Open for Business

I was disturbed when a member of the Faculty finance team recently stated that the University was a business and, in that particular debate, financial considerations outweighed the education argument. Not that the University was an education establishment which had to operate within its budget, but that it was, simply, a business. And that got me wondering whether collaboration and open sharing of real knowledge could survive a business ethos. Is knowledge valued enough in a time of economic uncertainty

and an era where experts and truth are not respected?

Universities as businesses

The Guardian in a piece on the role of the Vice Chancellor describes Universities as multimillion-pound businesses, with their leaders devoting significant time to raising funds. The VCs interviewed talked of focusing on the institution’s mission and claimed that, despite the focus on business and the recruitment of leaders with business experience, the culture of universities remains distinct. In that article, Fiona Ross, director of research at the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education is quoted as seeing Universities’ fundamental purposes as “sharing learning, producing knowledge and contributing to the community”.

But is that mission sustainable now that Universities have evolved from scholarly communities to multi-million pound businesses, where University leaders are no longer always academics, have constantly to be concerned with image and fund-raising, and may be known as presidents rather than vice-chancellors? David Ellis, writing in 2014 complains about a switch from Universities as facilitators of learning to service providers/employee factories, and from students as learners/participants to consumers. He quotes David Willetts’ encouragement to universities to focus on the earning prospects of their graduates (which suggests there wouldn’t be many future researchers or educators coming through). One problem with the idea of the student as consumer is that, in this transaction, this customer cannot always be right. Students themselves contribute to the quality of their experience and results, and the classification of a (reputable) University degree isn’t related to the amount of fees paid.

Universities cannot exist disconnected from the culture and economics of society, nor should they be monastic institutions of scholarship for scholarship’s (and the scholars’) sake. But in stepping away from a purer focus on research, teaching and learning, and the dissemination of knowledge, they risk losing something of their moral purpose and their indirect benefit to society.

I want to consider how successful openness initiatives have been, along with the threats to openness. Not the major academic publishers who sell our work back to us; this has been eloquently articulated by many research colleagues in earlier blogs. But the areas where Universities themselves have attempted to open up knowledge, or are now reducing openness in response to financial pressures.

Opening up access to knowledge: The Open University

The Wilson governments of 1964–1970 instigated a huge expansion of HE and the educational achievement of which Harold Wilson was most proud was the creation of the Open University (OU) in 1969. The OU was based on the ideal of equality of opportunity (Pimlott, 1992), aiming to make higher education available to a wider range of people. The expansion of HE was linked with modernisation of the workforce which was necessary for national competitiveness in a technologically advancing world. The need for a more educated workforce meant opening up Higher Education to individuals and groups of society who were not then accessing it: the OU model reached people who could not attend full time education but needed to study in their own time and locations. Pimlott (1992, p515) also points out that the OU model was cheap and therefore also championed by future governments who were less interested in social equality. So, the widening participation experiment of the OU was driven by a financial need for modernisation and was then maintained for reasons of economic efficiency. In this example there was no conflict; presumably the twin social and economic aims, plus the technological aspects of delivery, were a happy union for Wilson.

The OU was open in two ways; access was free of charge (as for all Universities and polytechnics at the time), and free of entry requirements. It was cheap because it had very few buildings and the BBC disseminated the information at off-peak times, but the original cost estimates for establishing the OU were still unrealistically low (Dorey, 2015). Even so the Treasury were reluctant to fund it because the lack of entry requirements meant that uptake was very difficult to estimate or to limit. Funding was eventually found in 1967 and the birth of the OU was guaranteed. But there was a conservative government from 1970 and it was a surprise that it survived. So an idea which came to reality because of a mistakenly low cost estimate actually admitted its first students under a Conservative government because Margaret Thatcher, then Education Minister, believed it would be a cheaper way of expanding graduate numbers than increasing capacity at traditional Universities (Dorey, 2015). Current fees are about £5700 per year for a student studying full time, i.e. it’s one of the cheapest ways of acquiring a degree in the UK and still has no formal academic entry requirements.

Once the OU was established, there were claims that it was attracting mainly middle class housewives using it for personal interest, who were unlikely to join the workforce. Labour protested that it had never been intended as a working class ghetto University (Dorey, 2015) — but this does anticipate a current debate about whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) really have reached out to a different population (and whether it matters).

