Welcome to the first European Distance Education Network's opening event in recognition of Open Education Week. I'm Mark Nichols, Director of TAAL at the Open University UK. I'm a member of the Eden Executive Committee and also your moderator for this webinar. So good evening, good morning and also good afternoon. We have over 130 participants registered for this event from Europe, the UK, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Costa Rica, India, South Africa, Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Australia and even New Zealand and if I've missed out your country I can only apologise. I think the interest in this webinar comes from not only our speakers but also the subject we've selected, the future of the Distance Education University, no doubt of interest to all gathered here for this particular webinar. Rather than introduce each speaker on the right hand side you'll see under the presenter notes there are some links there for anyone wanting to find out more about this evening's presenters. There's no way I could do them justice in the limited time that I have, far rather get out of the way and let them actually speak to you all about the subject for tonight. That will be running things. Each presenter will speak for around about eight minutes in the order listed on the presenter notes. Please use the chat area to make some comments as people present and also to post some questions and I'll ask those questions toward the end of the webinar. We won't be activating participant microphones it's way too complicated to do that so if you could use the chat window instead that would be wonderful. And the event is being recorded and will be published through Eden. So we've asked each presenter to address five questions which you'll see there on the slide and also on the right hand side under the presenter notes. So let me get out of your way and we will start off by having Sir John Daniel talk with us about the questions. So Sir John Daniel over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much and good morning to you all. It's slightly ironic that three of the speakers in this European distance education seminar live within walking distance of each other's houses in Vancouver. That's Ross, Tony and myself. My comments entitled where do open universities think they're going are based on a closed round table of some open university executive heads that was held last October in Toronto. Quickly my own background is I go back almost as long with open universities as Tony Bates. I did a three-month internship there in its second year in 1972 and then sometime later was Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University from 1990 to 2001. So I became deeply imbued with the values of that institution and open universities generally and these four opens, openness to people, openness to places, openness to methods and openness to ideas featured in nearly all the speeches that I made. Clearly the problem today which became very evident in our round table in Toronto was that many of the clothes that the open universities put on when they started have been stolen by other institutions. So have they become the victims of their own success? Briefly we decided to take advantage of the online learning conference in Toronto last October to hold this closed round table and Maxine JaLouis who did a brilliant job of organising that world conference, arranged for us to have a day before the conference in order to hold this round table of executive heads of open universities. A key player in that was Alan Tate who sadly can't be with us today from the UK OU who prepared a background paper for the event called Open Universities The Next Fence. We planned this event rather carefully and over quite a long period. We began more than a year in advance contacting some 60 open university heads and expected about 20 participants. In the event with visa problems, travel and so on, only nine were able to attend which was a bit disappointing but I think we got some useful conclusions out of it anyway. So we asked them a number of questions as we went round. These are the people who were there representing quite a variety of open universities although not as many as I would have liked overall. During the course of the day, each executive head got to work with each other executive head in smaller groups or in plenaries. So there was a lot of discussion. The questions we asked them were are missions evolving? Are demographics changing? How do OUs compete to win? What are the implications of operating at scale? The opportunities for collaboration and how to combine flexibility, quality and scale? Taking these one by one, missions evolving. Two of the open universities who are with us are now offering significant on-campus programs and all were aware of the implications for them of the UN Sustainable Development Goals which unlike the earlier Millennium Development Goals explicitly refer to higher education as a goal. Another issue that came up is to ask whether there's a limit to how large an open university can become before the wheels fall off and have they become a bit complacent now that they've become mega universities. In terms of demographics, it's quite a varied picture. Some such as Italy are seeing more older students but by and large the students in open universities are getting younger and they're also focusing more on shorter programs than on degree programs. How do open universities compete? Although some OUs are entirely online, outside the West most still use printed materials extensively and I think one of the conclusions of the day was that you shouldn't just focus the use of technology on pedagogy that the emerging country open universities are having considerable success with using it for some of their complex and large-scale administrative operations but basically coming to grips of online learning seems to be the challenge that they are all facing. We also came to the conclusion that some of the smaller open universities have perhaps adopted too much the industrial model of mega universities and trying to operate as if they're operating scale of hundreds of