An extended review of John S. Daniel's Mega‐Universities and the Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (London: Kogan Page, 1996; 212 pages, ISBN: 0–7494–2119–3)

McAleese, Ray

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Comment: the coming tornado?Ray McAleeseCentre for Combined Studies, Heriot-Watt University. Email: r.mcaleese@hw.ac.ukAn extended review of John S. Daniel's Mega-Universities and the Knowledge Media:Technology Strategies for Higher Education (London: Kogan Page, 1996; 212 pages,ISBN: 0-7494-2119-3).I will start with a declaration of interest and prejudice. I have been for some thirty years a'learning technologist', or what used to be unfashionably called an 'educational techno-logist'. I have observed and read books, chapters and papers by John Daniel, the author ofthis work, for about twenty years, since his days in Concordia University, Montreal.Professor Daniel is without peer as a judge of continuing, open and distance education. AsVice-Chancellor of the Open University, he has seen his institution grow to a leadingposition in the UK open-learning market with hundreds of courses offered under itsinimitable course-design system. He has ensured that the Open University is a beacon ofwhat is best in innovative teaching and programme delivery. He has steered an adeptcourse, gaining widespread international approval for the prototypical University of theAir. His views are canvassed by the Great and the Good. One can discern his hand in therecent Dealing (1997) recommendations.Why, then, do I feel uncomfortable with this book? I started this review almost a year ago,just in time for the publication of the Dealing Report in the summer of 1997.1 thought, asI read more and more of the book, that I wanted to say Yes. But I also wanted to argue. Iwanted to contest, to say: 'It's not like that. I don't like the way you describe what youclaim we do.'The thrust of Daniel's argument is that there is a global crisis in the old world of highereducation. Universities have a window of opportunity to take advantage of developmentsin information and communications technology. Knowledge media have become acommodity that is attractive to entrepreneurs and students alike. Sufficient is known ofcompetitive advantage between organizations to draw up strategic guidelines for innovativeinstitutional plans. Further, there are tried and tested implementations strategies for68ALT-J Volume 6 Number 2technology-based teaching drawn from organizational change and development. All thesedevelopments will allow the old-world universities to become, like the Open University,successful mega-universities. The argument is simple. The evidence is well documented (thebook's origin is in a doctoral dissertation written during a sabbatical leave). The writing iseasy.So what, again, is it that makes this book uncomfortable reading for me? If one takesDaniel's logical analysis of competitive advantage, the reason is soon apparent. He startshis argument with the premise that rational economic analysis is appropriate for the outputof universities. He asserts that students are outputs and the buyer is the State. Further, andby implication, students themselves buy universities as consumers. Some (for example,Hobbs, 1998) have doubted if such a rational cost-sensitive demand exists, and if it does,how it is characterized. Interestingly, this recursive consumerism is currently exhibiting adecline in demand because the price of the product has just been gazumped by theGovernment. The introduction of the £1,000 fee is highlighting the complex supply anddemand system that operates. This effect suggests that universities may have a product('knowledge') and that students will value and pay for it, just as they would for any othercommodity. Daniel's market-based economic analysis goes on to suggest that students, inturn, acquire 'skills' through just-in-time delivery of courses in what Tom King et al. inanother irritating book, so inelegantly call 'learn-places' (Ford et al, 1996; see reviews ofthis book in ALT-J, 5 (2), 64-74). The fact is that student demand has crossed a cusp.Perhaps there really are market forces at work. Not only is there a demographic-ledincrease, but perhaps also a rational market-led decrease. In 1998, the most recent figuresfrom UCAS suggest that there is a definite decline in the number of applicants foruniversity places in UK. Daniel is able to conclude that universities should focus on fivecore activities, namely: 'inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing andsales' (p.73).The issue I sense here is the use of a commodity-oriented framework that seems and feelswrong for my understanding of a university. My orientation to universities is more inkeeping with Bruce Truscot's (1943) much maligned Red Brick University, or the collegial-ity of the pre-Robbins community of scholars, rather than the consumerism of the modern'mega-university' system. To me, the language of description and analysis seems to ignorewhat universities do best. I feel that universities should concentrate on educating youngpeople. It is as simple as that. Universities should provide a scholarly and rigorousframework for the creation and adoption of scientific knowledge. Universities, after all,consist of scholar-teachers who engage with learners in a shared activity - teaching andlearning - based on post-Newman scholarship. Now, it is logical and feasible to analyseany system using a different framework. Such a device is often used by social scientists whosuggest, for example, an epidemiological model for the adoption of new ideas. It is as ifideas propagate, disseminate and are curtailed in a way that is similar to the growth of abiological epidemic. They.use this socio-medical framework to suggest interesting newinsights. However, unlike my reading of Daniel, they do not go on from a useful analyticalframework to a deterministic projection of how things should be. Normative determinism,based on an interesting but inappropriate framework is a characteristic I sense in Daniel'sbook. The