Comment: the coming tornado?

Ray McAleese

Centre for Combined Studies, Heriot-Watt University. Email: r.mcaleese@hw.ac.uk

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).

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 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.

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, as
I read more and more of the book, that I wanted to say Yes. But I also wanted to argue. I
wanted to contest, to say: 'It's not like that. I don't like the way you describe what you
claim we do.'

The thrust of Daniel's argument is that there is a global crisis in the old world of higher
education. Universities have a window of opportunity to take advantage of developments
in information and communications technology. Knowledge media have become a
commodity that is attractive to entrepreneurs and students alike. Sufficient is known of
competitive advantage between organizations to draw up strategic guidelines for innovative
institutional plans. Further, there are tried and tested implementations strategies for

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technology-based teaching drawn from organizational change and development. All these
developments will allow the old-world universities to become, like the Open University,
successful mega-universities. The argument is simple. The evidence is well documented (the
book's origin is in a doctoral dissertation written during a sabbatical leave). The writing is
easy.

So what, again, is it that makes this book uncomfortable reading for me? If one takes
Daniel's logical analysis of competitive advantage, the reason is soon apparent. He starts
his argument with the premise that rational economic analysis is appropriate for the output
of universities. He asserts that students are outputs and the buyer is the State. Further, and
by 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 a
decline in demand because the price of the product has just been gazumped by the
Government. The introduction of the £1,000 fee is highlighting the complex supply and
demand 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 other
commodity. Daniel's market-based economic analysis goes on to suggest that students, in
turn, acquire 'skills' through just-in-time delivery of courses in what Tom King et al. in
another irritating book, so inelegantly call 'learn-places' (Ford et al, 1996; see reviews of
this 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-led
increase, but perhaps also a rational market-led decrease. In 1998, the most recent figures
from UCAS suggest that there is a definite decline in the number of applicants for
university places in UK. Daniel is able to conclude that universities should focus on five
core activities, namely: 'inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and
sales' (p.73).

The issue I sense here is the use of a commodity-oriented framework that seems and feels
wrong for my understanding of a university. My orientation to universities is more in
keeping 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 ignore
what universities do best. I feel that universities should concentrate on educating young
people. It is as simple as that. Universities should provide a scholarly and rigorous
framework for the creation and adoption of scientific knowledge. Universities, after all,
consist of scholar-teachers who engage with learners in a shared activity - teaching and
learning - based on post-Newman scholarship. Now, it is logical and feasible to analyse
any system using a different framework. Such a device is often used by social scientists who
suggest, for example, an epidemiological model for the adoption of new ideas. It is as if
ideas propagate, disseminate and are curtailed in a way that is similar to the growth of a
biological epidemic. They.use this socio-medical framework to suggest interesting new
insights. However, unlike my reading of Daniel, they do not go on from a useful analytical
framework 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's
book. The analysis of the 'value chain' - logical and appropriate to such as the electronics
industry - seems a wholly inappropriate way to understand how universities can make the

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most of technological opportunities to facilitate learning and scholarship. It does not seem
like that to me.

The reality of being a student or a teacher in higher education may of course be different
from the noble aspirations I allude to above. Teaching is a job just like many others in a
service industry. There are clients who have expectations, and the teachers meet these
expectations in a professional way. They share their expertise through well-tried teaching
methods, while at the same time keeping abreast of their subject discipline and
contributing to the success of their institution through research and consultancy. Likewise,
students have a need to acquire paper qualifications that certify them as being competent
and employable. Their 'graduateness', while comprising both transferable skills and
subject-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 many
teaching staff and researchers disaffected with the inexorable drive to research output and
efficiency. The workforce is under-skilled and sometimes untrained. Its ability to make the
most of communications and information technology hangs on initiatives that aim to
disseminate best practice, and on painfully short induction courses to the complexities of
'teaching over the Web' and 'automatic assessment using self-marked tests'. Most teachers
want to help learners understand what they need in order to be successful, not to acquire a
new 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 in
some instances - come to university with almost no communications or IT skills. They
have experienced traditional or neo-traditional teaching methods in schools, and their only
ability 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 out
information for themselves in order to satisfy the requirements of distant teachers, they cry
for help and consume a disproportionate amount of tutoring time. Often, the teacher and
the 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 be
said for communications and information technology in higher education, there are few
listening 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 a
crisis with under-skilled staff and students. There are solutions to problems that do not
exist and no solutions for problems that do exist. A reasonable view might be to
concentrate our efforts on a better understanding of the process of learning - using the
existing 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, before
your do hew things. I only wish John Daniel had placed more weight in Chapters 2 and 3
on the book by his colleague Diana Laurillard (Laurillard, 1993). When she asked what
students bring to learning, and examined the 'complexity of coming to know', she touched
on the essential ingredient for a successful higher-education business: an understanding of
the 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 'dominate
the 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). The

