Towards a Culture of Quality: Cultures and Structures for Quality

Towards a Culture of Quality

Presented at:
International Conference On Quality in Distance Education


Cultures and Structures for Quality

Netaji Subhas Open University
Kolkata
21-23 November 2005

by:

Sir John Daniel
President & CEO
Commonwealth of Learning

Introduction

It is a pleasure to add the greetings of the Commonwealth of Learning to the gracious welcome that you have just received from Vice-Chancellor Surabhi Banerjee. COL is delighted to be teaming up with UNESCO to sponsor this event organised by the Netaji Subhas Open University. Let me begin with a word about our partners.

First, it is wonderfully appropriate that this conference is taking place at Netaji Subhas Open University. The rise of NSOU, West Bengal's Open University, has been the world's most remarkable example of the development of higher distance learning in this new millennium. At the turn of the millennium the Netaji Subhas Open University had fewer than 5,000 students. Today it has 65,000. That itself would be remarkable achievement; but you could argue that in a country with India's large population and relatively low participation rate in higher education it is easy to get the numbers up. What is much more remarkable is that alongside the growth in numbers has been a steady increase in NSOU's reputation for quality, two elements of which are its close attention to student services and its expanding physical presence in the state of West Bengal.

Earlier this year it was my great privilege formally to open NSOU's new Kalyani Campus. Aside from its role in bringing the University closer to the people; the Kalyani campus also expresses the breadth of NSOU's academic vision in concrete ways. That vision includes a commitment to sustainable development, symbolised by Kalyani's Green Campus, and an engagement with rural development, represented by the Biovillage.

These are but two examples of the way that NSOU is embedding itself in the contemporary world. Others are NSOU's commitment to research, its unusual level of activity in vocational education, its use of diverse media, and its determination to make the University an intellectually exciting place with a multitude of seminars, lectures, workshops, and international events like this conference.

I evoke the remarkable and rapid evolution of Netaji Subhas Open University not only because it is our host, but also because it is relevant to the theme of our meeting. Quality does not exist in a vacuum. When we talk about quality we must always talk about the quality of something real. My preferred definition of quality is simply: 'fitness for purpose at minimum cost to society'. The word I stress here is purpose.

The more noble and ambitious our purpose; the greater is the challenge of quality that we set ourselves. If our purpose is banal we may achieve it easily. If we set yourselves exalted and inspiring goals, as NSOU has done, then the task of ensuring quality will be harder. Yet NSOU clearly is achieving quality. This reflects great credit on the whole university community, but particularly on the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Surabhi Banerjee.

There is an international consensus that institutional leadership is a key factor in ensuring quality. I shall return in a minute to the nature of that leadership. Here I simply observe that Netaji Subhas Open University has been blessed with outstanding leadership during Professor Banerjee's tenure as Vice-Chancellor. I congratulate her warmly on her recent reappointment to the post - although, given her track record, I must say that it would have been madness not to reappoint her. I am sure we all wish her well for her new mandate.

Second, it is a pleasure for COL to work with UNESCO on facilitating this conference. We have worked together to bring distinguished experts from outside India to complement the contributions of their Indian colleagues. We shall also inform you of some of the work that UNESCO and COL are doing on quality. I stress that the strong links between UNESCO and COL in higher education pre-dated my own move from Paris to Vancouver. Professor Asha Kanwar, who will present some of COL's work tomorrow, once held a joint UNESCO-COL appointment at UNESCO's Regional Centre for Education in Africa. She will tell you about a new book, Towards a Culture of Quality, which COL will publish in the New Year.

This afternoon you will hear from Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić, who leads for UNESCO at this meeting. She will describe the work of her higher education group at UNESCO, which is focused on the global quality agenda. I am proud that during my time as Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO we set up the Global Forum for Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications in Higher Education. Its work is progressing strongly under Ms Uvaliæ-Trumbiæ's leadership.

One recent output has been a set of Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Cross Border Higher Education, which is a growing trend. I hope that she will also mention UNESCO's Open and Distance Learning Knowledge Base and the developing work on Open Educational Resources.

Both UNESCO and COL believe that the combination of growing connectivity and open educational resources has enormous potential for strengthening quality higher education. We are working together to help countries and institutions to exploit this opportunity. However, I shall let my two colleagues tell you about the work of UNESCO and COL.