thousands when they're actually not and could perhaps get some advantages by having more human involvement and less in the way of systems. In the group we were talking to and I think more generally the open university UK is an exception in having made a very major commitment to MOOCs so we didn't spend a lot of time discussing MOOCs during the course of the event. On the question of collaboration there's extensive course sharing among the India state OUs and most OUs do have partnerships and of course are finding that the challenge of managing those partnerships is greater when they're offshore. Spend time discussing the balance between flexibility quality and scale and the conclusion there I think that flexibility is the current buzzword and is obviously a good thing but you can have too much flexibility and having some structure and some kind of regime for studies that the students can relate to is important. A major problem still is that most heads found that the reputation of distance learning is still poor and indeed that the terms distance and sometimes even open are not helpful and this is a time of course when the conventional universities have come back with a very big emphasis on on the rankings so that it's quite hard to make access seem like an attractive proposition when everyone's talking about excellence and rankings. We didn't actually ask a question about OUs relation to government but that came up anyway and frequently during the day and I think the conclusion was that it's extremely important not only for open universities to stay very close to their governments but that one of their strengths is that they can use their power and reach to help governments achieve their own policies and the sustainable development goals are a good example of that. So in conclusion even with the small sample we had it was clear that open universities are a very diverse reality with great variations in size, mission and pedagogy but whether the terms open and distance are helpful or not the open universities are proud of their achievements in opening up higher education and bringing it to new places and because of that and because they feel that the values are mapped on to overall global goals like the sustainable development goals they feel that they have the right values and vision for the times even if they have to work very hard to implement those in an effective way for the current era so those are my comments so thank you very much I look forward to hearing my colleagues. Wonderful thank you Sir John and we joined Tony in applauding you for that presentation. First I need to put in my apologies there are presenter notes visible to those of us who are presenters but not available to all participants so I'll just link you through to the information about each of our speakers in this webinar my apologies for that. Thank you Sir John some wonderful themes there for us to pick up on I'd now like to hand over to Ross Paul to give us some more insight as to the future of the distance education university thank you Ross. I just want to in starting out I want to set out the context and assumptions that I'm making I think these questions that we've been asked to look at are as relevant to traditional campus-based institutions as they are to open universities and my primary focus is on the west on OECD country universities and some of the analysis would be somewhat different in developing countries and I again my main interest is open universities but I'm assuming the vast majority of distance teaching institutions are but not all so challenge is facing all universities today rapidly changing technologies social media artificial intelligence that are increasingly challenging the exclusive domain of university and of course the impact of social media on learning behaviors of students some positive some negative are very much in in the bulk all institutions have expensive infrastructures that can frustrate flexibility and responsiveness to change as can faculty and staff resistance to change in an age of enhanced accountability there's threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy and the complexity of all this means that recruitment to leadership positions is increasingly difficult regardless of the kind of institution I think the challenges that are specific to open universities include sometimes a sort of self-identified innovative pioneer feeling before Sir John arrived at the OU in the late 80s I did a bit of a study of attitudes towards change at the OU UK OU and found that there was more resistance to change there than an oxbridge I don't know to what extent that's changed I think the biggest one I can think of is adapting the industrial model to retain its cost advantages while adapting to online learning and that I hope there'll be good discussion about that because I think that is a huge challenge for open universities in some cases also continuing to fight to to lower to increase completion rates and recognizing this huge competition from residential institutions that offer increased flexibility blended learning flip classrooms and more student support also there's a loss of identity or or less identity when the UK OU started it was so clearly different that it had a whole cache of recognition just from that as we blur the distinction across institutions that competitive advantage is challenged and it's very important for each institution to be very clear about what it is also recruiting non-conventional faculty and academic leaders is dedicated to the mission of an open university it's a continuing problem as many traditional academics take positions there with their enhanced reputation and they're not necessarily dedicated to the institutional mission in mandate and as Sir John mentioned ongoing quality and reputational concerns about open and distance learning. Conventional institutions kind of come from the opposite direction but they have their their same challenges training faculties for new modes of teaching and learning and especially managing the transition from a very individualistic approach where the professor was supreme in the classroom to a much more integrated