over 2 thirds of all the universities and colleges in Canada believe that online is very or extremely important for the future of their institution so it's moving from the margins into a central part of university and college strategies now in Canada it's slightly different in the US I'm not coming to that in a moment in Canada the distance teaching universities are struggling the enrollments are flat or declining at the Atabasca University Teluc which is the French open university French language open university Cijepa Distance for the colleges and Thompson Rivers Open Learning Thompson Rivers Open Learning in British Columbia the only exception here is Royal Roads University which is primarily postgraduate and their enrollments are increasing but all these institutions with perhaps the exception of Royal Roads are facing major challenges in holding on to their students for instance LaValle University in Quebec City which is one of the oldest universities in Canada is campus based but it has now more online enrollments than Atabasca University which is amazing when you think that French is still a minority language in Canada so the distance teaching universities are really struggling to maintain their enrollments while the regular universities are increasing them in the US online distance learning they have a greater proportion of students doing online but it's more concentrated in a smaller number of university or it's a large number of universities but small proportion of universities 33% of students in the US take at least one distance education course for credit and most of those enrollments are in public or state institutions it used to be that University of Phoenix and the other for profits were the major providers of distance education but federal regulations have had a big impact on those institutions so although they're still very big University of Phoenix is still the biggest amount of enrollments it's been much more spread out amongst the other institutions now and what's interesting for me is that online learning is becoming mainstream most Canadian institutions have at least 15 years experience of fully online courses and because of that there's an increasing move to blended learning where online learning is being integrated into classroom teaching so the most prevalent way is still the flip classroom where the lecturer is recorded the students watch the lecture online and then come into class for discussions but what we are now seeing emerging is some new designs the illustration here is an active classroom at Queens University a very traditional campus-based university where online learning is being fully integrated and the classrooms are redesigned to enable this so that students can work at say the small groups and can project each table has its own screens and they can share that with the whole group or they can just work individually and one or two institutions now even have breakout rooms where individuals, students can go and do a little bit of work and come back and do a little bit of work and we're also seeing increasingly the use of serious games, simulations and virtual reality being embedded into some of the on-campus teaching and as a result nearly all Canadian universities now and most colleges have a learning technology centre that's often part of a bigger centre for teaching and learning where they have special expertise in learning design and use of technology that faculty can draw on. So how can distance teaching universities take okay, sorry I skipped a slide there are though issues with online learning at conventional universities 73% of the institutions reported in Canada inadequate training for faculty they see this as the biggest obstacle a great deal of the online learning now is the use of video lectures rather than learning management systems they use learning management systems as well as video lecturers but often the learning management system now is a support for the main delivery medium which is the video lecturer and of course that's because it's too easy for untrained faculty and that's led to a lot of poor design such as 50-minute presentations and so on too much content, not enough student activity inadequate feedback and the other big challenge is that as institutions move to blended learning and I think nearly all courses will eventually be blended how do you scale up the support for faculty when everybody is doing some kind of mix of face to face and online learning so how can distance teaching universities win when the regular institutions are taking on online learning in a large way I think the advantage distance teaching universities usually have is their scale they can if they can build at scale with loss of quality they can become more cost effective than the existing system and to do that they have to have much better designs for online learning than the regular institutions designs particularly that develop the knowledge skills needed in the digital age now that's another lecture but it means changing teaching methods that enable students at a distance to develop high level intellectual skills and secondly better world class student support one of the problems that I see in many distance teaching universities now is that the student support is actually decreasing since Athabasca University is trying to reduce the number of tutors now there may be other ways Athabasca is hoping to use artificial intelligence for this but I think distance teaching universities have to focus on active learning quality feedback and making that really personal now I think there is a use for artificial intelligence so long as it embeds learning theories and teaching practices that could also help because you need scale for artificial intelligence to work and distance teaching universities can get to that scale and they must use appropriate educational use of advanced digital technologies developing a game from scratch is difficult for an individual institution whereas for a distance teaching university it has the scale it has the number of applications that would make it worthwhile so if they make use of the scale to use advanced digital technologies that have a lot of educational benefits and could give a competitive advantage to distance teaching universities so my questions for discussions do distance teaching universities have a different market why are we worrying about it should distance teaching universities do what they do now to meet the competition from regular universities do they need to change radically if they are to survive or are conventional universities doomed distance teaching universities are the future we are seeing MOOCs for instance being accommodated into regular degree programs here will that eventually replace regular universities and lastly as I said North America is different from Europe so what do you think thank you Tony for a very provocative