Later (1999–2002) the OU tried to establish itself in the US, but not as an attempt to democratise access to education. Although profit wasn’t its sole aim, its closure came in part because of failure to meet its income-generating potential (Meyer 2006). Meyer’s critique was that some material was not ideal culturally, changes were costly and US education already allowed greater flexibility of study. “The lessons from the USOU experience show the need to combine lofty ideals with a solid understanding of the marketplace” (Meyer, p7).

Opening up access to knowledge, take 2: MOOCs

MOOCs can be taken by an unlimited number of students and are freely available over the internet. They began to appear around 10 years ago but became widely available only in 2012. Originally they offered open, re-usable educational resources (OERS, we’ll come back to them in a minute) as well as freely available, time-unlimited content to the user, but payment for the most useful aspects rapidly followed.

Like the OU, but on a global scale, MOOCs were supposed to democratise access to education — in the developed as well as the developing world. That’s an ambitious goal which has only partly been achieved. The MOOCs Directory, clearly acknowledging their limitations, describes MOOCs as “a partial win of the Educational Access Lottery”. Partial because winning the jackpot “would require adding free high speed internet access, personalized MOOC learner experience, free online MOOC tutoring, secure free access to learner’s MOOC course/skills portfolio, locally affordable MOOCs credentials/skills certification, transferable academic credit for their MOOCs, MOOC-related online internships with potential employers, and MOOC performance-based job placement opportunities with global industry partners”. In their development, advertising, technological delivery and educational support, MOOCs incur costs which HEIs are unable to bear. Hence the concept of Freemium, taken straight from the business world.

Nowadays current major platforms/ providers limit the opportunities for re-use, revision or redistribution of material. (Loeckx 2016). Most now don’t even provide completion certificates for free, but many offer upgrade opportunities where you can pay to register and get course credits which may be recognised as APL. Even the course materials may not be free, or online materials may be available only for a limited period.

MOOCs being online, it was easy to plot usage statistics and it was clear that a huge take-up was followed by a significant drop-out. Course completion rates in 2013 were around 10% and in a survey of Coursera enrolees, only 4% completed their MOOC to the point of receiving a credit. There are various reasons for this but among them are difficulties with technology (especially among economically disadvantaged groups and the developing world — two important original target populations), and lack of one to one support. Oh, and because you most likely have to pay to get the credit.

Rambe and Moeti (2017) examine the ability of MOOCs to democratise access to HE in Africa. Logistically, performance is limited by both electricity supply and internet connectivity. Politically, they complain about’ intellectual neo-imperialism’ in the dominance of Western providers of MOOCs, and materials provided ‘for consumption rather than adaptation’, available under full copyright only, not able to be adapted for local purposes. Zhenghao and colleagues (2015) report that MOOC enrolees are predominantly already well-educated and from developed countries but, across the world, they can be divided into career builders or education seekers. Among the career builders, people of lower SES/education were the most likely to report tangible career benefits. Education seekers are more likely to be from less developed countries or of lower SES, and these groups are more likely to report educational benefits. So they argue that, among the completers, disadvantaged populations ARE reporting tangible educational and career benefits from MOOCs.

Rambe and Moeti discuss whether MOOCs have been a ‘disruptive innovation’ (Christensen, 2013) and broken the monopoly of established providers to broaden and democratise the education market. I’m sure the big names in MOOC platforms and also the smaller HEIs saw the opportunity for financial gain if this disruptive innovation worked. But then the less-than-elite HEIs who went into the online market had their business models threatened by Harvard et al suddenly providing lots of free-to-access material with high quality delivery methods. Why have the elite done this? Elite providers see opportunities for brand enhancement, and business model innovation: their presence in the online market is likely to generate favourable publicity and (in developing countries) political goodwill, both leading to increased registrations. They also sell their learning analytics data and upgrades for credits.

So, MOOCs appear not to have smashed the system and democratised education globally, but they may have had measurable benefit to less advantaged groups. But when did ‘open’ cease to mean free? Did it ever? Was the provision of MOOCs by the big Universities based on an open ethos that has evolved into something less charitable, or was it always a cynical loss-leading way of getting customers into the shop?

