D.Keegan: The Competitive advantages of distance teaching universities

The Competitive advantages of distance teaching universities Desmond Keegan

Rumble and Keegan analysed the competitive and strategic advantages of distance teaching universities in four chapters of the book The Distance Teaching Universities (Rumble and Harry 1982). These chapters served as a framework for case studies of nine of the leading distance teaching universities of the period, contained in the book.

In a 1992 article in Open Learning, with the title 'The Competitive Vulnerability of Distance Teaching Universities', Rumble has revised the positions taken up with Keegan a decade earlier and puts forward new views (Rumble 1992). His article has now been republished for a wider audience in a 1993 volume Key Issues in Open Learning (Tait 1993) and further articles in Open Learning by Farnes (1993) and Raggatt (1993) have advanced the discussion. The conclusions reached in Rumble's article are far reaching, e.g., 'The most effective response for a Distance Teaching University (DTU) may well be to turn itself into a Dual Mode University (DMU).'

The section headings of Rumble's article (1992) are followed in this analysis.

Distance Teaching Universities

The author starts by stating that it is surprising that there are relatively few distance teaching universities. A listing of 26 of them is then given in his Table 1. In addition to this listing, Keegan and Rumble (1982) referred to the DTUs in the former USSR, which go back to the 1920s and to the Téléuniversité in Quebec. The Chinese T.V. universities of the 1960s, before they were suppressed by Mao's Cultural Revolution, should also be added and what is listed in the recent article as the 'Radio and Television University of China' is really a network of 40 DTUs, many of which have enrolments of 40,000 to 50,000 students, with a DTU which does not enrol students, called the CCTVU, as the hub of the network.

Establishing Distance Teaching Universities

In the second section, the author asks whether the needs distance universities were founded to meet could have been met in other ways. This is a valid question. The question has to be answered in the negative, however, as far as large distance institutions like the Sukhothai Thammatirat Open University in Thailand or a multi-level distance institution like the CNED in France are concerned. These institutions have no need for conventional face-to-face students. Where would they put them? Their whole planning mechanisms and cost structures rest on the premise that they do not have to build and maintain buildings for students.

Many nations in the 1990s have needs for universities that can enrol tens or hundreds of thousands of students. The distance teaching university, or a combined distance university and distance training institution is an appropriate model - in many cases, the only one.

The Strengths of Distance Teaching Universities

The author gives a listing of the strengths of DTUs including appropriateness for a different form of teaching, the value of focusing on the distance student, the marginalisation of small distance departments in large universities, technological expertise and economies of scale. The list could be lengthened but the query is rather why competition between open universities and distance education departments of conventional universities is set up. These are two groups of providers who need to be seen to be working together to achieve credibility for a field of education that is only just emerging from non-traditional status.

The economic vulnerability of DTUs in the face of DMU Costs

This is the central part of the article and three main arguments are brought forward to support the thesis: (i) experiences in Australia, (ii) 'the time and effort needed to produce one course' and (iii) 'DTUs cannot provide the full range of subjects'. To these five tables are added.

Rumble correctly recounts the proliferation of small external studies departments in Australian colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s and their closure in 1989 by Dawkins and Johnson (Johnson 1991). He does not, however, explain that this model, which he calls DMUs, was stopped by the Australian government because of its economic vulnerability.

46 colleges or universities which teach at a distance are listed, but the last 22 have enrolments of 300 or less in 1988. The problem is that there is a danger of either providing shoestring distance education services, and the author notes the 'ability for a university to turn conventional lectures into basic distance teaching materials at very low marginal costs' (Rumble 1992, p. 38), or the costs of DMUs to the taxpayer becomes unacceptable. How does one provide 46 instructional design teams of quality, 46 distance education management teams, graphic artists, pre-printing facilities, studio facilities for audio or video and student support systems, even if funding is made available for some of these services to be contracted out? Dawkins' decisions led to some institutions like the University of Queensland, which has just closed its external studies provision, opting out of distance education and he amalgamated the rest into eight Distance Education Centres (DECs), a system which is also now in review.

The second argument 'the time and effort needed to produce a course' has also been taken up by Farnes (1993) and Raggatt (1993). Rumble has written elsewhere (Rumble 1988) of problems of productivity with full-time tenured academics at open universities. This, however, is a management problem, not a reason for challenging the concept of an open university.

What needs to be done is to set up a desktop publishing system, give each academic a Mac, remind them of their reputation for the design of successful distance education courses and the expertise available within the institution in everything from the design of computer-based assignments to multi-media production solutions. Per se there is no reason why an open university cannot produce a course as quickly as a consultancy structure.

