Sir John Daniel has served as vice chancellor of the British Open University in Milton Keynes, England, since 1990. He earned advanced degrees at Oxford University and the University of Paris before moving to Canada, where he directed his attention to the development of open and distant learning. He held positions as vice president at Athabasca University in Alberta and Concordia University in Quebec, before becoming president of Laurentian University in Ontario in 1984. He also has served as president of the International Council for Distance Education. Daniel is author of Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Kogan Page Limited, 1996). In 1994, he was knighted for services to higher education. Daniel serves as a consultant to FSU on its distance learning initialtives.
 

RINR: How do you see delivery of distance education differing in the U.S. from in the UK and other European countries? Will it be necessary to Americanize the OU’s present courses to make them acceptable to students in the U.S.? Will you offer any of your courses in their present British format?

Daniel: We envisage greater use of partnerships, for example, through articulation arrangements with other institutions, than in Europe. We shall also offer greater flexibility in course time-tabling. We shall proceed in a cautious way over Americanization. Our business courses have already shown that they can travel internationally. We shall offer shorter courses than in the UK but survey students extensively to discover whether this is actually necessary. We shall not adapt content extensively, but then we are choosing courses that are the most likely to travel readily.

RINR: Given that there are more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., do you think there is still a large unserved population that will use distance education? The OU already has an annual worldwide enrolment of 200,000 students. How much expansion of OU’s enrollment in the next five years or so do you project by coming to the United States?

Daniel: The honest answer is that we don’t know, but as the shoe magnate Tomas Bata once said, ‘If you want to sell shoes, go to a country where they wear shoes’. Even a tiny proportion of the U.S. higher education market is large in absolute terms. However, the fact that the University of Phoenix planned to be a distance education institution and then became a largely campus operation when the market drove it that way suggests caution. Note that the OU will not be enrolling students in the U.S. USOU is a separate institution. I would be happy if USOU had 10,000 students five years after launch.

RINR: Can you identify any particular problems of a traditional university like FSU becoming a dual-mode institution?

Daniel: The general problem is that there are very few examples of successful dual-mode institutions. The campus tends to dominate and numbers in the distance program are usually small. The difficulty is to graft different working styles (faculty teamwork, division of labor, specialization within the teaching function) onto the individualistic, cottage industry tradition of the campus.

RINR: Over the past five years, FSU has gradually and carefully undertaken its distance education initiatives. Do you have any advice for us as we continue this work?

Daniel: I think FSU has made a good start. It was slow and hesitant until about mid-1998 but I observe that it is now moving well. My advice would be to go for scale, rather than letting the distance program drift into being mainly an enrichment program for campus students–which often happens. I think that the way you have got the community colleges involved is excellent and gives FSU a unique selling point compared to most such initiatives.

RINR: How do you see the Internet and the Web in relation to the delivery of courses in the U.S.? How will the Internet affect the internationalization of education? Does the OU plan to move more of its current course offerings on to a Web-supported mode?

Daniel: We’ll take advantage of the greater on-line penetration in the U.S.. However, we must be aware of the growing backlash against on-line instruction and the fact that our accreditation team strongly urged us not to go 100 percent on-line. As regards internationalization, remember that the Internet is still largely a U.S. phenomenon, just as cellular phones are largely a Europe/Asia phenomenon. My earlier response about caveat emptor applies. In 20 years’ time the Indians will have swept the board with on-line education but that is a long way away.

RINR: What do you see as the greatest challenge for distance learning?