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April 4, 1999

Distance Learning: The British Are Coming

By SARAH LYALL
M ILTON KEYNES, England -- The campus of Britain's largest university is spread over 30 neatly landscaped acres in this efficient, prefabricated city about 45 minutes from London. Inside its 30-odd buildings, work is proceeding apace. About 1,000 faculty members are doing research in dozens of fields and preparing course materials for more than 100,000 students in Britain and abroad. In one low-slung building in the center of campus, members of a BBC production staff are putting together television programs, videos and CD-ROM's for use in the courses; in several enormous warehouses off to one side, the materials are being divided into thick packets and then mailed to students.

What is striking about the campus, though, is not what is here, but what is missing. There are no dormitories, no sports fields for students and no classrooms. In fact -- and this becomes clear after just a few minutes, when you start to realize that the paths and the well-manicured lawns are largely empty of foot traffic and the air devoid of undergraduate hubbub -- there are no students here at all. But that is just the point.



Jonathan Player for The New York Times
The Open campus, outside London, has no dorms, no classrooms and, in fact, no students.

This is the campus of the Open University, which since 1971 has provided off-site education to more than two million students who, for reasons of financial necessity, class expectations or lack of opportunity, have been left outside the traditional university system. The university has done it through an acclaimed program of courses combining television, videotape, printed material and, increasingly, the Internet, as well as a strict system of supervision in which students meet monthly with tutors at one of more than 300 study centers around the country.

Over the years, the Open University has built up a presence internationally, accepting students from the European Continent and sponsoring or serving as consultant to programs in Asia and Africa. Most recently, it has helped the state university systems of California and Florida design distance-learning courses based on its singular model.

And beginning this month, it is sticking its own formidable toe in the American market by admitting the first students to the newly formed Open University of the United States (www.open.edu or www.open.ac.uk), which is awaiting accreditation. The earliest students are to come from corporations that want employees to get on-the-job training. In the fall, the university plans to admit general-interest students in business, computer studies and liberal arts.

The school will find itself competing with a number of American distance-learning programs already in place. It will also find itself fighting a cultural bias that sees such institutions as places where "you pay a fee, they send you course materials, you send in an exam and they mail you your diploma," in the words of Gary Spink, the university's chief spokesman.

In Britain, where a Government assessment recently ranked the Open University 11th of 98 higher-education institutions in quality of teaching, it has already overcome that prejudice. Its eclectic and far-flung alumni include Craig Brown, the manager of Scotland's soccer team; Milos Kuzvart, the environmental minister for the Czech Republic; Mena Zedawi, the President of Ethiopia, and Mickey Dolenz, the former Monkee.


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The average age of an Open University student is 37, but there aren't any average Open University students. To put it another way, an average student is one who enrolled because of highly unaverage circumstances.

Ann Gall, a 53-year-old Birmingham resident, left school at 15, had a family and worked as a secretary and personal assistant. In 1983, she enrolled in the Open University and began a grueling program of spare-time study: at 5 A.M., late at night when her children were asleep, on weekends and vacations. The courses helped her secure a promotion at work.

Mrs. Gall, who retired 18 months ago, is now a full-time student, pursuing a Ph.D. in geology at the University of Birmingham while taking supplementary mathematics courses through the Open University. Eventually, she hopes to become a teacher. But when she began, she had no inkling of the possibilities.

"I had absolutely no qualifications at all," Mrs. Gall said. "I was one of the people the Open University was aimed at, to give them a second chance."

The Open University was the passionate dream and legacy of Harold Wilson, the Labor Party leader who was Prime Minister in the 60's and 70's, and it was indeed designed for students like Mrs. Gall. Its mission, Wilson said, was "to widen the opportunities for higher education by giving a second chance to those who can profit from it, but who have been, for one reason or another, unable to go to a university or college on leaving school."

The University of the Air, as it was originally called -- the name was discarded because it conjured up the unwelcome image of people "sitting in front of the telly to get a degree," said Jennie Lee, Wilson's arts minister -- was meant to throw the university system wide open to anyone, regardless of social background or previous education. To this day, anyone can enroll in the undergraduate courses, regardless of prior credits. (There are prerequisites for graduate programs.)

In those days, Britain's higher education system was rife with snobbery and exclusivity. Only a tiny proportion of the population -- about 130,000 people in 1963 -- went to college at all. (Today, the figure is more like 1.75 million.) Politically, the notion of an enormous populist school without classrooms was an idea before its time, meeting with heavy opposition from an establishment whose collective educational background leaned heavily toward Oxford and Cambridge. The Times of London wondered derisively in an editorial whether there would be any demand for it. Iain Macleod, the chairman of the Conservative Party, dismissed the idea as "blithering nonsense."



Jonathan Player for The New York Times
Ryland Lee teaches a workshop.
But Wilson and Lady Lee persevered, and in 1971, the new university accepted its first 24,000 students, who completed the audio-visual portion of their learning by watching Open University programs on the BBC. The BBC still broadcasts courses, but television is rapidly being supplanted by videos and the Internet. Today, 125,000 undergraduates and 40,000 graduate students are enrolled. Seventy-five percent of the school's financing comes from the British Government, and the rest from student fees, which start at several hundred dollars a course.

At the beginning of each course, students receive a fat package of textbooks, workbooks, videos and CD-ROM's (including a simulated CD-ROM microscope for science). Students are required to turn in work to their tutors, who return the material along with comments and grades. People who fail to do assignments fail the course.

"These students are committed to learning," said Roland Kaye, the dean of the business school. "And because they are going through their courses as a group, with a timed schedule, supervision and peer pressure, there's a high success rate." Seventy-five percent of the students enrolled in any given course, he said, complete it successfully.

American academics seem impressed by the school's consistently high standards. "If they keep the same quality here in the U.S., Open University will provide increasing competition for our traditional institutions," said Robert Zemsky, the director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education in Philadelphia. But, he added, "They will have to translate their pedagogy to the U.S. market. If they get 'Americanized,' and get lost, it will be a real shame."

Richard Lewis, an interim chancellor of the Open University of the United States, says two things distinguish the program from Most American distance-learning programs. First, courses are tailor-made to their purpose. "Our courses are designed to be offered at a distance," he said. "We put a considerable sum of money -- a couple of million dollars -- into each course. They're not adaptations of existing courses."

Second, Lewis said, students are given personal support. In Britain, this has taken the form of the regular tutorials; in America, because of sheer distance, it will be hard to replicate the face-to-face system. But students will be assigned tutors, and the Open University is working on ways -- perhaps through classes held in real time via the Internet -- to bring the same level of interaction to its American program.

Lewis said he hopes the Open University can lure students who have abandoned schooling. "The American system is a populist, mass higher-education system, so you're likely to find more people who have part of a degree and might want to complete it," he said.

The Open University is also appropriate for older students with a yen to learn. (Its oldest graduate was 94-year-old R.T. Gage, who earned a B.A. in 1974.)

Frank Longworth, a retired civil servant, has been studying with the university since 1984, and has earned undergraduate degrees in biology and air sciences. Now he's going for a law degree.

"I've had to struggle a bit with some of the subjects," said Longworth, who is 68. "The actual learning of facts becomes harder, but your understanding of process gets easier as you get older."




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