approach and in a recent study of online learning in Canada spearheaded by Tony Bates we found that many institutional leaders were really unaware of what extent online learning was going on in their institution but as that became more and more obvious and more and more prevalent more and more universities were starting to build it in the strategic planning and really looking for a more integrated approach of course with great resistance to not just to the change but even the very notion that the institution could intervene so dramatically in the teaching and learning process and another interesting thing I found in looking at I picked a journal the the online journal of distance learning administration and between 2005 and 2011 there were 199 articles about distance learning and only one of those 200 actually mentioned any of the top five researchers from the open university movement and that was somebody from Penn State who cited all five so I think that we've missed something here with with institutions missing each other I think the most successful universities of the future will have a very strong and focused identity and purpose that and they will enjoy a concomitant academic reputation for doing something really well they will respond effectively to students as consumers have demonstrably successful graduates have faculty dedicated to their mission realize cost efficiency and effectiveness have a supportive community whether it's local national and or international have the flexibility to build new technologies into their processes on an ongoing basis and increasingly provide effective student support services well what does this mean for the future of open universities I think notwithstanding the significant tensions in sustaining their initial competitive advantage they're still in in relatively good shape I think they have to pay more attention to brand differentiation I think that open admissions and asynchronous learning remain huge advantages in an age of lifelong learning they have to pay a lot of attention to quality assurance following Gary Rosenblatt and as I said earlier modify the industrial model to gain flexibility without major cost increases the future prospects are not the same for all I think mega universities in developing countries where accessibility is a screaming overwhelming need will continue to flourish mega universities in developed countries need to find ways to sustain their enrollments and economies of scale but they should do all right high prestige research intensive universities are here to stay and increasingly smaller residential universities that really focus on teaching and learning and providing us support of student social life will flourish I think the future is less optimistic for smaller distance teaching universities that can't sustain the industrial model and utter and are at a competitive disadvantage with more flexible conventional institutions and comprehensive universities that are still trying to be too many things too many differently on tell are going to be increasingly in trouble this leads me to think we're going to see a lot more collaboration across conventional and distance teaching universities and even amalgamations that might produce effective hybrid institutions we know that a single institution is less regularly the whole answer for a given student and that more part-time study more credit transfer more cross institutional partnerships we are although maybe slow to be adapted these are increasingly going to be part of the future I leave you with some questions for discussion our distance teaching universities and difficulty in your country does it really matter whether the open university as an institutional structure prevails can an institution both retain the industrial model and provide opportunity and support to individual students and do you believe that conventional institutions are changing sufficiently to maintain their predominance uh and a few references and I one advertisement I'd like to put a plug in for erodal Alan Tate and I are co-editing an early 2019 edition on the open university and its future those who have an interest should go on the website the deadline for outline submissions is March 31st and for publication the data is July 31st so I encourage you to do that that was a free commercial from me that's wonderful thanks Ross and again our thanks to you for that presentation if you could perhaps link to the special edition of a rattle in the chat area I think that'd be quite useful for participants to to pick up on so there were a few questions there on a previous slide we may come back to those if we have sufficient time once we've had the participant questions toward the end of tonight's session I'd like to hand over now to Antonio Tegzara who will take us through his perspective on those questions to be discussed during the webinar thank you Antonio well thank you Michael and Mark sorry just okay I'd like also first to thank the invitation it's really an honor and a privilege to be sharing this webinar with Sir John Ross and Tony and first of all I'd like to to say good good evening good afternoon and good morning to everyone well actually my approach although I've come from an open university was more try to see the problem from a perspective that the distance in education university as such not necessarily from an open university of course I believe we all agree on most of the challenges I had well I've just selected a few and as you can see in the end on the slide first of all I've identified what I call the proliferation of online higher education provision providers this does not mean only that most of the institutions nowadays being traditional or not are offering online education and open education there is also a change in the type of the providers and now we are witnessing also experiencing also groups of citizens just network of people combining and joining and actually starting an open university also an operation as such it's not an institution but it's starting to work as such and we're seeing in society a clear mistrust about institutions and people are just joining in and forming