It is a tradition that the Chairman does not have a column in the newsletter, but all traditions need shaking up from time to time. This column allows me to let you know of a few major events in my life and work, which have had some knock-on effects on LearnTel.
First of all, I am leaving the Open University. After nearly 25 years in various jobs in the Open University, I have been given the major honour of being offered the new post of Professor of Telematics at Sheffield Hallam University. Professors of Telematics are a rare breed, at least in the UK, so rare that I would very much like to hear from any others. Perhaps we can form some sort of exclusive society, or an EU consortium at least!
Sheffield Hallam University has perhaps the typical profile of a potential early adopter of telematics. It is newly incorporated as a university, but has a strong history and current successful track record. It has 22,000 students, which is large by UK standards, and over the last few years has begun to move rapidly into the distance education area. In my new Faculty, the School of Computing and Management Sciences, I will have 700 students studying Masters-level courses at a distance, including 200 outside the UK. That is already over 35% of all our students - very much in line with the thinking on the "new majority" of off-campus students piloted by Steve Ehrmann of the Annenberg Foundation. You can assume that telematic support to my new students will develop rapidly.
Indeed, in many ways I will be continuing the line of work I have been developing over the last 15 years. And moving to what we in the "open university" world call the "traditional university" sector also gives me the chance to try out in this sector the theories on telematic-based distance education that I have been developing over the last few years with colleagues, most notably with my co-worker Dr Robin Mason of the OU, but also with colleagues in EADTU, JANUS and LearnTel. Much of this theoretical work is being elaborated, with suitable case studies, in the two-volume work that Robin and I are writing on "re-engineering the campus".
Does OU experience, so often admired but so seldom copied, really work outside its core sector? We shall see. But as I have often said to visitors to the OU "learn from us, don’t copy us".
Any local good news must be judged in the light of changes elsewhere in the system. After a period of steady growth, universities in the UK are now going through a period of savage cuts in budget. The first compulsory redundancies have been announced. While the recent changes in the UK may be more sudden than in most other European countries, there is a general crisis of confidence in universities and their funding. It would be a great pity if this crisis led to a retreat from the use of new technologies in teaching. There is some evidence from the US that universities can use the pressures of funding cuts to really rethink their offerings and teaching methodologies, and react strategically, not just panic tactically.
Coming back to my own more local problems, the move to my new job has precipitated within my area in the OU a kind of interregnum coupled with a period of rethinking and budgetary restraint. A number of promising activities have had to be paused while internal management ponder and external sponsors adapt to the new realities. I am deeply sorry that this included the FLISH conference. It just was not possible to mount an event of the quality that delegates have come to expect over the last few years within the current parameters. However, I am glad to announce that colleagues have rallied round and a two specifically targeted smaller events, free to LearnTel members, will take place at the OU within the FLISH period (April 22-23) - details here.
I am confident that FLISH will return in 1997. Learning our lesson from this year, planning and publicity for the date and venue will take place much earlier and more widely, to pre-empt clashes with other events and to secure sponsorship.
Life in the telematics world has not been calm either. The Internet continues to melt down all rivals. Recent sufferers include the various consumer-oriented video on demand trials, most of which now look decidedly sickly, and continuing casualties among non-Internet online services, the most recent casualty being eWorld. The amazing thing is that Internet has this melt-down power while (at least in many parts of Europe) being increasing implausible as a viable delivery technology due to the costs of the service, the congestion on it and its inability to deliver real-time traffic. Never one to resist a challenge, Dr Paul has more to say on this here.