and interesting presentation perhaps we can delve into some of these questions at the end in our discussion period if you have a look at the chat you can see you've got some questions coming up you might like to have a crack at answering yeah one from Elena how to develop online distance learning countries without financial technical resources I think that's a very difficult question I think the demand is greater in countries without financial and technical resources it is the scale issue that enables many countries to have moved towards distance teaching universities because of the scale issue so but it's a question of national investment strategies do you put all your money into creating a large national open university or do you try to build up your traditional institutions I think the quickest return on investment would be build large distance teaching universities and there was another question from Liz I think how to train the fact yeah very good question how to train the faculty for distance teaching why are we not doing it the problem is that in regular universities faculty development is optional it's not compulsory and therefore there's no reason for faculty to do the training and it's very hard for administrations in regular universities to force faculty to do things they don't want to do because of academic freedom issues some institutions do now require faculty to take an online course on how to teach online before they're allowed to teach online but they are rather unusual universities one is the university of central florida which started as a blended learning university so until we require university professors to have a teaching certificate before they can teach they don't see how we can crack this one I think it's a big problem but it's not just a problem for distance teaching it's a problem for classroom teaching as well because basically the lecture based model is broken for the kind of skills and knowledge that we need to develop in our students so it's not just a distance teaching issue it is also an issue for face to face classrooms okay thank you very much tony very good answers to those questions we'll have some more time at the end of this session to go back and look at some of these issues in slightly more detail but to keep us on track now I'd like to hand over to the cool kid on the block for the next presentation please so hi everyone so it's a bit of a tongue in cheek title the cool kid on the block of course the key idea in my short is going to be that pedagogical innovation can be a competitive advantage for distance teaching universities or distance learning universities and much of what I can say of course goes together with what Antonio and what tony rates have said I'm going to choose this moment in 2012 where there was this phenomenon called the MOOCs they were lurking with small communities of connectivist enthusiasts and then suddenly they were discovered by high profile teachers at Stanford who opened their artificial intelligence class to everyone who wanted to register and then suddenly they had 160,000 students enrolled for their course and of course this was a big scare in the sense that online learning had been until that point in time more of a field for specialized universities and then some experiments and some courses in traditional universities but it was on the field where people felt attracted to and suddenly everyone wanted to do online learning then it became mainstream it became the talk of the day and after Stanford got in after Coursera Udemy were created every university wanted to jump on that bandwagon and take advantage of what seemed to be a very easy way to increase your student numbers and for many people also this idea that it might be cheaper than what it is before which can be of course a false idea the thing is suddenly distance teaching universities were faced with a very tough competition from this very well settled very well established well branded traditional universities that found in many cases a lot easier to attract students to enroll in their courses and so the natural question that arose then was if anyone can do distance and online learning why do we need specific institutions for that why do we need distance education universities now that we can do what they did in the past of course when they look at the strategies used to implement the courses this was that old story of doing something apparently new using the old methods so these people did not go back and look at the history of distance education online learning decades and decades of theoretical experiments of practices of reflections pedagogical innovation and they just went for the things they knew and Tony has already talked about some of them so what he knew was the lecture and then some videos because they were traditionally used in distance education decades ago and then quizzes for the videos some discussion forums and they have you know they created these symbiosis which is interesting and they took old methods from both fields so they took old methods from place to teaching and they took old methods from distance education and that's where the pedagogy went of course it was also a very platform centric it was very much also about the technology and when we look at currently what's happening in universities trying to explore online learning it's a big focus on the technology technological part the classroom of the future it's those technological apps that Tony showed us things revolve more around technology than about conversations and about interactions and about sharing and so you would say okay we live in a network society the idea of knowledge has changed the way the information and the content is produced and transmitted and disseminated in the network has changed it is now in the power of more people outside institutions and organizations to make culture go forward and to create content and to interact with that content and so when you have a society that has this new perspective on knowledge and on information and how it is produced how it is shared you also need a different way to approach education to approach learning so you need more participatory pedagogies that go along with a participatory kind of society and then you thought okay this is a great opportunity for distance education universities because a lot of people want to do the online learning but many of them or most of them don't have a clue on how to do that and so what do distance education universities have that goes for them well they have a long experience in innovating pedagogically of course and they have something which is they have been able to adapt to different generations of technologies and this thing of the generations in distance education is a core aspect of the field every time new technologies came about distance education universities were able to find the new pedagogies