Convocation Address :2004

'Leading an Academic Revolution'

By Sir John Daniel, President and CEO,

Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada

Your Excellency, the Governor of the State of West Bengal and Chancellor of the Netaji Subhas Open University, my esteemed fellow educationist Professor Dr. Surabhi Banerjee, Vice-Chancellor, Netaji Subhas Open University, distinguished guests, new graduates, colleagues and friends, it is a pleasure to address you. I thank the Vice-Chancellor for inviting me and I congratulate the many graduates who are receiving their degrees today.

I congratulate you most especially because you are part of an academic revolution that is transforming education here in India and around the world. The world's open universities, including Netaji Subhas Open University, are spearheading that revolution.

Why do I say that open universities are revolutionary: simply because they have shattered the traditional constraints that have hindered education for centuries.
Throughout history education has been locked in a triangle defined by balancing quality, access and cost. The people want wide access to quality education at low cost. However, conventional teaching methods cannot deliver that. With traditional educational methods quality usually goes down when you increase access or cut costs, for example by putting more students in each class. Conversely, most ways of improving quality restrict access or increase costs.

The open universities are revolutionary because they have broken out of this triangle. They have cut that insidious link between quality and exclusivity that has limited the impact of education throughout history. Open universities like the Netaji Subhas Open University are demonstrating that you can have wider access, higher quality and lower costs – all at the same time. This has never happened before.

The Netaji Subhas Open University is leading this revolution in higher education and I am proud to be here. This revolution means that in higher education big is now beautiful. That is a wonderful achievement. Along with the Indira Gandhi National Open University and India's other state open universities you have opened up access to higher education to hundreds of thousands of people. Even more importantly, you have not only made higher education available to more people, you have brought learning to people who could not previously aspire to it because of where they live or who they are.




Your success does not end there. You have also raised the quality of higher education, not just here at the Netaji Subhas Open University, but across all of higher education. Because of the scale and diversity of your academic and professional programmes, you are a large producer of quality academic material that can improve the quality of teaching and learning in all universities.

Along with wider access and higher quality, you have brought down the cost of quality higher education. The Government of India, more than any other government in the world, has recognised this by putting the expansion of distance education at the heart of its policy.


Operating a university of this size is a major academic, managerial and administrative challenge. I congratulate the Board of Management, the Vice-Chancellor and the staff for their work and commitment in overseeing the growth of this University. Big is beautiful and bigger is even more beautiful.


You work with a purpose, which is to serve many thousands of students who are represented here by those graduating today. As you struggled to find time for study and worried before your tests and examinations you may not always have appreciated what a precious gift the Netaji Subhas Open University has given to you. The Cuban poet Jose Marti said it well:

'To educate is to give people the keys to the world, which are independence and love; granting them the ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals.'

Education is a human right — and 1 applaud India for enshrining that right in the Constitution. Furthemore, the right to education is the key to unlocking other human rights. Where the right to education is guaranteed, people have a greater chance to access and enjoy other rights.

Second, education is a key to freedom. The key, as Marti put it, to the 'ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals'.

Third, education is the route to development. The distinguished Indian Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen explains this in his book Development as Freedom, whose title sums it all up. The purpose of development is to expand freedom. That expansion of freedom drives further development because development depends on the free agency of people.

I have talked of the triangle of access, quality and cost that has been a straitjacket for education throughout history. The Netaji Subhas Open University has broken open that straitjacket. In so doing you are creating a virtuous spiral of hope through education, freedom and development. It is a spiral of hope because more education means more freedom, which means more development, which means more education - and so on going ever upward.

I hope that each of you will foster education in others, that you will pursue your own education for the rest of your life, and that you will make your lifelong learning as broad as possible. Your great poet, Rabindranath Tagore, can be your guide. He said that 'the object of education is to give man the unity of truth'.

He also observed that 'true modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action'.


Lifelong learning should be your road to freedom of mind and to independence of thought and action. You rightly hope that the degrees and diplomas that you have earned will benefit your careers and lives directly. But I urge you to think of education itself as part of your lives. Again, Rabindranath Tagore expressed it perfectly when he said :


'We can look at a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as a road that leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment.'


The degrees that we celebrate today are part of your attainment and I congratulate you in that spirit. My own experience is that lifelong learning opens up opportunities because it caused me to join the distance education revolution.


When I was in my first university post, teaching engineering, I decided that I ought to know more about education. So I enrolled, part-time, in a Master's programme in Educational Technology at Concordia University in Montreal. One programme requirement was a three-month internship.

This was in 1971: the year when academics the world over heard about a remarkable new British venture called the Open University. It sounded fascinating and I elected to do my internship there. The experience was a revelation. Everything that I saw inspired me.

I found highly motivated adult students and dedicated academic staff who were often younger than the students. I saw a large-scale operation. I saw brilliant uses of communications media. In short, I saw the beginning of a revolution. I was convinced that here was the future of higher education. I wanted to be part of it.


An opportunity came quickly. I joined the Tele-universite and helped to bulid a new open university for Quebec. Then I moved to Athabasca University, an open university serving western Canada. From then on I was always involved in distance education and in 1990 I became the Vice-Chancellor of the UK Open University where I had done my internship 20 years earlier. In the 1970s and 1980s there were only a few open universities in the world and their staffs were in frequent contact. In the early 1980s I came to India for the first time to visit the Andhra Pradesh Open University in Hyderabad. The Vice-Chancellor was Professor Ram Reddy, who soon became the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi National Open University. We became good friends. Professor Ram Reddy was a towering figure in Indian education and yet a modest man of simple tastes. All India's open universities owe him a great debt.