networks of learning and this is something that will affect us also in the future well one of the risks of this is of course the decrease on quality standards of course on the provision but also something which I believe it's quite important which is the loss of expertise and the central role of expertise in course design and delivery another important aspect especially here in Europe it's the accreditation of this entire occasion programs and courses especially when there are formal course programs but nowadays we are also witnessing an increased combination of formal and informal provision and this is something that is now on the table and especially in Europe we need to adapt what just the document which actually regulates the accreditation programs to online provision there's also a lack of regulation cross-border higher education there is also an emerging demand that is something that I also identified for can be the combination of scalability on one side but also personalization and openness of our provision and the services that we provide so this is something that we should also be addressed and a major challenge is also this institutional identity crisis that we are all feeling and in a way implies that these business education universities reposition themselves and try to enhance their differentiation in relation to the other universities how can what can be the best response to this challenge is well one of one of these possibilities could be or implies the redefinition of the business notion of business and also of the territory of the university for instance at the European University of Portugal the territory is basically a cultural one it's not the territory on a geographical sense it's the land the countries that speak Portuguese and so it's a more cultural based notion of territory and we have to make the business education universities in authority again this is something that I believe it's it's an important response to the challenges that have been put forward one other aspect relates to the establishment of alliances with traditional institutions this has already been also identified by Ross once again the the focus on leading research in technology enhanced and business learning and to improve the transfer of innovation from research to political practice this is something that I think is a little bit missing in currently in our institutions also a very important thing is to develop experiment and implement political enrich online learning design models which are actually enabling learners to acquire higher order skills not this is still a problem in a sense and at the same time also to introduce innovative content space evaluation and certification practices we are all in eating also needing this well I'll skip the others in for the sake of time but you can find it here on the on the slide an important aspect deals with teacher teacher training and teacher training and of course the training of students and learners to learn in open learning environment this is something that now all universities are applying and this is critical for the success of their learning experiences of course also the the introduction of personal intelligence this is something that is coming on and we have to look at it in a very organized and integrated way and another aspect to the more institutional one or linked with institutional culture we have to transform the distance education universities into continuous learning organizations themselves um we we've been asked to suggest a possible vision for the future distance education university this is just a proposal um these universities are these my proposals these universities are special design institutions which use um an open network organization of framework this is something that I think it's clearly very critical for the the new model of these universities and they dedicate or commit themselves to advanced research innovation technology has learning as well as the traditional mission of widening access and pretty special interrogation for all independent left context condition and barriers but because of this modular and scalable design these universities are also more prepared than others to swiftly adjusting to changing societal challenges and needs and this is something that could differentiate them um clearly in another question that was asked was about what is unique in these institutions while I might suggest in this that is of course the know-how experience and the legacy the based on research also the fact that they have an integrated approach to technology and has learning design and delivery they have fully online learning they provide a fully online learning experience they have specially trained teaching and teaching staff and have dedicated infrastructure and technological resources this actually sets them apart from the others how might they become more flexible to or flexible enough to adapt to new markets and opportunities well just we will see here a number of suggestions of course starting by industrializing and networking but one of the most important aspects is to review or in a way to change the organizational model and I clearly think that unbundling their services is part of it also um re-centering the university operations around research and innovation this is also something that I feel it's quite critical and in also in a more open approach also to involve learners more increasingly more in-course co-design processes as well and finally to implement an open framework technological infrastructure so these are basically a number of ideas that I believe try to address the questions that were asked but of course in conclusion I believe that we'll find also a lot of ideas in common I would agree with most of what Ross has already pointed out and also the conclusions by Sir John so I tried to just add a number of um suggestions additional suggestions thank you wonderful Antonio thank you very good presentations very clear themes coming through now from all three of our presenters so far and some good questions coming through too please do keep those coming through our last presenter in the webinar is Tony Bates