that made most of these technologies but then when you look at reality this happens very far and wide and not with most distance education universities in many of them innovation just stalled they didn't get web 2.0 they didn't get cyber culture they didn't get the network society and they were a bit like held back and imprisoned by the old methodologies that have worked in the past so those legacy investments in print, in broadcasts decentralized computer systems the idea of everything very well planned distributed in the package but then did not open to these new affordances that we were having in society of course also something else Tony talked about and that is if you migrate to online learning and they want to become a virtual online university you need to retrain your teaching stuff and this is not something easy to do and we know that in in Portugal because we had to train everyone of our teachers we had to train every teacher that was from outside institutions collaborating with University of Alberta and this was a very very heavy task and very difficult one which was led I might say by my colleague Peshada very successfully and so I think what we need is we need to focus on network learning as the right answer for the network society so if you want to think about learning in the context of a network society you need to think about how people learn in a network and of course it's obvious that there is a very strong social dimension when you're learning in a network there is an emphasis on collaboration versus competition it's all about dialogue and interaction you know people said when Web 2.0 was exploding it's all about the conversation it's about interactions, about encounters about experiences that people share it's also about openness of practice and of resources even of syllabus these are active learners these are people that should have a say in defining some parts of the curriculum some of the things they learn how they learn some of the things some of the objectives that they feel like are important for them we need to bring them in and we need to accept that these are people who can contribute to make a more creative and more productive syllabus also of course this blending of formal, non-formal that is very much characteristic of today's world in which our paths are always intermingling things we do in a formal context that then go out and do an informal context and then we have feedback from there into non-formal or formal contexts again so it's kind of a circular thing as networks really operate and so I think the key for open universities and distance education universities is to refocus on pedagogical innovation is to go back and find again that spark that has brought them decades into the future when they every time a new generation came they were able to adapt and to evolve and we have some great ideas for network learning like connectivism or isometric education of course there are not pedagogies which are fully polished they need development they need to be adapted they need to be deepened but they have some very key ideas that I think some very solid building blocks on which we can think of a pedagogy for digital age including of course all those other things that Tony mentioned in his presentation games, badges virtual reality even AI in some cases we also have some very well established pedagogies like the community of inquiry for like 20 years and it has evolved it has been completed updated with a lot of new things that are more akin to the network society and all the things that social software brought about and made possible so to finalize I would say distance education universities they have a chance if they keep themselves one of the steps ahead so if everyone is doing MOOCs education should be doing something else they should be working on the new frontier they should be discovering the new concept they should be trying the new pedagogies that are lurking and emerging in places where nobody is looking at now so and that is because I think they should try to be recognized as a specialist in the field so you say okay I'm a student in a face to face institution and I do some online courses some part of my credit is online but if you want to do an online full course and if you want to do a real quality learning experience it would go for a distance education university because you recognize them as specialized in that field it's their core business it's what they do it's not something they do besides a lot of other things and so this also I think helps you be cool it helps separate yourself from the herds and make yourself noticed and relevant because you're trending you're cool you're up to date you always seem to know what's coming next and you seem to be working always with a foots in the future and I think that for today's public especially adults like like distance education generally has so adults with a family or with a profession or with experience this is very enticing that you can come into a context where you are recognized as a partner something someone who can contribute to how things are done and someone who is in a context that is always probing for the future and trying new things and more productive things so this is what I chose to say in these 10 minutes of course best wishes from Lisbon I hope you can come and visit us because this is a great place to be and thank you very much no I think that was a very interesting and very provocative presentation you've given us a lot to think about and if we have any questions can you please put them in the in the chat give us your chance to answer them while the questions are going in there I think what you say is very good and I think we'll also have to evolve our students more and more in this process as we move forward there seem to be the people who are deciding about the tools that they want to use more than we are so do we have any questions of course perhaps you could answer the question well I said it wasn't really a question but I can phrase it as such how do you see the role of students in this process of moving forward to new models of distance education universities so you have to activate your microphone we can't hear I was saying that distance education students have always been different public than what traditional universities have so it's not like high school students in their 17s or 18s that come to universities to live with their parents it's mostly adults many of them with a family many of them with a professional experience which is relevant and these people today they feel like they want to have a voice they don't want to be someone who goes into a course to be told what to do all the time and have no say in how things are done because many of them also already have a pretty good idea of some of the things they need to learn and some of the skills they need to develop and because many