AUSTRALIA: New QA approaches for new learning forms?

So my title is: New Approaches to Quality and Standards for New Forms and Modes of Learning? There is a question mark at the end of the title. Whether new forms and modes of learning actually require new approaches to quality and standards is a basic question. Some would argue that quality is quality and standards are standards; so that if you assure quality and measure standards properly, new modes and forms of learning should not require new approaches.

I will look at four new forms and modes of learning in order to ask whether they need new approaches to quality and standards. Those forms and modes are: first, degree mills; second, private for-profit provision; third, open and distance learning; and, fourth, open educational resources.

Degree mills

You will say that degree mills are not new - scams have been around for a long time - and neither are they a mode of learning, but rather a way of paying to avoid learning. I accept that, but justify talking about them in two ways.

First, the internet is giving degree mills new opportunities to con people and quickly to change the colour of their operations, like chameleons, when trouble hits. Second, although they are not a mode of learning, employers, most of whom are lazy about checking the credentials presented to them, believe that the holders of phoney diplomas actually have the knowledge and skills they seek. Phoney medical qualifications are particularly alarming to the public but all bogus qualifications are potentially a danger to society.

Lawyers like to define things before they campaign against them but I shall not try to define a degree mill. There is a continuum between the degree mill that gives a PhD by return mail in exchange for your CV and a low quality institution that requires one to do much less work than a serious programme. Inserting a tight definition somewhere along this continuum is tricky and unnecessary. What we need is a pincer movement. Governments should take action, through legislation and enforcement, to close the out-and-out scams. Quality agencies should work from the other end to raise the bar so that poor quality institutions either improve or cease operations.

Do we need new approaches to quality and standards to combat degree mills? My answer is basically no. What we must do is to use the tools we have more aggressively. There is bad news and good news.

The worst news is that in any domain where demand exceeds supply as dramatically as it does in higher education in the developing world, you will find people ready to make a quick buck. Many developing countries make the problem worse by refusing opportunities to increase supply. They could introduce fees in public institutions and so generate resources to expand them; or they could encourage private for-profit providers who would like to establish serious institutions of integrity. Few countries have the guts to do this.

The obverse of the coin is that deals are struck between the wide boys and people in power so that bogus institutions can claim political approval without bothering to present themselves to the national accreditation agency, even where one exists.

The other element of bad news is that the internet allows scams to be even more slippery than in the days of post-office boxes. It is easy to attempt to borrow credibility from international bodies such as UNESCO. However, the internet is a game anyone can play and the worldwide quality establishment can do much more to use the internet to steer people away from scams.

An international working group on degree mills that met recently under the auspices of UNESCO and CHEA, the US Council for Higher Education Accreditation, will probably try to catalyse some collective action in that regard, and is an expression of a willingness to coordinate the fight against degree mills internationally. It is part of the good news. Another element of good news is that governments are gradually waking up to the problem, notably the governments of small or fragile states, such as St Kitts, Vanuatu and Liberia that have historically provided safe havens, or flags of convenience, to dubious providers.

What has changed is that these countries now want to develop an indigenous capacity to offer higher education. They realise that it was not a smart move to have allowed a foreign provider to appropriate the country's name for its local outlet, nor is it helpful when all qualifications emanating from the country figure on the informal blacklists of the more alert jurisdictions in the rest of the world.

There is still a way to go, but I hope we can place this issue on the agenda for next year's Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers. The attack on degree mills requires joined-up government. Education ministries must have accreditation systems, trade ministries must not give business licences to higher education institutions without reference to those systems, and heads of state and government should be more careful about giving photo opportunities to smooth-talking con artists.

It is the role of bodies like the Australian Universities Quality Agency to start from the credible end of the continuum between established universities and degree mills and extend the proportion of credible institutions. The key is to instil a professional quality assurance culture that obliges institutions to internalise their quality processes. All branches of government must back these agencies and see that their remit covers all higher education institutions, private and public.

Once countries know which institutions on their territory are credible and which are not they can place those lists on the portal that UNESCO is creating of legitimate accredited institutions.

Private for-profit provision

My second new form and mode of learning is private, for-profit provision. By this, of course, I don't mean degree mills but provision that wants to operate within the higher education framework of its country in a transparent and sustainable way. I say 'wants to operate' because some governments are still very chary about for-profit provision.
In the countries where it is an issue I do not see much point in labouring the distinction between private non-profit and private for-profit institutions. This distinction is perhaps useful in countries that have an effective tax system and a clear and enforceable legislative framework for educational charities. In the US the University of Phoenix, which distributes profits to shareholders, is considered to be different from Harvard, another private university.

In most developing countries the situation is even muddier. When a private college is run by a non-profit family foundation, how many family members can legitimately be supported from the surpluses generated before it should call itself a for-profit operation?

Developing countries with age participation rates in higher education that languish around 10% will never achieve the 30% to 40% figure considered necessary for sustained development without encouraging the private, for-profit sector to expand. The solution surely is to encourage this sector but to subject it to the same quality assurance processes as everyone else in a spirit of complete transparency. This will get some useful questions on the table.

I remember when I was at the UK Open University our Validation Services would hold informal discussions with potential candidate institutions in order to get any issues that might prove be show-stoppers out in the open before any formal process started. One show-stopper was the Open University's requirement that academic staff had a proper degree of individual and collective influence over the shape and content of the curriculum. Institutional owners who wanted to dictate the curriculum themselves had to go somewhere else.