analysis of the 'value chain' - logical and appropriate to such as the electronicsindustry - seems a wholly inappropriate way to understand how universities can make the69Ray McAleese Comment the coming tornado?most of technological opportunities to facilitate learning and scholarship. It does not seemlike that to me.The reality of being a student or a teacher in higher education may of course be differentfrom the noble aspirations I allude to above. Teaching is a job just like many others in aservice industry. There are clients who have expectations, and the teachers meet theseexpectations in a professional way. They share their expertise through well-tried teachingmethods, while at the same time keeping abreast of their subject discipline andcontributing to the success of their institution through research and consultancy. Likewise,students have a need to acquire paper qualifications that certify them as being competentand employable. Their 'graduateness', while comprising both transferable skills andsubject-based skills, is judged by their ability to perform traditional tests of recall,evaluation and communication. And the reality, as seen from the shop floor, is of manyteaching staff and researchers disaffected with the inexorable drive to research output andefficiency. The workforce is under-skilled and sometimes untrained. Its ability to make themost of communications and information technology hangs on initiatives that aim todisseminate best practice, and on painfully short induction courses to the complexities of'teaching over the Web' and 'automatic assessment using self-marked tests'. Most teacherswant to help learners understand what they need in order to be successful, not to acquire anew set of professional skills for which they will receive no direct reward.The experience of being a student is no less confusing. Many students - up to a third insome instances - come to university with almost no communications or IT skills. Theyhave experienced traditional or neo-traditional teaching methods in schools, and their onlyability to reflect on their competencies has been in preparing a short CV for a summer job.When they are invited to take responsibility for their own learning and to seek outinformation for themselves in order to satisfy the requirements of distant teachers, they cryfor help and consume a disproportionate amount of tutoring time. Often, the teacher andthe taught are both on a voyage of discovery into the complexities of a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. The reality is that while there is much to besaid for communications and information technology in higher education, there are fewlistening and few with the minimum set of skills to achieve 'take-off. If this were not true,why should the Funding Councils support initiatives such as TLTP and LTDI? There is acrisis with under-skilled staff and students. There are solutions to problems that do notexist and no solutions for problems that do exist. A reasonable view might be toconcentrate our efforts on a better understanding of the process of learning - using theexisting technologies - before starting on a head-long rush to re-skill, re-learn and re-organize. There is a respectable argument that suggests: Do what you do best well, beforeyour do hew things. I only wish John Daniel had placed more weight in Chapters 2 and 3on the book by his colleague Diana Laurillard (Laurillard, 1993). When she asked whatstudents bring to learning, and examined the 'complexity of coming to know', she touchedon the essential ingredient for a successful higher-education business: an understanding ofthe customer.In a chapter entitled Making Technology Attractive (Chapter 6), Daniel uses Moore's(1995) 'technology life-cycle' to argue the case for capitalizing on technology to 'dominatethe niche' (p. 90). Daniel asserts: 'The organisation that develops whole products success-fully in a series of niches may create a tornado as the mass market takes off' (p. 93). The70ALT-J Volume 6 Number 2tornado concept - an unstoppable advance through synergistic alliances - allows, as Danielparaphrases Moore, 'large numbers of customers to enter the market simultaneously,swamping the supply system and creating a frenzy' (p. 94). The implication is clear forthose who wish to see it. Technology is going to support learners and institutions, but onlythose who move forward using the technology paradigm will survive. Only those institu-tions who see their competitive advantage being served by buying into distance learning,open systems and communications and information technology will be the real players. It isalmost like the tornado that blows the smaller football clubs away when the Premier clubsstrike deals with the media to take them to a state of higher turnover and profitability. Thecomparison between soccer and scholarship is not only close; it offers an opportunity toconsider the impact of competitive advantage on those who still enjoy standing on theterraces supporting local heroes.Now, this is where one can see the full impact of Daniel's' argument. In the real world,technology-supported infra-structures are differentiating between those that are keepingup and those that will have to change or be left behind. The higher-education system isinfected with the competitive spirit. Attracting punters (sic) is now an every-day job foreach and every one of us. To offer better opportunities to learn through Metropolitan AreaNetworks; to share applications over distributed systems, and to be a member of a virtualcommunity of learners is what we are told should be attracting more students . JohnDaniel may be right, but I do not like it. I feel exposed. I may have to change my coststance. I may have to reflect on what I should do, not what I like doing.Turning to the core issue, 'knowledge-media', may present an attractive proposition as faras learning technology is concerned. Daniel draws heavily on his well-informed OpenUniversity colleagues Diana Laurillard and Mark Eisenstadt. It is Eisenstadt's 'knowledge-media' that offers such an