of them have this experience either personal or professional they feel they can contribute to this it's also a context where conversations and interactions are very productive because you're talking about people bringing in a lot of different experiences even cultural backgrounds professional backgrounds so I think this is not going to change a lot I believe that distance education students are not going to be most of them the 18 year olds who come out of high school it's mostly going to be people who are already in a more advanced phase in their lives and I think I believe that this is true even for these 18 year olds who come to university you should have a voice but of course I think a more adult population a more adult student population has more skills has more ideas has more substance to what they can contribute in terms for example of the curriculum in terms for example of some of the methodologies and of course I'm not saying they're coming in and dictating what is going to be done this is a conversation and of course most of the things need to be decided by the teaching staff and by the specialists but they should also have a place to bring in their experience to bring in their needs and to take part in the conversation so that the context results in a much more productive and interesting context of course this also revolves a bit about something that Tony just touched very quickly and I didn't even talk about which is something which I really really am interested in which are the person learning environments because the concept that aggregates the capacity of the students to be able to bring in all these experiences from informal non-formal and formal education all these conversations all of these encounters all of these interactions into a system that he creates for himself and where he organizes and filters and makes the most of the information and then he himself or she herself produces knowledge in the form of artifacts in the form of ways of developing ways of displaying the competencies and the knowledge that the person developed and that the person can share with other people and that can be helpful for other people and so again it's not only the teacher who is teaching or the resource who is teaching it's also the people learning that after doing their process and after now integrating and learning and reflecting they create something to show their understanding of the content they can also produce interesting resources for other people to learn from so I don't know I'm not going to say much more because time is of course short I think you get the idea Wonderful Josie thank you very much for that answer there's some other questions in the chat but I think we'll leave them for the end and let's move swiftly on to Alan Tate Alan if you'd like to start your presentation please I can't hear you sorry can you move a little closer to the microphone please Alan a little How about that that must be better Perfect thank you very much So great to be here thank you very much to Eden and to Tim for the invitation to take part what I've got to say has some significant links with colleagues who have spoken before me which is not surprising because I've certainly discussed the issue of the Open University as an institutional model with Antonio and with Tony in the past and what you've got on the slide here are three articles in which over quite a period I've tried to develop an analysis a critical analysis of the Open University model because I've sat at too many occasions too many conferences too many meetings where there's been a deal of complacency and self-congratulation within Open universities and I think a failure to engage with the way the landscape of higher education in which Open universities distant teaching universities find themselves has changed the one I've got to say is drawn primarily out of that first article there and one and two are in open source journals so they're easily found and in the article the editorial that Ross Paul and I have written Ross being a colleague from British Columbia in Canada we set out in that special issue the special issue is called Open universities past, present and future a critical analysis which my comments are drawn from today the special issue which if you have the time to look up you might enjoy has 12 articles about Open universities drawn from Asia, Africa North America, South America the Middle East and Europe and they're mostly case studies with some thematic studies but in all of them I hope you'll find that we have encouraged colleagues to avoid the complacency which I think is worryingly still dominant in many meetings where Open universities gets together in a nutshell what I've got to say revolves around this proposition which you can think about while I go through the rest of what I've got to say the digital revolution has reorganized many sectors the way we listen to music and buy music the way we shop on the high street many, many areas have been reorganized and the core question I've got is whether the Open university model will survive the reorganization of the education landscape and I think the answer is open about that so let me see if I can persuade you that that's the case but let's begin the big plus is that the Open university model has produced so the Open university model is 50 years old this year the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Open university in the UK and there are something like 60 to 80 Open universities around the world depending exactly how you count and there are still Open universities being founded still new Open universities being founded for example Botswana created an Open university last year Kazakhstan is an advanced stage of creating a new Open university so you say well the Open university model is still clearly current and vibrant and there are something like 8 million students in Open universities around the world as best you can count them so it's still a very major phenomenon but I think it will be very unwise to fail to consider some of the critical challenges to the Open university model today for example in the UK the Open university has been really wrong footed by a change in government policy in England which is the Open university's biggest market about 80% of its students around fees and the Open university has lost in 10 years something like one third of its students in Europe which has the second largest number of Open universities as a world region of the 8 Open universities although discretion prevents me naming them I think 4 have been challenged existentially over the last 10 years and those challenges have primarily been governments losing confidence in the institution model and asking themselves whether it had a future in Canada what's often called the Open university of Canada, Athabasca has itself been through I think an existential crisis over the last 3 years