and Tony I will hand things over to you now thank you feel a little bit nervous about doing this because it's many many years since I worked in a distance teaching university so I'm not all that sure that I have the right to say anything here but that won't stop me anyway why I'm hesitant about this is every country is different and critical for any open university or distance teaching university is continuous on ongoing market research and particularly paying attention to demographics and how that's going to impact on the higher education system um I'll say that because in the United States their actual overall course in overall university and college enrollments are dropping because of demographics they're actually going down whereas many universities have come into existence because the demographics was suggesting that the university's conventional universities couldn't cope so it's absolutely critical for whichever country you're in to pay attention to this the second issue is is the political situation and what I call social license to be an open university I think in the UK that social license has been lost because of the government ideology and if you're in that situation that's very desperate because once you lose that social license for whatever reason it's not the fault of the open university but it becomes then very difficult to to to survive so actually I think the point was made that you can't always be loved by government but you must be not hated enough by any single government otherwise you're in real trouble um so it comes down in the end whatever country you're in to finding a niche within the existing higher education system and actually adding value that the other institutions can't do um and that answer that niche will be different depending on the context in which you're working so there are no general answers to this to many of the questions raised so what are the big challenges well now Canada may be an outlier here but 83 percent of conventional Canadian public university in colleges now offer distance education courses so it's no longer a distinct advantage to be a distance teaching institution in terms of methodology anyone and similarly with access 75 percent of all people in the 20 age 21 cohort in Canada now go on to some form of two-year college or university education but within that there are still big differences only 51 percent of Aboriginal people go on to university and only 61 percent of first generation students that students whose parents can go to university so there's still an opening there in that market for more for for opening up access and the other the other big challenge for distance teaching universities are the providers of alternative services such as MOOCs when you have MIT and Harvard competing with you you are in trouble actually whether they have the whether they deserve the right to do that or not is another question it's just their sheer reputation puts you on the back foot alternative qualifications such as badges not necessarily issued even by higher education institutions new methods such as competency based learning which the Western Governors University in the US has been very successful with and blockchain blockchain I think will be important because it will give you a secure untamperable qualification the way of handling qualifications that can that that employers can use to see what is what what competencies a student has got so what's the best response to these challenges well as I said find a local niche in higher education that serves the underserved and provide globally accredited qualifications I think this is the big challenge because the big market of course for everybody is in third world countries where they don't have very strong higher education systems but what those students want is the ability to bring those credentials into developed countries and get jobs there and without that ability to transfer credits it's a really big challenge and one of the things I would love to see the the distance teaching universities and conventional universities is getting together to challenge the girls the professional engineers accountants and so on which still refuse to accept any qualifications in that's done at a distance and I put up a graph here from Queen's University which is a conventional university in Canada but the oldest one offering distance education and what they've done is work with the employers in Ontario because they're running out of engineers it's a demographic issue all the old engineers are qualified engineers are retiring but they've got a lot of good workers who are not qualified so they're offering a bachelor's of art a bachelor of arts in mining engineering for working miners now that that's the kind of partnership between institutions and employers that I would like to see happening a lot more they're actually going around the professional association of engineers in Ontario that won't recognize and this this program is under credited by the professional engineers of Ontario but to be honest those working in the mines don't care because they got a job already but they just get a better job as a result so one of the things I think even in developed countries is to aim the under-deserved in developing countries such as refugees women and the disabled and so on I really like the Kieran University model in Germany that helps prepare refugees for for work in developed countries and that means partnering with alternative funding sources foundations charities and UN agencies and partner with local institutions and agencies in developing countries I don't think you can do this on your own you have to work with local partners so what the vision for the future well I think that must come from within the organisation it's got to come from the people working there but if I was asked I would say focus on access and adding value to the traditional higher education systems obviously be best at digital learning how many distance teaching universities are not best at digital learning they're way behind what many convention universities are doing now and they can't survive if they're not ahead of the game high quality