 Welcome Professor Jeff Peters. Jeff Peters is a Professor of System Strategy at the Open University of UK. He is here in the AOU conference and he just now made a very interesting presentation about partnership. The title of his topic was How to Ensure Partnerships Go Wrong. One particular point in partnership is that any partnership should have a win-win situation for all the stakeholders. In your experience, in addition to the Open University in UK, have you come across institutions doing a kind of a stakeholders analysis that you, being my partner, what is the advantage I give for you? Do you think that kind of an analysis is taking place in that institutional level? I think sometimes it does and I think that the really successful partnerships are the win-win-win ones where you can see the benefits for both partners and you can see that there's a gain for, if you like, the consumer, for the student, that there is something that you can do together that you couldn't either if you do on your own. In your presentation, you gave seven points that if any institution adopt the seven points that partnership will go wrong. Could you explain those points? Yes, I think I can pretty well guarantee that partnerships will go wrong. These aren't the only seven, but they're seven that I think from the research and from my experience do seem to be pretty fool-proof in terms of making sure that a partnership doesn't work. The first one is about keeping it woody, about just having a vague idea that these are two institutions that really ought to be able to do something together. And in universities, you know, vice-chances and presidents meet and say, we should be doing more together and then they set some people together from their both sides to try and work something out or one organisation and a university or a school or whatever. And that's pretty certain not to work because essentially it's too vague and nobody really knows what was in their mind and so on. The second one, which is related to that, which is essentially have one big idea, but don't bother to test it out. So you can think through, well actually, we could work together and we could do this exciting thing. And you set off to do that, you don't actually test whether it makes any sense or whether anybody wants it or whatever. If you take the polyphoretic learner-centric approach, the students should also be a partner, but right now we see students as a consumer. Do you think that open universities, do they have a scope to take student as a partner, help in developing learner-centric approaches and take the education to a different plane? I think that's a very challenging question. I think that in some ways that's a bigger challenge for open universities than it is for others. And their history is such that they have in the past with correspondence courses and then the second generation of open and distance learning, which was long print runs and so on, they developed a model, which although it may have been tested on students, worked on the basis that the teachers developed the model and then the student benefited from it. Now of course, the technologies are changing all that around. The student, my view is that the open universities have to move and will move to a position where they are creating personal universities for students. And so that it is very individualized. And the student is much more active in terms of deciding what they want from it. And the institution is responding to that by opening up the pathways and helping them through that. But it's a challenging model for open universities, as it is for other institutions. But it is a challenging model and we have got to put our feet in the water and test, and some of us are doing some of that already, trying out models like that, seeing how well they play with students and how they change the way in which we operate as an institution. You also talked about something, very first time I heard about it, is the systems failure method. Do you think that could be a good tool to look in terms of, one, the partnership issues and two, within the university systems, particularly the open university systems of quality and other issues of which are being challenged. Do you think that could be a good tool to address those issues? Yes, let me say a little bit about it. Over the last 30 years, with some colleagues, we've been looking at large-scale failures, whether they are accidents or whether they are organizational failures and so on. And we've been trying to draw out some general lessons from those and put those, what I call systems terms, which is to try to understand, if you like, the generic, systemic nature of this. And I think, well, firstly, we have done some work on using that with partnerships and we have certainly found that some of the things that go wrong in general with a large accident or whatever, or a large organizational failure, a version of those goes wrong with partnerships. And those are things about, for example, not having good feedback mechanisms in place, not having sufficient resources and so on. Now, you asked the question about quality and my own view, having just been involved in quality assurance audit in the open university in the UK, is that actually there is a lot that we can give. I'm not a great fan of the quality assurance mechanisms around the world, not least because they have actually just grown and grown. They become ever more elaborate. People add and add to them. And I think there is a need just to go back to some basic principles, saying, what is the purpose of this? What is it we are testing for? If you like, what would be a failure in quality assurance? And how could we make sure that is not likely to happen? So I do think there's some interesting work to be done there. Do you think the partnership mode could help to address those challenges? Because I think the basic fundamentals of ODL is being challenged by these institutions. I know in certain countries, there are court cases where this government is being challenged, saying that if there is a graduate from an open and distance learning institution that graduate should not get an employment, the first priority should go to a person who went through a conventional university. I know the court cases are going on. Well, I think I'd say two things about that. In some ways, it seems a bit odd that it would be happening now rather than 30 years ago. And I can't help but feel that those people are just fighting against the tide. They will be, that can't last. Open and distance learning, e-learning is happening all over the place and it's bound to be successful because the quality of the students will demonstrate how successful it is. In terms of partnership, I've got a bit of experience which might be helpful. And that is that one of the things that my own faculty found was that when we went in, when we opened up new programs with industry, which were high level postgraduate programs, we made new friends. We were working with technical directors of companies and senior people in companies. And they then learned to respect what we were doing. And that changed the climate for the lower level courses and students with their seniors. So I think there may be a way in which picking some partners who are influential and doing some good things for them, whether it is the civil service or whether it is political parties or whether it is the other people who are the movers and shakers in society could well be a way in which one could change the climate. Do you think there's a need for an ethics of partnership or a code of partnership? For instance, AAUU. Could it develop a code for partnership among its partners? You need to be careful about what you ask of a partnership. But if you set up a partnership for one reason, and then you ask something else of it, which is difficult, you may make the whole thing unstable. Let's say that just for an example, AAUU set up a template for partnerships. And then some of the members of AAUU did not hold to that. They might be critical of AAUU as a result of that. And when AAUU was, that was not the main purpose of AAUU. So I think it relates also to your question about quality assurance. Should organizations like AAUU or the European equivalent actually get involved in quality assurance? And they can help. But if they become the police, they have a different relationship than if they are, you know, your friend and a member of the family. And so there are risks as well as advantages. The reason why I asked this question was because a partnership, one, it has a legal angle. The other one is more of an ethical angle. In a business model, you know, your partnership fulfills a legal angle dimension. But there are many universities which come together, which may not have a business model, but then they'll say, okay, we'll like to share your strength and we'll be able to give our strength to you. So without any business perspective, the institutions could come together. But then you require certain standards so that the both the parties could meet. So that's the reason why I asked, do you think there is a need for such a code? Certainly an organization like AAUU could help formulate, if you like, a draft of the terms that universities or members of the Association might use themselves. In the UK, we talk about being, the Open University being open to people, open to places, open to methods and open to ideas. And I've often wondered about adding open to partnership and then spelling out what that meant about, you know, our dealings with partners, how we would deal with them and what we expected of them and so on. So I think it does touch on the ethical dimension, as you say. So what will be your message based on your experiences and your long interaction in the partnership? What would be your message for the Open University in Asia? Well, I have a very good colleague who's done a lot of research on partnerships called Sivvangan. And she says that, you know, the first rule is, you know, if in doubt, don't do it basically. Partnerships are not easy. They are high resource. And they require a lot of commitment and energy and effort. So by all means engage in partnerships, when you're sure that there are good things to be done together, and that you are both committed or the many partners are committed to it, but don't don't drift into it in the same way. You know, don't drift into a marriage, it will end in tears. And it is like that, you know, it could make things worse. If you don't force a partnership, don't force a partnership. Exactly. And don't allow an outside body to force a partnership. Don't let someone dangling money in front of you force a partnership, because that won't be sustainable either. Thanks a lot, Jeff, for all this thought provoking ideas. It was pleasure talking to you. You're very welcome.