AUSTRALIA: Online studying for the remote and on-the-move

The only troublesome incident Kerry Grace had in four years of studying online for her bachelor of business degree through Open Universities Australia (OUA) was when she was breastfeeding her first baby and had to travel to sit for an examination 90 minutes away. The university she was taking the unit with refused to allow her to bring the baby into the exam room but said she could have a babysitter outside and she could go and feed her baby if she needed to.

Intervention by the academic union resolved the issue and the baby slept quietly beside her mother during the exam; Grace, not having to worry about the little girl, gained a credit. The next two children came along and, as she had them by Caesarean, it meant a week-long stay each time in hospital where she says she was able to complete her assignments with no distractions - again scoring highly.

Increasingly, universities around the world offer units, courses and whole degrees online but what sets the OUA apart is the fact that it offers degrees through seven partner universities that are shareholders in the company while another eight provide further units of study. The seven are scattered across the country with at least one in every state and students who complete the requirements for a degree receive their certificate from one or other of the main seven, although they may also be awarded the qualification from the other eight.

Creation of the OUA via its predecessor, Open Learning Australia, represents one of the great education innovations in this country - both in the way each opened up the possibility of studying at the tertiary level to people living in the cities or in remote corners of this wide brown land, but also because no restrictions are placed in the path of any prospective student.

Yet looking at the history of open learning, it seems amazing when the OLA began in 1991 that there was not more of an outcry in academic circles at the breakdown of the age-old taboos that had governed university access in the past. For there were and still are no entry requirements to undergraduate study, no competition for scarce places and students could and can study anything and everything that is available.

At first, all that was needed was a TV set, a radio and a kind of gritted-teeth determination while today students must have online access - and the same degree of self-discipline. If they last the distance and complete a set number of units satisfactorily, they graduate with a degree from a recognised university and not just an agency, as is the case with other 'open universities' around the globe.

Most students praise the method of learning that gives them not only a huge range, with 750 units and 50 degrees to choose from, but also a flexibility that would have been impossible had they enrolled on-campus. Grace, for example, lives and works along the mid-north coast of New South Wales where the nearest city university is a six-hour drive away. With a full-time business to run and three children to look after, she says she could never have obtained her business degree last year through Swinburne University in Melbourne - including units from five other institutions - without the freedom the OUA offers.

"A lot of women I work with think they can't do this [study at university]," she says. "A friend who is in her mid-50s believed she would never be able to do a university course but since she enrolled with OUA, she now realises not only that she can but that she can do it well. And it's in regional and country areas where the OUA comes into its own, as it means you can extend your education without ever having to leave home."

Another OUA student is 45-year-old Alex Todd who has been an IT contractor for 20 years but is now completing a bachelor of technology degree through RMIT University. Todd began a pharmacology degree after leaving school but dropped out and went into the IT industry. Two decades on, he saw the OUA's annual course guide in a newsagent, picked it up and suddenly realised here was his chance to finish a degree without having to study on campus.

"I'm a perennial non-completer of things," he says. "The idea of enrolling in a traditional university always struck me as too hard, having to attend lectures or tutorials, whereas with the OUA it's self-paced learning where I can do my study when I want to in my home or on the train. It has been so convenient I don't have excuses any more and now I'm happily doing well."

Todd says he could not speak more highly of the course in terms of flexibility: "The fact you learn at your own pace, in your own time and in your own home has been a godsend. It has cut down on the travelling time I would have had to do had I enrolled for on-campus and now, with a wireless connection and a laptop, I can read my study notes while going into work on the train."

The origins of the OUA are now almost lost in the mists of time but it began more than 16 years ago with television as the medium of instruction. TV has long been accused of helping scrub any tell-tale traces of grey matter from Australian minds yet when the then Labor government decided to create a 'television university' a new world of learning opened to thousands of Australians.

Those who signed up the first year ranged from youngsters in secondary school to old-timers in their 90s. Many were not interested in a formal qualification; they were simply curious to learn something new. Nothing as novel as this had ever been tried in Australia and although the organisers believed only a few hundred students might enrol in each subject, they were staggered when 40,000 people inquired about the courses.

By the time anthropology and environmental studies were offered, some 5,000 Australians had enrolled and thousands of others had bought the study notes just to learn by themselves. At the end of the trial year, more students were taking part in the project than were enrolled in some of the nation's smaller universities.

The pilot project became a fully-fledged scheme, operated by the Open Learning Agency of Australia, with 75 subjects on offer by the end of 1993. Although the notion of learning at a distance from a university campus was hardly new, for the first time anywhere in the world 18 universities were collaborating to offer courses that each would recognise and give credit for.

For the first time,, ABC television and radio were being used as a medium of university instruction and, for the first time too, access to higher education was open to anyone whatever their previous educational attainments.

In 2004, the then federal Education Minister signed an authorisation allowing the OLA to change its name and incorporate the word 'university' in its title. Today, Open Universities Australia has more than 25,000 students enrolled.

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com