internationally recognized qualifications that's got to be essential and of course a focus on lifelong learning the market in the future in developed countries is going to be the lifelong learning market that's going to be greater than the students coming out of high school and that's a real advantage for distance teaching universities because convention universities aren't very good at that lifelong learning market particularly in the credit based areas they offer good continuing education programs but they're not very good at getting their main faculty to think about lifelong learning because they're thinking of graduate what the faculty are interested in is getting good research students and good graduates that will become good research professors and so on so I think the lifelong learning market will remain very important for distance teaching universities how to become more flexible well certainly distance teaching universities require a more agile lighter lower cost course design and development now I'm not saying you don't need an industrial model to handle admissions and student records and so on but you certainly need a different model that most distance teaching universities still have for designing courses I mean taking two years to design a course now is ridiculous it should be you should be able to design a good quality course in three weeks um I like Antonio's point about engaging learners in course construction I think that's one way to really make courses relevant with lifelong learners in particular who bring a lot of life experience um into into courses and that's not that's often underused in the way we design our courses better links with the employers as I suggested more direct links more adjuncts and contract instructors not for the delivery of courses but for the design and development of courses but working with professional instructional designers and the reason for that is that the knowledge base is changing so rapidly that you want to bring people in who've got that specialist expertise for a very short period that course may only last two or three years and then you throw it out and bring another one in and that means more flexibility in the central faculty and disposable courses for immediate market needs I've got an example down here on the right from University of British Columbia which is the course changes every year it's how to set up a high tech company and each year they focus on different technologies so the content changes every year and the content's often driven by the participants in the course who often know that content area better than the instructors do but what the instructors provide is a framework for learning to enable those that kind of teaching to take place um I think as I said you need to be world leaders in educational uses of digital technologies particularly apps virtual reality and artificial intelligence and I would like to see some distance teaching universities develop their own online international startup companies in partnership with industry and government and that will be a very good way to learn about the market and also to enable high tech developments within their own organizations so in conclusion I don't think there is an easy no easy answer for distance teaching universities it will vary from country to country but there's still a great need for alternatives to the current system there are still a lot holes and gaps that need to be plugged and failed but if that to survive distance teaching universities need to change radically and quickly and I don't see that happening thank you wonderful thank you Tony a very provocative finish there and I think you are right that we need to change radically and quickly to survive there are some wonderful themes that have come through across all presenters let me just run through some of those quickly firstly online learning is a common theme obviously there are some competitive pressures there but the benefits of flexibility quality and scale have been pointed out but also the challenges of maintaining those as the future unfolds competitively all presenters talked about alliances and collaboration including working with partners and employers that was pointed out that we need to take a system view quite a few presenters mentioned the political fit of the distance university so John challenged distance and open helpful terms for us as we move forward Ross suggested that the questions and challenges are relevant to all universities and possibly some of the solutions are as well there's some other interesting points made about research into practice and the openness to the undeserved potentially as a way forward but as Tony pointed out there is no easy answer there have been a number of very interesting questions come through but before turning to those let me just ask our presenters if any of them have questions for one another and if so please please take the microphone and ask your questions thank you it's Ross I think a provocative question is what would happen if distance teaching universities as as such didn't make it and we lost them what what would we lose well this is John here I I think we would lose the focus on access to a wider clientele which is not there's has been said very easy for the conventional universities it seems to me that one of the big problems at the moment and explains the the election of Trump and the brexit in the UK is the division of society into two groups a group that have university degrees and a group that don't and the people with university degrees tend to run the show and the people who don't tend to be struggling in those two countries at least and I think more widely so I do think there's a a mission for open universities to really try and get into those people that are sometimes called the somewheres the people are rooted in local realities and and have a much more if you like restricted worldview than those who've been to university and this really ties in I think to the sustainable development goals I really like Tony's idea of social license and I grieve entirely in some of the western countries that social license has been lost but I think