Open Educational Resources (OER)s

As discussed in Blog 1, I haven’t knowingly made much use of OERs because there was little available in the form of teaching materials that was suitable for unmodified use. However, if we include reading lists in this category then I have consulted other people’s materials and apparently contributed my own to the pool. You’re welcome. The barriers to providing open materials for clinical teaching in my field are not finances, but consent and confidentiality. Consent from participants to be videoed, especially children, has to be re-obtained every 3–5 years which is potentially a short period of benefit for a lot of work. In addition, ethical requirements for confidentiality make it very difficult to allow open access.

But there are also pressures for commercialisation of learning resources. A team at Plymouth Marjon has created a valuable audio resource allowing self-practice of phonetic transcription for which they successfully negotiated open access. However, colleagues at another University produced a client video intended for open use by other Speech and Language Therapy courses but were prevented from distributing it free of charge by the University, and refused on principle to sell it. Our own library’s My Learning Essentials package, available under a Creative Commons licence, is linked to and embedded by a number of other institutions which must save, or even make money for the users as they are effectively selling it to their own students. Chris Millson argues that open sharing of resources is a win-win situation, where you benefit from both your own and other people’s efforts, alongside improving your profile and reputation. The library management team agreed, and MLE went public. In contrast, Sam Hemsley and Simon Hardaker describe the barriers to sharing resources, including the University owning the copyright of any material produced while you work for it, or selling that material as a package to another institution.

Intellectual property (IP)

A glossy University leaflet headed

emphasises the University’s desire to sell its research output. (Two phone calls to gain permission for use of the banner.) “Our academics generate new knowledge every day, creating a wealth of intellectual property that has real world applications and the potential to enhance society. Much of this work can be commercially exploited.” Commercialisation, marketplace, wealth and exploited — the business message couldn’t be clearer. But is this knowledge theirs to sell? Much of it comes from public money via the research councils or charities. What are the moral implications of profiting from publicly funded research, enriching the University (30%) and the researchers (70% of profits)? Shouldn’t the public get at least some direct benefit from public funds?

The Research Councils themselves prefer not to be involved, saying that exploitation of research is best left to the commercial sector (MRC) and that researchers owning their own IP encourages further innovation and creativity (ESRC). The ESRC retain the right to reclaim a third of the total IP income, up to the value of the original grant but, according to UMIP, they don’t do so. From my own experience it has been possible to licence a product to be available without charge for research and NHS clinical work, but excluding for-profit organisations. So, there is a distinction between copyright protection and commercial exploitation of IP, with UMIP involved in both.

Summary

From this consideration of some tensions between openness and business, the role of the marketplace in initiating, shaping and challenging open knowledge is clear:

· the OU has survived but was defeated in its overseas expansion aims by insufficient business planning and not paying enough attention to its intended market;

· MOOCs have survived but the truly open bits are limited;

· There are excellent examples of OERs and other clinical or computing resources which developers have fought to make truly open; lack of uptake rather than commercial pressure may have smothered Jorum;

· IP is being vigorously exploited but it IS possible to distribute products non-commercially, and the Research Councils could reclaim more funds if they wanted to.

There is a conflict between the social ideal of sharing knowledge and the economic need to sell a product (education) in order to keep providing it. Open Knowledge is under continual pressure from economic factors and it has to make some compromises in order to survive. It’s still open for business.

References

Dorey, P. (2015). ‘Well, Harold Insists on Having It!’ — The Political Struggle to Establish The Open University, 1965–67. Contemporary British History 29(2), 241–272.

Ellis, D. (2014). http://www.independent.co.uk/student/istudents/the-government-must-change-its-mind-universities-should-not-be-run-for-profit-9726560.html

Loeckx, J. (2016). Blurring boundaries in education: context and impact of MOOCs. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17 (3).

Meyer, K.A. (2006). The Closing of the U.S. Open University. Educause Quarterly 2, 5–7.

Pimlott, B. (1992). Harold Wilson. London: HarperCollins.

Rambe, P. & Moeti, M. (2017) Disrupting and democratising higher education provision or entrenching academic elitism: towards a model of MOOCs adoption at African universities. Educational Technology Research and Development 65(3), 631–651. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-016-9500-3

Zhenghao, C., Alcorn, B., Christensen, G., Eriksson, N., Koller, D. & Emanuel, E.J. (2015). Who’s benefiting from MOOCs, and why. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/09/whos-benefiting-from-moocs-and-why