We are also honoured to have with us the Secretary-General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, Dr John Rowett. The ACU is expanding its membership among open universities and has an important programme for benchmarking practice in all its member universities.

Lessons from the UK Open University

In the rest of these remarks, which I have entitled Cultures and Structures for Quality, I shall speak primarily from my experience at the UK Open University and draw some lessons from it. I was Vice-Chancellor of the UK Open University for eleven years, from 1990 to 2001. At the beginning of that period there was a comprehensive reform of higher education in the UK.

One result of the reform was a much greater emphasis on quality assurance. Indeed, some would say that the UK 'overdosed' on quality assurance during the 1990s, and being subject to the UK's steadily evolving systems for quality assurance and quality assessment during that period was not always a comfortable experience. However, it had very good results for the Open University. Furthermore, universities in the rest of the world, some of which watched in horror as the UK's draconian QA system was put in place, learned much from the developing UK experience.

The new emphasis on QA was one feature comprehensive reform of UK higher education. Two other key policies were the decentralisation of control over higher education to the four home countries (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) through new funding mechanisms and the granting of university status to the former polytechnics. This meant that considerable attention had to be paid to the positioning of the Open University, which had previously been funded directly by the central government.

By then the UKOU was by far the largest university in the country, with 100,000 students spread over England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and growing numbers in continental Europe. Positioning the UKOU appropriately within the new higher education system was therefore a very important task for government. I am pleased to say that it was done in a very consultative manner.

In our discussions with government we at the UKOU argued strongly and successfully for one simple principle. We wanted the Open University to be fully integrated into the same framework as all other universities for all purposes. Most importantly this included the quality assurance and assessment systems and the funding mechanisms. I continue to believe that this was the right stance to take.

Today nearly all universities are operating in dual mode; teaching both in the classroom and at a distance. It would now be difficult to distinguish between these two modes for any purpose, but in the early 1990s it would have been quite possible. We argued for a single framework for all universities for reasons of both principles and pragmatism.

For the reason of principle I cannot do better than turn to your great poet, Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote that the object of education is to give man the unity of truth and elsewhere that true modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action.

What I mean by using those quotations is that universities are complex organisations with high ideals. Their overall purpose is to educate people and conduct research in a spirit of independence of thought and action. Any system of quality assurance must try to reflect those high ideals. This is not easy, but a QA methodology has a greater chance of reflecting that holistic purpose if is designed to address the whole higher education system.

Whilst I am on the topic I cannot do better that give you a longer quotation from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali that is quoted by Amartya Sen, another great Bengali, in his stimulating recent book The Argumentative Indian:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls...
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert of dead habit...
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

From that poem I particularly emphasise the third and fourth lines as injunctions to those designing QA systems. They must not break the world of higher education into fragments, nor must they lose their way in the dreary desert of dead habit. That also applies to the institutions that are subject to quality assurance. They must not lose their way in the dreary habit of compliance with requirements but must rather use a clear stream of reason to develop a culture of quality.

So much for high principle! What were the pragmatic reasons that led the UK Open University to insist that it be subject to the same quality assurance and quality assessment systems as all other universities? Bluntly, we were eager to have the quality of the UKOU assessed alongside that of the other universities because we were confident that we would show up well.

I press the fast forward button to show you that this confidence was justified. The English quality assessment system included reviews of the quality of teaching by discipline. The teaching of each discipline was scored in each university. Teaching judged to be excellent was recognised by a rating of excellent. Each year the press produced a league table that ranked universities by the proportion of excellent ratings they had achieved since the QA system was put in place.

Here is the table for 2003. After that year the system was changed. Universities that thought of themselves as elite institutions did not like the weaknesses of their teaching being publicised in this way and complained to the Prime Minister. A new QA system was then introduced that made it impossible to construct such a table. So this is the last table of its kind that will appear. I am very content with the position of the UKOU at 5th place, one above my own alma mater, Oxford University. From my knowledge of both institutions I consider this order very appropriate and I shall come back to that.

I observe also that several subjects for which the UKOU received excellent ratings were disciplines with an important practical component, such as General Engineering, Music and Earth Sciences.