The final argument proposes that an open university cannot provide a full range of subjects. This conclusion also needs to be reconsidered. ILyn of the USSR Economics DTU (ILyn 1983) pointed out that his university and the other USSR DTUs had been providing specialised honours degrees and doctorates at a distance for decades. It can be one of the strengths of a DTU that the expertise is available within the institution to produce courses at different levels and that, for example, the science department can develop a Physics course at high-school graduation level or at teacher training level or a BSc or an MSc or a doctoral course in Physics. Another of the strengths of a DTU is that the same instructional designers, graphic artists, media specialists and study centre organisers can work on a full range of subjects at different levels.

Conclusion

In 1982 Keegan and Rumble came to the following conclusions on the feasibility of founding a DTU or of giving preference to a distance education department of a conventional university (DMU):

The costs associated with the establishment of an infrastructure for a DTU and the preparation of sufficient course materials to support a degree programme are high, and require a guaranteed annual volume of student enrolments if the system is to be cost efficient.
If sufficient numbers of students cannot be guaranteed, a mixed system is preferable.
The number of students at which an autonomous DTU becomes more efficient than a mixed-mode institution depends on the choice of media, the extent of student support services, and the number of courses on offer, as well as the costs of conventional university education in the country concerned. It lies at least in the range of 9,000 to 22,000 enrolments a year. (Keegan and Rumble 1982, pp. 245 - 246).

The 1982 conclusions gave practical guidelines to government planners and distance education administrators in the developed and developing world, especially those who need to provide for many tens of thousands of students, and appear to be still valid and unaffected by the recent article by Rumble.

Reduced to their simplest terms the guidelines of a decade ago read: if one is setting up a distance system which is forecast to enrol less than 9,000 students a year one opts for a distance education department of an existing university (termed a DMU by Rumble). If an enrolment of over 22,000 students a year can be guaranteed one opts for a specialist distance education institution at which the staff will be able to concentrate on developing distance education courses, teaching students at a distance and their research --without having the complexity of having to try to cope with a fourth area of activity; lecturing face-to-face students at the same time. The best presentation of how difficult it can be for lecturers to do all the four academic functions of conventional and distance teaching at a high level at the same time is probably that provided by Shott (Shott 1983). Only one production and student support facility is set up, not a series of mini-production and mini-student support services. The figures provided by Keegan and Rumble are clearly approximate, and there is an ample area in between the guidelines chosen, in which the planning decision can go either way.

Co-operation between open universities and distance education department of conventional universities in the pursuit of excellence and in the elimination of under-resourced programmes is the way forward for this field, rather than insistence on competition. For over 100 years before the founding of the Open University of the United Kingdom at Milton Keynes in 1970 and the series of other open universities which followed, the status of distance education, both at correspondence schools and in university departments, was fragile and often the subject of harsh criticism. Few nations allowed a university degree to be gained completely at a distance.

The achievements of the open universities brought new status to this field and in the years since 1970 academic credibility for university degrees at a distance has been won, or nearly won, with vast benefits for correspondence schools, university distance education providers, open learning structures and globalised distance programmes. The range of technologies that are already developed and are coming on stream in the period 1995-2000 (universal mobile telephony, universal personal telephony, satellite virtual classrooms, fibre-to-the-local-loop or to the curb or to the home, two-way video codec systems, computer designed individualised courses) will require a professionalism from the distance educator that it would be unfair to expect from those whose focus is the students who come to study at universities.

A quick glance at the world of educational provision shows further examples of the competitive advantages of DTUs. The Spanish DTU, for example, is forecasting an enrolment of 130,000 for next year after an enrolment of 122,781 last year. The German DTU is grappling with 60,000 students in 1993, due to rising German unemployment, after an enrolment in the 40,000s in recent years. Rumble does not indicate which DTUs are meant to be threatening them.

It should not be imagined that what is said here puts forward the open university or DTU as an ideal model. Clearly, below an annual volume of students, one would not found a DTU. Even when the annual figure is achievable, education planners should look rather to the French CNED model. Now in its 54^th year and with 350,000 students in 107 countries in 1993, it is a well-tried model and probably Europe's largest educational provision by a government. Among the strengths of this model are the government commitment to distance education and training at all levels, full-time distance education specialists who concentrate on the development of courses and teaching of students at a distance over a range of levels: children's schooling, high school graduation, technical and professional qualifications of all kinds, teaching training, university level courses and post-graduate courses. Most of the world's DTUs recognise this by providing distance training courses in addition to degrees at a distance.