attractive term in the title of the book. The observedconvergence of telecommunications and computing, along with the cognitive and learningsciences, has suggested this term to Eisenstadt. The key assumption by Eisenstadt is thebelief that the increased 'bandwidth' of what Dealing was later to call the communicationsand information technologies, gives rise to qualitative differences in what can be learnedand what is learned. Because it is possible to push terabytes out over a network, it ispossible now to create new virtual learning environments - so the argument goes. Nolonger do students have to wait at their modems for a trickle of bytes at 1200 Baud todownload the tutor's comments on their assignments. Students can make the most ofdistant tutors who can see, hear and almost touch the cyber-learners. Of course, there is alot of sense in this chapter (Chapter 7). Diana Laurillard - who herself made a highlysignificant contribution to the Dearing Committee and Report - has previously offered a'conversational framework' for understanding how learning is facilitated. Thisconversation facilitates the social aspect of learning. Learning, according to Laurillard isdiscursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective. Her analysis, first widely publicised in Re-Thinking University Teaching (Laurillard, 1993) is clearly referred to by Daniel, but I feel hedoes not make the most of her analysis. Perhaps in a similar way, the conclusions of theMacFarlane Report (1992) paid lip-service to the thorough analysis of Entwistle et al whoprovided the pedagogy for the report's Intensely Supportive Learning Environments(MacFarlane, 1995). MacFarlane (1992) himself placed a high premium on makinglearning 'more productive and efficient by harnessing modern technology' (p. 13). On a71Ray McAleese Comment the conning tornado?larger canvas, Daniel seems to prefer the artefacts that emanate from 'knowledge-media' tothe cybernetic negotiation of understandings between teachers and students mediatedthrough communications media. In summary, Daniel concludes: 'Universities need to doconsiderable development work if they are to derive full advantage from opportunitiessuch as on-line tutoring and the Internet' (p. 135). Here, again, I can see the road ahead like. the Bill Gates vision. The potential to place the cart (the technology artefacts) before thehorse (the instructional technology of Laurillard's 'conversational system') is all tooapparent.So what is it in this book that has made me read it, re-read it, think about it, talk about it,cite it, hate it? It is the logic of Daniel's argument. I fear he is right. I may have been leftbehind. The world out there that allows me to support my students through my mailsystem while I write this passage at home. The ability of high-performance workstations tomodel complex process and allow learners to engage in their own learning process is here -now. I suspect the real impact of John Daniel's' book will be that it brings out in each of us- in a cathartic exorcism - the deepest, darkest feeling that we have been dinosaurs in apark, owned and run by the entrepreneurial knowledge-scientists.This reminds me of the way Barbara Falk, the Grand Lady of Australian staffdevelopment in the 1970s, alluded to the role of the successful staff developer as being like'a professional irritant'. The successful staff developer makes others 'scratch'. It is perhapsDaniel's role in writing this book, from the authority of his long experience, to irritate therest of us into new ways of seeing the world. If the reader wants to know: how to initiatechange; what the new language of innovative teaching is; how to get one over on the nextdepartment/college/ system, then this book will be essential reading. If the reader wants tounderstand what is known about learning and scholarship under communications andinformation technology, there are pointers galore. If the reader wants to impress thesenior-management team with an awareness of the next window of opportunity, this bookis required reading. I still want to know more of the 'ethnographic' studies Daniel refers tothat explicate the process of learning. I want to know what will happen when the currentwave of communications and information technology is superseded by new and as yet un-thought of artefacts. I want to know how I am to compete for attention as a learningtechnologist, without selling cosy scholarly principles to The Grim Technology Reaper.But before I change my name to Faust, I have to acknowledge a debt to Professor Daniel. Ijourneyed through his book and wriggled on every page. Yet I have now read it cover tocover on three occasions. I feel I will do so again.For more down-to-earth readers, the book has eight well written chapters, a fascinating setof biographies of existing 'mega-universities' in the Appendix, and a useful bibliography toset them off verifying, corroborating, testing Daniel's assertions. May their journey beinteresting.ReferencesDearing et al (1997), Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report of the NationalCommittee of Inquiry into Higher Education, London: HMSO and NCIHE Publications.Ford, P. et al (1996), Managing Change in Higher Education: A Learning EnvironmentArchitecture, London: Open University Press.72ALT-J Volume 6 Number 2Hobbs, P. (1998), 'An analysis of teaching methods, costs and student preferences', ActiveLearning, 7, 8-10.Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching, London: Routledge.MacFarlane Report (1992), Teaching and Learning in an Expanding Higher EducationSystem, Committee of Scottish University Principals, ISBN: 0-9519377-1-5.MacFarlane, A.G.J. (1995) 'Future pattern of teaching and learning' in Schuller, T. (ed),The Changing University?, London: Open University Press.Moore, G.A. (1995), Inside the Tornado, New York: Harper Business.Porter, M.E. (1985), Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining SuperiorPerformance, New York: Free Press.Truscot, B. (1943) [pseudonym of E.A. Peters], Red Brick University, London: Faber &Faber.73

