Closure at the Open University?

So now all those who work at The Open University may finally have some ‘closure’: Peter Horrocks, the Vice-Chancellor, is going and the future suddenly looks a lot more open than it did a week ago. The acting V-C, Professor Mary Kellett, is in place and has issued a widely-welcomed message in which she calls for a period in which to be calm and reflect, and to listen.

Things are changing, after a short period of news stories appearing all over the place, focused not just on the recent utterances of the outgoing V-C but also on the changes already in process to all sorts of aspects of how this university works. The V-C’s widely-reported comments about academics trying to ‘get out’ of teaching were the straw that broke the camel’s back. The staff response isn’t, as some have suggested, scapegoating: it’s what happens when the CEO shows what has been interpreted as either a serious lack of understanding of the ‘product’ for which he is ultimately responsible, or contempt for his own staff. These comments came at the end of several years during which many feel that the core values of The Open University – a university with a mission that has attracted many outstanding staff over the years – are being set aside by management. Until the last few weeks, along with internal unease there has been press silence, I assume largely because those within the institution have been too nervous and/or too loyal to the mission to speak up.

How could any national treasure go quite as wrong as The Open University has done in recent years?

Setting it all in context

The external context certainly hasn’t helped. This diagram from a House of Commons Library document shows how government changes to the funding of higher education have shifted the source of university funding towards student fees, over the last eight years, for all universities:

The papers for the February 2018 debate on HE funding tell you everything else you may need to know.

As everyone must now realise, The Open University has been particularly badly hit by these changes. In 2012, the maximum fee p.a. that could be charged by a university went up from £3000 to £9000, and although The Open University charges less than other universities this change in HE funding has still had a huge effect on us. Loans were extended to include part-time students in 2012, but those with an equivalent or higher qualification aren’t eligible, thus ruling out those who are changing career direction or who want to study another subject to degree level simply because they can. The focus of marketing has recently been on young adults already in work and trying to improve their prospects; a key group but, weirdly, the largest increase even in 2010 was among the under-25s who may have wised up to the point that they can achieve a degree for less outlay and can perhaps stay in a part-time or even full-time job while saving enough for a car or a house deposit. This also applies to the under-21s, as in 2010 that market too was reported as ‘growing rapidly‘. Even more weirdly, in a university designed for the part-time learner taking six years or more to reach their degree, there has been a steady increase in those completing their degree in three years, or even less. As the modules weren’t designed to be taken so intensively, this means a rethink is needed.

For The Open University, until recently charging c.£15,000 for a degree (as opposed to the standard for UK universities, which was £27,000), the shift in 2012 was dramatic. How it worked out was that, from September 2012, the standard OU part-time student, taking a degree over six years, would pay £2,500 for the 60-credit module they’d take each year (360 credits = an undergraduate degree). That would have previously been around £500-£700. Yes, around three times as much – the same rise as everywhere else – but with a very different vibe to it. A year’s study for £700 felt affordable, not just to those in work or whose studies even were subsidised by an employer, but for the leisure/pleasure learner wanting to keep their brain active. And what’s wrong with the latter category, using education to expand their horizons, anyway? I’ve known students doing courses in order to keep sane while being a carer, or to keep their brains active in retirement, and I don’t understand the relatively new view that these aren’t the students the OU ‘wants’. Of course they are! ‘Open’, right? In the past, doing the odd £700 module over many years could unexpectedly become ‘doing a degree’. In the new model, the result of government changes, it’s the other way around; you have to register for ‘a degree’ in order to be eligible for the student loan. That mental shift – in OU terms, into ‘Q’ world, qualification world – feels very different.

How to lead change

And then there’s the Vice-Chancellor. It’s a difficult gig but there are ways of surviving it. I don’t know what his induction process was like, other than that he took an OU module because that’s what incoming V-Cs do (his was in Statistics). Did he travel to sit in on tutorials, which was part of my induction when coming to the OU after a career in the ‘brick university’ sector? The now-outgoing V-C, of course, has never worked in a university before. Let’s just leave that thought there. Did he shadow any of the central academics who create the courses, or the Associate Lecturers who support the students taking those courses? Did he look at the work of the many administrators who make it all possible, from curriculum managers to those who run the examinations office, or learn how the sound and vision teams work with academics to create engaging content? Did he sit in on meetings to plan new courses?

I don’t know, but I do know he attended the assemblies of the different types of staff in some Faculties, because he came to mine, as a result of which I wrote up a list of what a senior central academic does in a week; from what he’d said at that assembly, it seemed that he had little idea. He didn’t reply. He has clearly become a great enthusiast for graduation ceremonies, but that isn’t surprising; OU graduation ceremonies are the most buzzy I’ve ever attended.

The departure of the V-C doesn’t solve everything, but it does give the university a chance to return to a sense of collective mission. That doesn’t mean rejecting change; everything changes, and always has. For me, as far as change is concerned I tend to be an ‘early adopter’; an example would be my enthusiasm for MOOCs which led to my acceptance of a request from FutureLearn to write one. That doesn’t mean I am happy with the enormous sums of money from The Open University which created and sustain FutureLearn, or with suggestions that postgraduate degrees can be delivered through MOOCs, but I do agree with the previous V-C that The Open University needs a MOOC presence.