globally the SDGs give a terrific social license for trying to reach a completely new group of people so that the developing countries don't encounter the problems that Britain and the US and some European countries are experiencing of an alienated less educated group and conventional higher education I think is a large part of that problem well this is Antonio I'd like to compliment if I may on this question I agree that the social agenda is something that is critical for the mission itself of the open universities in particular since we're now focusing on open universities but it's also true that in my view that there is a difference between the European open universities for instance and the open universities for instance in Asia in Asia open universities are clear very much linked to the social agenda in Europe we have lost a little bit the connection with the social agenda so this open license that Tony was talking about in Europe it has to be reclaimed in a sense in my view also an important aspect when Ross asks the question well but do we still need dedicated open universities if which cannot just the others assume that role this is the question that is being asked by governments everywhere and especially in Europe this is bringing quite an important challenge for the open universities and most of them are finding difficulty difficult to answer and this is something that I think we have to reflect upon and have to in a way improve our own understanding of what is our social role and mission and also our role in terms of being the front runners and development of online learning and at the same time also being the the the carriers of the legacy the research legacy as well and it is something that I think it's critical because if you look at the institutions which are not dedicated as such to distance education they will not invest in fundamental research they will not invest in research which is not very much close to just experimenting very small things that could improve a little bit the practice will not invest in a continuous way on research and distance on online learning on digital education as Tony was mentioning and I think this is critical that there are institutions who can assume that role and in that sense be piloting the development of higher education as well if you look at higher education in the last years who has been researching on the quality of learning probably us more than others and I think this is something that should be thought lost very important points let me turn to one of the questions asked by one of our participants Sandra asks have students of open education universities changed over time and are students coming from the same ages backgrounds and needs comments from the panel on that question I'm in the point John here that in this small round table we held in Toronto we we saw things going both ways the open university in Italy Nechudo is getting more older students but in general and this has been going on for a long time the age demographic of open university seems to be decreasing and this is partly associated also with the move to shorter cycle qualifications and then I remember when I was at the university this actually created us quite a problem because we were we made the assumption that most of our students were sort of median age somewhere in the 30s mid to late 30s and when that moved back into the mid to late 20s you really got a rather different demographic and you had to adapt your pedagogy and course content to to deal with that because these were not adults with families and all the things that go with that so it's another part and I think Tony made the point very forcefully that you've got to see you've got to keep right up with your market research know who it is you're dealing with because the people you're dealing with yesterday may not be the people you have to deal with today well this is a Tony if I can just add something from the Portuguese experience in the last couple of years there's also an interesting aspect to add well throughout Europe and in in our case as well there has been a decrease in the average age of the students of course but and we're getting we're receiving ever more younger students but there's also an element which is interesting to reflect upon we define with the economical crisis it got it became much more important for young people to secure a job and so their first first concern is to find a job only then to complete their qualifications and that has favored in many situations the fact that they find and open universities a solution for the for their own for this problem that they have so they focus on finding a job first and then complete their higher education qualifications so great and that certainly mirrors the avenue university situation today as well let me flick to a more provocative question an interesting one here from jay Francisco Alvarez who asks are small changes to the industrial model enough perhaps we must think about other innovative models and he talks about whether we need to go from cabs to uber I wonder if the panel might have some comments on that particular question well Marcus nobody is the same something at this point I can just start off I agree with the with the pack with the house of Francisco and and this is something that I've just suggested in my presentation that we should change the organizational models as such and for it could include of course some bundling of services also to involve the entire community in networks for instance co-producing courses co-designing courses and all of these so there's a lot of new possibilities of changing not just the business model but the entire organizational model opening up networking it with thank you intern here any other panelists want to weigh on that particular I think my microphone's muted okay now I'm open yeah I think the the issue here is one of how big the organization is in terms of industrial model I think we do need to be able to manage large numbers of students efficiently and that means some some kind of model that will handle very large numbers but it depends what you mean by an industrial model what we're seeing