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tornado concept - an unstoppable advance through synergistic alliances - allows, as Daniel
paraphrases Moore, 'large numbers of customers to enter the market simultaneously,
swamping the supply system and creating a frenzy' (p. 94). The implication is clear for
those who wish to see it. Technology is going to support learners and institutions, but only
those 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 is
almost like the tornado that blows the smaller football clubs away when the Premier clubs
strike deals with the media to take them to a state of higher turnover and profitability. The
comparison between soccer and scholarship is not only close; it offers an opportunity to
consider the impact of competitive advantage on those who still enjoy standing on the
terraces 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 keeping
up and those that will have to change or be left behind. The higher-education system is
infected with the competitive spirit. Attracting punters (sic) is now an every-day job for
each and every one of us. To offer better opportunities to learn through Metropolitan Area
Networks; to share applications over distributed systems, and to be a member of a virtual
community of learners is what we are told should be attracting more students . John
Daniel may be right, but I do not like it. I feel exposed. I may have to change my cost
stance. 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 far
as learning technology is concerned. Daniel draws heavily on his well-informed Open
University 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 observed
convergence of telecommunications and computing, along with the cognitive and learning
sciences, has suggested this term to Eisenstadt. The key assumption by Eisenstadt is the
belief that the increased 'bandwidth' of what Dealing was later to call the communications
and information technologies, gives rise to qualitative differences in what can be learned
and what is learned. Because it is possible to push terabytes out over a network, it is
possible now to create new virtual learning environments - so the argument goes. No
longer do students have to wait at their modems for a trickle of bytes at 1200 Baud to
download the tutor's comments on their assignments. Students can make the most of
distant tutors who can see, hear and almost touch the cyber-learners. Of course, there is a
lot of sense in this chapter (Chapter 7). Diana Laurillard - who herself made a highly
significant contribution to the Dearing Committee and Report - has previously offered a
'conversational framework' for understanding how learning is facilitated. This
conversation facilitates the social aspect of learning. Learning, according to Laurillard is
discursive, 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 he
does not make the most of her analysis. Perhaps in a similar way, the conclusions of the
MacFarlane Report (1992) paid lip-service to the thorough analysis of Entwistle et al who
provided the pedagogy for the report's Intensely Supportive Learning Environments
(MacFarlane, 1995). MacFarlane (1992) himself placed a high premium on making
learning 'more productive and efficient by harnessing modern technology' (p. 13). On a

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larger canvas, Daniel seems to prefer the artefacts that emanate from 'knowledge-media' to
the cybernetic negotiation of understandings between teachers and students mediated
through communications media. In summary, Daniel concludes: 'Universities need to do
considerable development work if they are to derive full advantage from opportunities
such 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 the
horse (the instructional technology of Laurillard's 'conversational system') is all too
apparent.

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 left
behind. The world out there that allows me to support my students through my mail
system while I write this passage at home. The ability of high-performance workstations to
model 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 a
park, owned and run by the entrepreneurial knowledge-scientists.

This reminds me of the way Barbara Falk, the Grand Lady of Australian staff
development 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 perhaps
Daniel's role in writing this book, from the authority of his long experience, to irritate the
rest of us into new ways of seeing the world. If the reader wants to know: how to initiate
change; what the new language of innovative teaching is; how to get one over on the next
department/college/ system, then this book will be essential reading. If the reader wants to
understand what is known about learning and scholarship under communications and
information technology, there are pointers galore. If the reader wants to impress the
senior-management team with an awareness of the next window of opportunity, this book
is required reading. I still want to know more of the 'ethnographic' studies Daniel refers to
that explicate the process of learning. I want to know what will happen when the current
wave 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 learning
technologist, 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. I
journeyed through his book and wriggled on every page. Yet I have now read it cover to
cover 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 set
of biographies of existing 'mega-universities' in the Appendix, and a useful bibliography to
set them off verifying, corroborating, testing Daniel's assertions. May their journey be
interesting.

References

Dearing et al (1997), Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report of the National
Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, London: HMSO and NCIHE Publications.

Ford, P. et al (1996), Managing Change in Higher Education: A Learning Environment
Architecture, London: Open University Press.

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Hobbs, P. (1998), 'An analysis of teaching methods, costs and student preferences', Active
Learning, 7, 8-10.

Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching, London: Routledge.

MacFarlane Report (1992), Teaching and Learning in an Expanding Higher Education
System, 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 Superior
Performance, New York: Free Press.

Truscot, B. (1943) [pseudonym of E.A. Peters], Red Brick University, London: Faber &
Faber.

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