caused by a number of things of course but Tony can perhaps comment on that but I think it's fair to acknowledge than me and in Asia where there are more Open universities as a region than in any other continent I think it's fair to say that the challenges around quality are still extremely concerning and indeed there are large countries very significant countries where the quality of the Open universities is people are widely skeptical of what's happened but let's just remind ourselves of why the Open university model has become so important and I think it's because Open universities pioneered 5 singularly important features the mission to include new audiences in higher education has been pioneered by Open universities over at least 5 decades and I think it's fair to say that Open universities have changed the broad understanding that they can go to university secondly Open universities pioneered a new focus on learning and teaching they had to because they were admitting new kinds of students first time entrance from families without higher education and the challenges of learning to distance demanded study skills, self confidence and social capital which Open universities tried to create through innovation in learning and teaching methods and student support putting that under the same umbrella thirdly Open universities committed early and very firmly to the deployment of new technologies to support learning and teaching pioneering methods of course production and design and student services fourthly the idea of such large-scale universities was in its time significantly different from what had been assumed as a characteristic of a university up to that point Open universities existed in order to change how post secondary education was conceived and so innovation I think was embedded as a core feature of Open universities so Open universities have got a great deal to be proud of and I wouldn't want anything I've got to say to take away from that but, and I think there is a big but what you could call those five features you could call the first mover advantage of Open universities and that has been very substantially eroded elsewhere by developments in the university sector in many countries and it's my view that this erosion of their first mover advantage has not been adequately noticed or addressed by Open universities themselves many of the features that were adopted for the first time and in its significant scale by Open universities are now more widely shared as the move to mass higher education in all developed countries and increasingly other universities takes place these features include a much wider recognition that part-time roots to study have to accompany the traditional full-time campus-based mode and that the much wider range of student backgrounds in mass higher education has to be accompanied by commitments to reform teaching and student support new entrants, notably online universities and traditional university institutions moving significantly to online and blended learning a significant competition for longer established Open universities which have struggled to move successfully from earlier distance education models into online modes so I would argue that in most countries Open universities are increasingly struggling to maintain their primacy in a much more competitive and complex environment of blended learning and dual mode campuses and while a very few governments have kept the monopoly position of their Open university to deliver part-time and distance education within the country this is less and less sustainable in the face of burgeoning new technologies for teaching on so many campuses if we look at the next 15 or so years with the UN Sustainable Development Goals they propose an enormous growth in higher education from something like 260 million places around the world to 400 million places and this is while mass higher education is created in middle and lower middle and some lower middle income countries as well as in upper middle upper income countries which has already happened and this is particularly important for countries on the scale of China India, Brazil and South Africa now 20 years ago only the natural conclusion I think of many governments will be well we'll do this mass in increasing scale with more Open university models but that is not what is being said today in many of these countries and the question I think I would want to highlight this evening is whether the Open university model retains the dynamic energy and innovative character to gain the trust of governments with that task of moving to mass higher education or will the much wider range of models available today including blended delivery, dual mode campuses and new online universities of Open universities in the higher education landscape and so in conclusion I think what's important for Open universities is that they do a SWAT analysis there are certainly many opportunities there's worldwide access to the internet although many many challenges particularly in rural areas in poorer countries there's a major expansion of higher education envisaged by the UN which governments have agreed with there's far more trends international collaboration and open educational resources and there are international trends for more lifelong learning and continuous professional upgrading Open universities continue to have significant strengths the mission centred mission embedded commitment to openness, flexibility and access the capacity for large scale the dedicated support for part time commitment to technology enhanced learning however there are significant weaknesses which continue and which I think Open universities are finding it difficult to address firstly the in some cases absolutely dismal completion and graduation rates there's issues in some countries at least of reputation and brand I think that's particularly true in Asia there are ironically resistance to change from within Open universities themselves on the part of staff so some Open universities have become quite conservative and become embedded in second generation distance education and finding it difficult to move to the new models of innovation which are absolutely necessary and so there are threats threats to the Open University model as an institution burgeoning distance education provision as other colleagues have mentioned in mainstream universities I think evidence of governmental disenchantment in some countries at least with the Open University model and of course innovation taking place elsewhere like MOOCs which weren't born out of Open universities but were born out of other universities completely so I'll end my comments there to say I don't want anything I've said to take away from the major achievements of Open universities but I do want to put that institutional model under a critical focus and have some discussion with you