An analysis of teaching methods, costs and student preferences',

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance,

Future pattern of teaching and learning'

Inside the Tornado,

pseudonym of E.A.

Teaching and Learning

Comment: The coming tornado?

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I will start with a declaration of interest and prejudice. I have been for some thirty years a 'learning technologist', or what used to be unfashionably called an 'educational technologist'. I have observed and read books, chapters and papers by John Daniel, the author of this work, for about twenty years, since his days in Concordia University, Montreal. Professor Daniel is without peer as a judge of continuing, open and distance education. As Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, he has seen his institution grow to a leading position in the UK open-learning market with hundreds of courses offered under its inimitable course-design system. He has ensured that the Open University is a beacon of what is best in innovative teaching and programme delivery. He has steered an adept course, gaining widespread international approval for the prototypical University of the Air. His views are canvassed by the Great and the Good. One can discern his hand in the recent Dealing (1997) recommendations.DOI:10.1080/0968776980060207</jats:p

Ray McAleese

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Research in Learning Technology

Comment: the coming tornado?

I will start with a declaration of interest and prejudice. I have been for some thirty years a 'learning technologist', or what used to be unfashionably called an 'educational technologist'. I have observed and read books, chapters and papers by John Daniel, the author of this work, for about twenty years, since his days in Concordia University, Montreal. Professor Daniel is without peer as a judge of continuing, open and distance education. As Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, he has seen his institution grow to a leading position in the UK open-learning market with hundreds of courses offered under its inimitable course-design system. He has ensured that the Open University is a beacon of what is best in innovative teaching and programme delivery. He has steered an adept course, gaining widespread international approval for the prototypical University of the Air. His views are canvassed by the Great and the Good. One can discern his hand in the recent Dealing (1997) recommendations

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