Different jurisdictions will have different takes on this particular issue but the point remains.

By putting all types of public and private institutions within a common national quality assurance framework a country can have a proper debate about what constitutes legitimate quality higher education.

Open and distance learning

My third new form and mode of higher education is open and distance learning. Again, this is not very new. The UK Open University will be 40 years old next year. Before it was created its founders came to Australia to be inspired by practice at the University of New England in Armidale, which already had a respectable history. In another sense however, distance learning is a new mode, in the French sense of à la mode, as eLearning has made it the flavour of the decade.

When I joined the distance learning movement 35 years ago we could hold our international meetings, if not in a telephone booth, at least in a small conference hall. Now it is a big business with conferences every month, including a world summit of open university presidents to be held in Thailand in September to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University.

In terms of quality and standards, distance learning is an easy issue to address. You do not need new approaches to quality and standards for distance learning or, if you do, it is because quality assurance processes are based too much on input measures and therefore probably inappropriate for the times anyway.

It is actually much easier to assure and assess quality in distance learning than in classroom instruction. That is because the materials of distance learning are tangible and its systems explicit. I realised that very clearly when I moved from Canada to the UK as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University in 1990. I arrived there just as the UK embarked on a major reform of higher education and spent the decade overdosing on quality assurance and assessment.

The reform creating higher education funding councils and a quality assurance body. The Open University campaigned, with success, to be fully integrated into this structure and subject to the same criteria for funding and quality assessment as the rest of the system. Whether this obliged the quality agency to focus more on outputs and outcomes than it would have done anyway I don't know, but we found the methodology used fully appropriate.

In particular the system of assessing teaching quality by discipline was very helpful to the Open University. After a decade, when you aggregated the scores for teaching quality across all the disciplines assessed and rank ordered the universities, the Open University came out in 5th place, just above my own alma mater, Oxford. This is the last such table I can show because at that point the research universities campaigned successfully to have the teaching assessment system terminated to avoid further embarrassment.

The main reason that the Open University did well in the QA programme was that it is a quality institution. One element of that quality, which Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor considered to be the OU's major innovation, was the development of courses in teams. A second reason for the very favourable quality judgements was that the OU's teaching and learning system is so transparent and tangible. All learning materials could be examined, all systems reviewed, and the work of tutors sampled.
But is that still true as distance learning has morphed into eLearning? Has this not made distance learning less tangible and transparent because learning materials are in a constant state of change?

Open educational resources

I will close by looking at this question through the lens of an extreme case, the phenomenon of open educational resources.

One can get very scholastic - I use the word in the medieval sense - about open educational resources and how open they are. I will spare you a disquisition on the various kinds of Creative Commons licence and simply assume that an open educational resource is a learning resource that individuals and institutions can use and adapt freely. How do you quality assure such academic putty? It seems to me that the focus has to be on the process rather than the product.

There also has to be a strong element of 'buyer beware' (caveat emptor) or rather, since no money changes hands, of 'borrower beware'. Users must exercise the same caution that they would in taking articles from Wikipedia.

The protagonists of the freedom culture, of which Wikipedia is the most famous expression, are convinced that democracy will yield truth. In other words that the examination and collaborative revision of an article on, say, Canberra, by all who might have views and knowledge about Canberra, will produce an accurate and reliable statement on the city. While this might be true in many cases, academic quality assurance can hardly be based on such an act of faith.

You will all be aware of the problem that the Vice-Chancellor of Griffith University created for himself recently by quoting an article in Wikipedia about Islam without due care and attention.

I am all in favour of online collaboration, and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is thoroughly engaged with it in the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth that we are coordinating on behalf of 30 ministers of education.

However, to be sure that the product of such collaboration is academically solid the process must have some of the checks, balances and processes that have been developed through the course team approach in more traditional distance education. It would be unwise to rely on free-for-all of contributions by enthusiasts.

Throwing the question of quality back to the process may sound like a cop-out. Is it really impossible to kite mark open educational resources and e-learning materials directly, without having to go back and make judgements about the way they were produced?

I am pleased to say that COL's unit in India, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), is making an attempt, working with experts in India and Malaysia to develop a quality kite mark for multimedia materials. But even if this proves possible, any such kite mark would have to carry a 'best before' date, as our Indian governor pointed out at a recent COL Board meeting.

Of course, you could say that any quality assurance approval based on process must also be limited in time, to avoid institutional backsliding. But first, the shelf life of institutional quality approval is likely to be longer and second, it is almost certainly more efficient and economical, in terms of time, effort and simplicity, to quality assure institutions rather than individual learning materials. However, watch this space. We shall see how CEMCA gets on.

Meanwhile, I believe that the challenge is to incorporate some of the discipline and organisation of the course team process into the creation of open education resources or, as the UK Open University has done with its OpenLearn website of OERs, to put the course team discipline in first and then make the result available.

Conclusion

Those, all too briefly, are my thoughts on whether new approaches to quality and standards are required for the new forms and modes of learning represented by: degree mills; private for-profit provision; open and distance learning; and open educational resources. My conclusion is that they are not. If current approaches to quality and standards are solid we should be able to adapt them successfully to the new manifestations of learning that appear.

* John Daniel is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada. He is also former Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, UK, and Assistant Director General for Education of UNESCO. This is a shortened version of his paper for the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2008.