all about how reform and revolution perhaps even in the Open University model is going to assure it for the next period. Thank you Thank you Alan we see some comments in the chat there's been some slight problems with links which I will fix. Do we have any questions? There's one from Liz for you there Alan your volumes going again can you move closer to the mic please there we go it keeps turning itself down for some reason it's got a mind of its own Tim so Liz Marr asks is there any hope what might we do well there's always hope and I think there are Open universities which have begun to address these issues and I think the Open University where Liz is is one of those I think it's been through a tough time I also agree with Antonio that Open University leadership in many instances has been at fault there have been wonderful presidents rectors, vice chancellors and universities but I think in too many cases we've seen some Open University leaders taking Open universities up a cul-de-sac and that's I think leadership development for Open universities is a crucially important issue. Okay thank you very much I think Don has a question for you as well Alan if you look at the chat yeah I think that's very well put Don I think your first point is it is very persuasively put I think is perhaps the success of Open universities in showing that new kinds of audiences can be admitted to study in higher education which has made it possible for other universities to follow but it's not always the case that the original innovators succeed in the long run that's my real concern Wonderful Alan if we have any other comments or questions we can leave them to the end so we can move on now to Liz Meyer our last speaker who is in a fortunate position of being as a provice chancellor in the OU K but also is in her capacity as EADTU president can share her opinions with us now Liz thank you you need to switch your microphone on I think perfectly thank you Liz Hello can you hear me all right now okay excellent thank you well thank you very much for the invitation to be here you said yes it's great to be last Tim but actually one of the problems is that everybody said all the things that I was going to say so but what I want to do is try to perhaps give us all a little bit more hope and after Alan's presentation but also picking up on what Don just said around the ways that we can we can support the rest of the section and reclose ourselves in a way that can help us survive I've always struck constantly reminded of a comment which John Daniel made a couple of years ago which was how do open universities dress now that traditional universities have stolen their clothes and it sounds like that's been quite a theme of the discussions that we've been hearing tonight but I want to step back from that and I want to look at the situation from an EADTU perspective and I particularly want to go on to consider issues that came up at our last conference through all the presentations that we heard and through the keynotes and look at the things that EADTU as a representative body of European distance teaching universities is trying to do to kind of do that reclothing and to look at and to help with the influence on the wider sector so I've only got two slides and the first one is around the challenges and opportunities that I perceive for European distance education and in a sense these are the same kinds of challenges and opportunities that exist globally and in many other parts of the world so a lot of the issues that we're facing now are to do with skills and skills for kind of global competitiveness disparities in skills levels across all of the EU member states so if I look particularly at the UK there are very clearly skills gaps which are developing in key areas which will impact on the ability of the country to move forwards in terms of getting involved in competitive industry and really driving the economy forwards and those skill gaps are not going to be met any longer by the traditional model of a three year higher education for school leavers they really are only going to be met through a very different approach to higher education which is really premised on the notion of lifelong learning and so it isn't just in the UK it's across Europe that we're seeing those problems and that within and between EU member states there are real skills and balances that we need to address by the way I am making an assumption here that we are still in Europe while I'm talking from a UK perspective so the second issue which came up and I think this has been mentioned by a couple of people already is that we have insufficient skills in delivering flexible just in time online learning at higher education level so this has come out in a number of talks so far and it's about the need for us to develop our faculty to develop our academics, staff develop our tutors in terms of delivering in a way that's more appropriate for the learning requirements of the learners of the future the learners of now and of the future so if you look at the way that young people are absorbing knowledge and learning now they're doing it in very different ways to how we did when we were at school and when we were at universities so they're going to expect very different things in terms of what they get when they do go on to higher education study so I have a grandson who experiences the world in reality but also a lot through screens and he's learning to use that screen experience in a way that will really influence how he accesses education on higher education in the future and at the moment I don't believe that there are sufficient skills of the type essential for us to take advantage of the technologies that are available to us to be able to deliver in the way that needs to be done there was also a feeling at the conference that there's a need for much greater cooperation across European universities that we need to work together to collaborate in new and different ways and that includes both distance and open universities and those in the traditional mainstream sector and that cooperation is being addressed very much through European policy but that sometimes is at odds with regional and national policies which make things different and I'm going to say a little bit about the policy issue at the moment a really big issue that's been coming up more recently is how to address diversity and inclusion at a distance so one of the things we're finding at the OUUK is that we have an increasing number of students who are registering recording a disability that might be a visible physical disability a learning disability or a mental health issue that is challenging their ability to learn in traditional ways we have approximately 29,000 students who are now registering with a disability with us and Anadola University has similar numbers out of one and a half million students they