Whilst I am on the topic, let me also note the results of a recent survey of student satisfaction carried out with a sample of 170,000 students from all UK universities. The Open University came top of this survey. In other words students at the Open University are more satisfied with their experience and the service that they receive than those of any other university. The survey was also broken down by the disciplines that the students were studying. The UKOU came top in ten disciplines, and they were a nice spread across the curriculum, again including subjects with a strong practical component. I note that a similar survey in Alberta, Canada, also put the province's open university, Athabasca University, at the top.

These results show that a good distance-teaching institution has nothing to fear from comparisons with universities that operate in traditional ways. The public recognition of the quality of the UKOU's teaching was a very helpful boost to its already strong reputation.

I do not need to remind this audience that in many countries distance education is still struggling to shed the poor reputation of correspondence education. Historically distance teaching universities have had difficulty in competing with the mystique of elite traditional institutions where the evidence for quality is usually limited to waffle about excellence in the vice-chancellor's speeches.

The establishment of serious quality assurance and assessment systems has had a wonderful effect in levelling the playing field, which is why the UKOU insisted on their being a single playing field. Although it may appear to be only of historical and local interest, a brief look at the UK QA system of the 1990s does reveal some general lessons.

Leaving aside the assessment of research, which was a separate system, the QA system had two main components, quality audit and quality assessment. At the OU we found the quality audit process and a similar audit of our arrangements for planning extremely useful. We found that successive audits were progressively less useful, because we had acted on the findings of the first, but they helped to keep us institutionally fit. Because distance-teaching institutions have to be more systematic than classroom-teaching institutions in almost all their activities they usually come well out of process audits.

The system for Teaching Quality Assessment, which provided the data for the league table that I showed earlier, reviewed teaching under six headings.

- Curriculum Design, Content and Organisation
- Teaching, Learning and Assessment
- Student Progression and Achievement
- Student Support and Guidance
- Learning Resources
- Quality Management and Enhancement

You could, I am sure, divide the teaching function of higher education in other ways, but I think this captures the totality of the student experience without in Tagore's words, 'breaking it into fragments'. They are also, to quote him again, areas in which it is difficult to lose your way 'in the dreary desert of dead habit'.

By capturing the totality of the student experience this list also reminds us that distance education must address the totality of the student experience. For simplicity we often divide the task of teaching at a distance into just two components: course development and course delivery. This list reminds us that we must look at quality assurance through a wider angle lens than that.

Recently there has been discussion about whether the quality of eLearning should be assessed using criteria already in use or whether it needs new models and approaches? A survey of quality assurance in the mega-universities revealed that they were applying to eLearning the criteria already in use for their other distance learning courses (Jung, 2005). In my view this is as it should be. If we focus our interest in quality too narrowly on one fragment of the student experience we miss the point.

Cultures and Structures for Quality

Why did the UK Open University emerge so well from the UK's processes of quality audit and teaching quality assessment?

The reasons lie in the cultures and structures for quality within the institution. Let me deal first with structures. When I use the term structures for quality I do not mean the organisational structures put in place to manage quality, although I shall mention those in a minute. I mean that a structure of quality is inherent in distance education. The institution's task is to develop that latent structure.

The inherent structure of quality is there because the essence of distance education is to divide the experience of the learner into its component parts. In conventional classroom teaching each instructor is usually responsible for all aspects of the learning experience. She or he must design the curriculum or lesson, prepare any supporting learning material, teach the class and then assess student performance. This is a flexible and robust model but it does not lend itself to economies of scale. There are also separate services which look after registrarial and administrative functions.

The essence of distance learning is to disassemble the learning experience into its component parts, specialise in doing each of them competently, and then reassemble the learning experience so that it appears seamless to the student. Furthermore, this disassembly and reassembly must also include the administrative and registrarial functions, which are more closely integrated into the experience of the distance learner than that of the classroom learner.

Because they are obliged to disassemble the learning experience into its component parts and focus specifically on doing each well, distance teaching institutions have a natural advantage over face-to-face teaching institutions when facing quality assurance and assessment processes, which also look separately at the different components of the learning experience. Face-to-face teaching institutions tended to assume that because all the ingredients the learning experience were, in principle, present on the campus, they would assemble themselves spontaneously into a good experience as if by magic.

I am not saying that quality is automatic with distance teaching. Quality is never automatic. Institutions can ignore particular elements of the learning experience or do them badly. All I am saying is that by requiring us to distinguish each element of the learning process distance education gives us the opportunity, if we care to take it, to ensure quality in all areas of the operation.