The pace of change

For me, the main failure in recent years has been that the rush to change has been too rapid, happening on too many fronts at the same time, and without proper consultation, meaning that many people outside the ranks of the various project managers getting on with ‘Students First Transformation’ and its large number of ‘workstreams’ have felt excluded and unheard.

It also doesn’t help that The Open University is a very, very complex structure, or it would be if it stayed still long enough to study it. In 2015 the VC stated, ‘we cannot afford to stay still’. Indeed: nobody can. However, there’s also a principle of change management which says that you shouldn’t change more than one thing at a time. Here’s the Harvard Business Review warning that ‘running three major change initiatives at one time would simply overwhelm the company’s employees. And just as importantly, each area impacts the other.’ Successfully driving change means you should ‘Seek to better understand colleagues’ work; in doing so, you increase your trust in their expertise, and their trust in yours.’

Well, the last few weeks at The Open University haven’t done much to convince staff that the senior management understands what the various groups who work there are doing; I’ve discussed that already here. Telling central academics they should be ‘bloody well teaching’ was hardly likely to increase their trust in the outgoing Vice-Chancellor. Someone who doesn’t understand how a university – any university – works is not the best person to inspire confidence in a ‘Transformation Project’.

Although there have been controversial changes for a while (such as the closure of seven regional offices with the consequent loss of jobs and thus of expertise), things have been particularly difficult since the start of the 2016-17 academic year, when GTP (Group Tuition Policy – The Open University loves its three-letter acronyms), was ‘rolled out’. This changes the established practice of holding local tutorials into a far more complicated model in which every ‘learning event’ (in this case, that usually just means a tutorial) had to have an online equivalent. Sort of good – not everyone can, or wants to, attend a real event: but sort of bad – because at the same time students were told they could attend any ‘learning event’ within a ‘cluster’ of different tutors’ groups, so the tie between students and their allocated tutor went out the window, which disrupted the pattern of ‘your’ tutor knowing you and how you tick, and then grading your work and helping you to improve next time.

Major disruption

In management-speak, disruption is good, isn’t it? And it’s not going to go away, as a previous Open University V-C said when introducing the MOOC platform, FutureLearn. However, there’s disruption, and there’s chaos. When GTP went live, the aim was to publish details of learning events for the next three months, to help students make arrangements to take part. However, it went horribly wrong. Even before it launched, questions were being asked about the risk assessment, so it wasn’t clear why it was allowed to go live. ‘Three months’ became ‘well in advance of the module start date’ but as the tutors are not appointed to a specific module until the student registration numbers make it clear how many tutors will be needed, this was never going to happen: basic chicken ‘n’ egg. In that first round of GTP, the link between students’ and tutors’ locations was broken. Your tutor group could be spread thinly across the country, so the chance of meeting up in person was reduced. Worse, the room bookings for tutorials hadn’t been made: it was never clear why not. By the time this emerged, the usual venues were already full. New venues had to be found, and some were not ideal; no internet access or projection facilities, rooms on the top floor with no lifts despite several students in a group having registered mobility issues… Many stories emerged of tutors and students turning up at a venue to find that the caretaker had no idea they would be there. Students returning to higher education after a long time away may, understandably, be very nervous about going to tutorials, so this was hardly ideal. The university acknowledged that there were severe difficulties, but it was difficult to recover from such a bad start to the 2016-17 academic year.

On its own, GTP would have been a lot to handle. But it’s only one of many major changes going on. So much so, that at the start of 2017 a Major Change Board had to be set up in an attempt to get a grip on all the different things that were happening (and all at the same time), to think about overlaps, duplication and contradiction. There are Projects all over the place: Delivering Student Outcomes, Interactive Direct Authoring, Online Rooms Implementation Programme, Student Engagement Project, Curriculum Review… Ah yes, the curriculum. One of the shifts in recent years is that students want to do named, single or joint honours, degrees. So, rather than ‘Humanities’, they want to do ‘Classical Studies’ or ‘History’. That means that you need enough modules in a subject to enable these various degrees to exist. If the modules go (and Curriculum Review of course means ‘what can we lose?’ rather than ‘what new modules could we create?’) then that threatens the degrees, or at the very least reduces student choice.

There is still much concern that the SFT (Students First Transformation – a title which has irritated those of us who thought we’d been putting students first ever since the university was founded) Project which Peter Horrocks says he led has failed to gain support from the university staff. Ideas fly about in an uncontrolled way: four start dates per year for modules? 24/7 access to a human being to support your studies? abolish all tutorials in favour of having a few day schools? The outgoing V-C is on record as saying that research and curriculum should be ‘focused on what students need’; and there are signs that research into pedagogy is becoming the only research that counts. And (from that same interview) while the outgoing V-C was well aware that students are uneasy about this, it’s all about ‘digital’, ‘not digital only but digital first’.

As we move forwards together, let’s pause, think, and listen to those who know best how to support our students to achieve their ambitions. Let’s find out how to appeal to all the age-groups learning with us; can some modules be offered with cheaper alternative versions for those who don’t want to get certificates or credit but just want to learn? The success of MOOCs proves that there are plenty of people out there in this category. And, throughout, let’s keep up the pressure for more government support for this amazing, life-changing institution.