for instances is a breaking down these large single IT systems for instance into smaller subunits that are more flexible and more adaptable to the needs of individual departments within the institution so for instance if you're running a first year arts course with thousands of students you've probably got one system running but if you're running graduate courses for say a hundred or a hundred and fifty you could have a more flexible system for that so the big problem is the investment that institutions already made in their existing systems and and also the power that the people who manage those systems have in decision making within the institution so unless that changes then then it's going to be very difficult for a very large industrial organization based distance teaching university to change very good point I think we've got time for one more question from the chat I'm happy to report that at least one of our presenters is quite open to answering the other questions by email those from ever and also Sandra but let me just pose this last one for this evening what do you think would be the better strategy to pursue Alton asks to persuade faculty at conventional universities or build a new capacity to deliver open distance education programs perspectives from the panel please do you repeat the question yes what do you think would be the better strategy to pursue to persuade faculty at conventional universities to respond to these challenges or build a new capacity to deliver open distance education programs thanks Tony I think you had your hand up there too yeah actually I think it is happening already in Canada it may not be the same in other countries but one of the other projects I worked on recently is called pockets of innovation I went around Canada in interviewing faculty on conventional universities who were using technology for teaching and what they're doing they're discovering technology for themselves and they are experimenting without any background necessarily pedagogy or ed tech and then they're realizing they need help and they're going to their local centers so you have to have somebody there that faculty can turn to now the model often has been to try to push that into the faculty and I don't think that that works so faculty have to be ready to move in these directions but you need to have the support in place when they are ready to move and I think it's both bottom up and top down I think the central administration has to have a strategy and a policy for distance education and online learning within the institution and so faculty are aware that this is a direction in which the university wants to move but it also has to come from the bottom up where faculty are using technology nearly all the cases I saw to solve a teaching problem they've got a problem and they saw how the technology could help resolve that teaching problem and then that opens the door to bringing in things like learning objectives course design and so on but it has to start with the faculty member you can't force it down I would really agree with that and I am optimistic because I'm seeing some significant change because there is an excitement around some of the some of the opportunities and some of the developments and in institutions where there's more of a dialogue where there's some leadership from the top there is a more concerted effort to integrate it's going to take some considerable time because as I said earlier it's not just about change it's that whole notion that the institution can intervene and try and bring everybody together so it's kind of ironic that the open universities achieve that from the outset and are now having to undo a lot of the industrial model because it's too cumbersome and inflexible so they're coming from one direction and the universities the conventional universities are coming from the other direction where they're having to integrate what faculty are doing in ways they've never done before and that's really going to take time but it is happening and that I think a lot of our discussion offices addressed developed countries in the developing countries I think that the problem is very different because there that's where the millions hundreds or tens of millions of new students will be coming from in the next two decades and there I really do think you need big systems to deal with not so much degree level study but the kind of employment related stuff that I was talking about earlier so I think it's a horses for courses and different models in different parts of the world well if I may just add something as well I would reply that well apart from the comment that Sir John made and I agree as well there are different realities across the world even focusing in Europe or also in the US and Canada I think that there is a place for both so for technology has learning on one side and also for the development of dedicated distance education and open and distance education structures these are not fundamentally the same and will develop different things and will have different capabilities and I think this is important to keep both wonderful thanks to the panel for their responses to that question well it's now coming up to the hour let me thank our presenters our prestigious presenters for their their time this evening and presenting with the in the morning for most of them for what they've shared with us I wonder if everyone in the participant list could either change their status to applaud or us just and note their thanks in the chat window to our presenters for this particular webinar thank you great some good comments coming through there let me remind you that there are some other events happening in open education week through Eden do check the website for the next events coming up and thank you again to our presenters and to everyone who's joined us for this evening's webinar much appreciated and I hope you found it both very useful also very entertaining I've certainly found it very insightful and again thank you to the presenters and to all participants for joining us thank you mark thank you for organizing it yep good show thank you thank you thank you