have over 20,000 who are recording a disability when they register with them so for me that's a positive in the sense that it shows that open distance universities in particular have a role to fulfill in terms of reaching a part of the population that isn't well served by the traditional sector but it also has its own challenges in terms of making the adjustments that are required in order to deliver in an effective way and that's an issue that came up a number of times in the conference in different formats in different sessions and one that I think is something that we need to put on the EADTU agenda moving forward and then the other issue which came up was around delivering what the market needs and there's a sense that with the changes in future employment the move to the gig economy the kind of Uber world that we're living in there's no more careers or jobs for life but people moving progressing, changing direction that higher education needs to deliver a different kind of product so the three year degree may have a place or the four year degree or whatever it is that's offered may have a place in a single subject discipline so for example you would want to ensure that you had sufficient doctors who had a medical qualification that was soundly and robustly based in research and knowledge and experience and practice but when they need to update in order to take advantage of new technology for example they really need to, we really need to be able to deliver what that need is at the point of need and at the time of need and the flexibility which distance teachers and universities have always had at their heart as a way of making sure that that can happen so I'm going to move on so having highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities and I have to say there are many more than that that the whole sector is facing but there are some things which EAGTU has been doing in order to try and cope with some of those things and to reflect the changing nature of the open and distance teaching university sector so EAGTU has been doing a lot of work in a number of areas some of these are in funded projects some of these are in peer learning events that have been supported by EAGTU and some of them are ongoing business that's funded for and by the memberships so the first area I want to comment on is quality of online provision and Antonio touched on that and I think others have mentioned it as well what are the concerns that has been expressed in a number of fora where I've been recently is that the quality of online and distance education is in some places perceived as being lower than traditional face to face it's not necessarily the case it might be the case but there is a perception there and some countries still don't recognize online qualifications, online provision so we do know that open university UK degrees are not necessarily recognized in other countries in the world and we have to warn students around that but EAGTU has been working with ease in and with other organizations to agree a pan-European framework which step goes above well goes broader than what NQA is able to do at the moment they've introduced their own excellence awards which are based on peer review and encourage self-assessment reflection and action planning so working hard to kind of address that quality issue and that so many of us are concerned about they're also we are also looking at the development of blended education and how the distance teaching and online provision or providers of higher education can really support the wider sector in terms of developing those blended educational skills so the embed project is looking at a conceptual framework for blended on campus degree education it's based on state of the art theories, good practices on blended learning and wide evaluation by experts and practitioners all over Europe and we're working with both within EDIN and ICDA to see if we can extend that further into other parts of the world we've been doing quite a lot of work on virtual mobility so when I was talking earlier about diversity and inclusion one of the challenges that students who have limited mobility or have disabilities or have caring responsibilities or are in full-time employment it's very difficult for them to take advantage of international mobility to study at other organizations but online and distance education makes that mobility possible in a virtual framework so that it provides opportunities there the networking of the European Universities Initiative is designed to create excellence innovation and inclusion in higher education across Europe there are a number of alliances already in place 17 of those with 114 universities from 24 countries and it's anticipated by 2030 there will be 100 such alliances and the long-term intention of that is for cooperation, complementary curricula and joint degrees with embedded mobility so here is an opportunity for open and distance providers to participate in networks where they're kind of setting the running really setting the pace for what needs to be done there's work on going on a university hub which is also known as the bloom hub which will be a single point of access for online learning in Europe providing pedagogies models, guidelines to enhance and accelerate joint development and delivery of collaborative courses and mobility and many other things besides there's work which is being done around a European MOOC consortium so the four platforms in Europe five platforms I'm sorry coming together to collaborate on the development for example of micro-credentials so smaller amounts of learning which can be offered much more flexibly which is stackable, which meet market needs and which are a way of diversifying income for the partner institutions what they really need is for institutions to come together to recognize each other's credit and to collaborate on the production of those qualifications and finally the European short learning programs is another Erasmus funded piece of work that is helping universities to produce shorter programs of learning which are less than a full qualification so they could be at 60X, they could be at 30X they could be at 50X or 5X but really pushing that development so it can sit alongside micro-credentials so the programs might be made up of micro-credentials that they can be delivered much more flexibly across a whole sector even across the whole of Europe and the recognition will allow people to move into different labour markets in different European countries so that's just a very quick flavor of what we're doing at EOGTU to address some of the challenges that open and distance universities have been facing and I see a very positive future for organizations which have been very radical and very innovative in their approaches and which still have a role in continuing to do that Thank you very much for that Liz