What we need in order to take advantage of this structure of quality and achieve real quality is a culture of quality. This seems like a vague and woolly concept but it is very real. Let me take an analogy from another industry. In my work at COL - and at UNESCO before that - I travel by air extensively: hundreds of hours each year on a great variety of airlines. This gives me many opportunities to observe a culture of quality or the lack of it.

The large aeroplanes used on long-haul flights are all broadly the same in terms of layout and equipment, so all cabin crews are working in similar situations. Yet the experience they give the passenger can very dramatically. On an airline with a culture of quality the cabin crew are attentive and friendly. They see that safety requirements are explained and observed. Crew members pass through the cabin from time to time, even when the lights are out, to check that passengers are OK and deal with any requests.

Contrast this with an airline with no culture of quality, like a European airline I used recently that I shall not name. Safety requirements were announced but no one bothered to check that passengers were observing them. As soon as they had carried out an obligatory operation, like serving a meal, the crew would disappear into their galley and shut the curtain behind them. The only way to get service was to go to them in the galley or press the call button. Their interest in passenger comfort was minimal.

Why the dramatic difference? The staff of the good airline had a culture of quality; those of the bad airline simply followed the book. I always hope that on the bad airlines the lack of a culture of quality does not extend to the maintenance of the engines. The irony is that having a culture of quality does not cost any more, apart perhaps from some training, than having a culture of indifference. Yet the impact on customer experience is considerable.

I would not press the analogy between airlines and distance teaching institutions too far, but you can no doubt see some similarities. Airlines also have to bring together a great variety of operations in order to fly passengers and their bags in a safe and timely manner from A to B. This happens best if the people involved in each operation are trained to carry it out effectively and motivated to carry it out well. We call this empowerment. Even in the military, which we think of as the last bastion of command and control, the complexity of operations and equipment is such that great reliance now has to be placed on individual judgement and motivation.

During my career I have worked in seven universities in various jurisdictions. Among them the UKOU had by far the strongest culture of quality. This extended from the academic staff both full- and part-time, through the administrators right through to the packers in the warehouse. There was a palpable spirit of service to students. Why was this?

Partly it was the idealism that has persisted since the foundation of the UKOU. Partly it was the fact that much of the UKOU's work, notably the development of courses, is done in teams which have developed a strong culture of quality along several dimensions. Partly it is the very participative governance structure of the University, with strong involvement of students and tutors, which gives a widespread sense of ownership. I am sure there are other reasons too. All I can say is that it was a tremendous privilege to lead such a remarkably student-centred institution for eleven years.

Does this mean that a separate kind of leadership is required in distance-teaching institutions? Are they different from other institutions? Because they offer education to the masses they are part of the global march towards democracy, so elitist models of leadership that rely on hierarchy are not appropriate. More democratic and consensual leadership is called for.

Moreover, because of its popular nature, distance education attracts a higher proportion of women as both students and leaders than contact institutions. Of the eleven open universities in India, three are led by women, as is the UKOU. Does distance education require leadership with more womanly attributes?

In reflecting on their leadership traits two women leaders, Professors Brenda Gourley of the UKOU and Surabhi Banerjee of Netaji Subhas Open University here present, both identify resilience as part of their styles. Is resilience an element of a culture of quality? Is this trait a female speciality or is it shared by men and women?

Rather than speak of male or female leadership styles, we should perhaps speak of the androgynous leader-or a leader with both male and female traits. Eastern cultures believe in the complementary concepts of the ying and yang, and there is the Hindu concept of the androgynous -the Ardh-Narishwar - or a complete whole embodying both the male and female principles.

The androgynous leader would combine the best of leadership qualities, combining moral authority, empathy, decisiveness, creativity, caring and compassion. Such leadership would appear much more likely to inspire staff to a culture of quality than leadership that is either highly controlling or rather disengaged.

I realise that I have only stroked the surface of a huge topic. In the coming days you will have the opportunity to explore in detail what a culture of quality it and how you achieve it. I hope that these remarks at this opening ceremony will nourish your reflection on this important issue.

Once again, I thank Professor Surabhi Banerjee and the staff of the Netaji Subhas Open University for their splendid hospitality.

References

Jung, Insung (2005), "Quality Assurance Survey of Mega-Universities" in C. McIntosh (Ed.) Lifelong Learning and Distance Higher Education, UNESCO-COL, Paris/Vancouver, 2005