I think if you go to the chat and scroll up a bit you can see that Antonio and Ilya have left a couple of questions for you there Okay So I'm just trying to find them Well the first one is from Antonio to here He said, well I'll read it out to you, that might be easier He says, nice idea You got it, great Oh no, okay I found it I found it, sorry, yeah Nice ideas but collaboration between European OU's could still improve extensively Scale effective joint delivering degrees for instance is underdeveloped Absolutely, and I think we're seeing quite a few challenges which particularly the European short learning programs project is trying to resolve So for example we have that there is one work stream which is looking to collaboratively develop short learning programs between two or more universities and the questions are around funding around pricing, around recognition so all of those things still have to be resolved So I think there's there is more that we can do but there's a lot we're learning about the barriers that are in place that we need to, or the hurdles that are there that we need to actually try and address So yes we can do more I'm just looking at earlier's question is it necessary for states to adopt the Global Convention on Distance Education which would establish uniform requirements for the activities of open universities I think part of the problem that we've identified is that the open universities that they kind of share features and similarities but they all operate in different regulatory contexts and those regulatory contexts limit or constrain or restrict the things that they might do so there's always that extra layer of regulation or policy or whatever which prevents which limits the possibility of adopting exactly the same approaches to what we do so I think a more general maybe thinking about something like the lifelong learning charter or really rethinking something like that and about how all universities could contribute to that would be one way would be one way forward but I don't know a similar document that exists but I would like to go away and think about that unless Alan could answer the question. Are you going to answer Alan? Sorry we can't hear. I'm conscious at the time I think we've had some interaction thanks to the chat I'm extremely grateful for our speakers but I'm not going to let you off the hook without one thing I'd like to ask you please and that is since we've had a webinar about the future the possible futures for distance education I'd like one concrete prediction for something each of you think will happen or might happen in the field of distance educational institutions in the next 10 years in the next decade so can we very quickly go speaker to speaker and can you give me an answer for that Antonio can we start with you please? Well team we hadn't agreed on the questions so I wasn't prepared but anyway well I think the biggest impact that we'll have in the next decade will be of course the use of artificial intelligence so how is AI going to impact on many of the things that have been been discussed here on for instance on the role of tutoring on the so also on the allowing for a larger degree of personalization on developing new forms of recognizing skills, life skills and things like that so the impact that artificial intelligence, the use of artificial intelligence or AI in online learning is going to be probably the biggest thing in the next decade of course this has a lot of implications also vertical and so on indeed that's great Antonio and it's harder for you because you're the first one who's had to answer Tony what's your answer to that question I think we'll see a global open university at least one one that operates across the world unfortunately it's likely to be in English or Chinese probably English it probably will be commercial rather than public as well and it will probably come out of the United States I suspect but I don't think it's a good development but I think it's a likely one okay that's a great answer thank you Jose as I said in my presentation I think the only way of remaining relevance for distance education universities is to be innovative and perceived as doing something which is different and better and more advanced than mainstream institutions than what the many institutions are doing otherwise I think distance education universities will just be absorbed and involved in partnerships with other universities and they will just disappear as independent entities doing something which is a core business of their own in their own way and this is the risk in Portugal for example with this new law that Antoine talked about he said the open university in Portugal may very well become technological instructional design department for other universities because they have a social prestige they have investment and they have the power of attracting number of students and the people who are influencers at top level in society so as I said at least that's something which I didn't know from John Daniel which is you know these universities that put on the clothes of distance education universities they can do many of these things very well and they can pass on as distance for all my universities so I think these institutions need to go with the way it was also saying that become better and very differentiated at what they do so that when people want to choose an online learning experience they will go for the specialists and not for the mainstream of what people are doing in traditional universities okay thank you Alan your prediction please yes can you hear me can indeed my prediction is that the core of innovation will move to curriculum reform to make curriculum compelling for the new audiences and to qualification reform as I think Liz has mentioned because I think the bachelors and masters structure which dominates so nearly entirely is inadequate for the future so I think innovation will pass to curriculum and qualification reforms Liz lastly thank you I don't know whether this is symbolic but I'm in my office and all the lights have gone out so that's why I'm in the dark but my prediction was really going to be what Alan said I think in the next 10 years we will see distance teaching universities leading the way in much more flexible approaches to qualifications which are stackable where people can pick what they want at the time that they need it and build up to a degree thank you very much to our presenters for a very interesting and highly entertaining period of reflection I think we learned a lot this afternoon and thank you very much to everybody who's been with us during this presentation so I think we'll finish there thank you very much thank you team for managing the session thanks very brilliantly I would say that's very kind bye bye Alan thank you very much and thanks to all the participants I'm pretty sure it's on me