That is how lifelong learning led me into distance education and open universities. However, I must be honest and make a confession to today's graduates. Although my studies in Educational Technology led me into distance education, I arn ashamed to say that in the 1970s I dropped out of the Master's programme without completing it.

It was not until the 1990s, with the encouragement of my wife, that I re-registered and finished the programme. Concordia University kindly allowed me to return and complete my thesis. So I finally graduated in 1996 having taken 25 years to complete the programme. I hope that this encourages those who think that part-time study takes a long time. Take heart from my example - - I'm sure you did not need 25 years.


The topic of my thesis explains why it is so good to be here. My subject was the open universities around the world with over 100,000 active students. I called them the mega-universities. That was in 1995 and there were eleven of them. Today there are quite a few more and the number will grow as universities like Netaji Subhas Open University join this group of revolutionary institutions.

I therefore wish success to the Netaji Subhas Open University and to you, its graduates. You are the pioneers of a revolution in higher education that holds the promise of quality education for all at low cost. It is a revolution that can change the world.

Special Convocation :2005

'A Passion for Open Universities'

Remarks by: Sir John Daniel, President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada, following the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa

Honourable Vice-Chancellor, Professor Surabhi Banerjee; Honourable Chief Guest, Professor V.S.Prasad, Director of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council; Distinguished Consul-General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr E. Zander; Members of the University Staff: Graduates; Distinguished Guests: Ladies and Gentlemen.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the privilege of being associated with Netaji Subhas Open University as an honorary Doctor of Letters. I first congratulate the graduates, who have earned their degrees by hard study and examination. Although I have not earned my degree by study and examination I am as proud as you are to receive this award today.
The Vice-Chancellor told you that in 1972, as part of my studies in educational technology, I spent three months as an intern at the UK Open University. The UKOU was then only in its second year of operation but, like NSOU, was growing strongly and already had 40,000 students. I was impressed by everything I saw at that infant Open University. Here, it seemed to me, was the future of higher education. Fresh ideas were being combined with technology to create a new type of university. I gained a lifelong passion for open universities from that experience. That is why I am so delighted to be welcomed into the community of Netaji Subhas Open University today.
Although a combination of fresh ideas and appropriate technology can create a potentially winning formula for higher education it takes people to implement any formula successfully. I congratulate the Vice-Chancellor and the staff of NSOU for the truly remarkable development of this University in recent years. I refer first to the growth in numbers, from 3,000 students in 2001 to 50,000 today. That growth has given the University the public impact and financial resilience that gives it substantial autonomy to make its own choices about the future directions that it will take.
I refer, second, to the attention to quality that is so evident in the operations of NSOU. Here may I open a parenthesis to say what a wonderful surprise it was to arrive at this Convocation and find that Professor V.S. Prasad was the Chief Guest. We have been friends for many years and Professor Prasad himself has an impressive track record with open universities. Now, as Director of NAAC, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, he stands for quality in Indian higher education.
NSOU is clearly promoting quality. Yesterday I was privileged to help launch the Bachelor of Education in Special Education. It was evident that great care had been taken to consult the community of practice of special education in designing the course and to learn from the weaknesses of previous attempts to serve them. I note with approval that there are similar links to professions and stakeholders in all the diverse programmes of NSOU.
I also congratulate the Vice-Chancellor and her staff for pursuing a vision of a complete and authentic university that conducts research and generates academic debate and intellectual excitement through an intensive programme of seminars, conferences and special lectures.
You are also using a variety of media such as the EDUSAT satellite, FM radio, interactive radio and videoconferencing, to create interaction between students and staff and to open up the work of NSOU to the general public. There is a diversity of media available today but one great medium, the book, is as important as ever and will remain so far into the future. I was delighted to hear of NSOU’s increasing impact at the Kolkata book fair although, having lived in countries with much smaller populations than India’s, I have difficulty imagining the 100,000 visitors per day that your stall at the book fair attracted!
The development of NSOU is important to West Bengal, to India and to the wider world. It is most important, however, to the individuals who study with it, whose spirits have been released, and who, through academic achievement, have acquired new confidence in their lives.
Rabindranath Tagore said that ‘the object of education is to give man the unity of truth’. That truth is the key to the freedom that flows from education. Yesterday, in my endowment lecture, I quoted that famous son of Kolkata, Amartya Sen, who defines development as freedom. This morning the Vice-Chancellor recalled former Prime Minister Nehru’s statement that ‘we will liberate the country through education’. The most effective agents of development are free people and education is the road to that freedom.
That is why it is such an honour to become part of the NSOU community. I give you the assurance that the Commonwealth of Learning is eager to accompany you on your journey and to assist in the development of this University in any way that it can.
I congratulate you all. I offer my best wishes to the graduates for their future lives and to Netaji Subhas Open University for its continuing rapid development. The Vice-Chancellor stated that NSOU’s ambition is to achieve mega-university status by the 10th plan period. As the person who, some ten years ago, invented the term mega-university to designate a distance-teaching university that enrols over 100,000 students simultaneously, let me say that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see NSOU join the select group of mega-universities.
Finally, let me thank you all for being here on the public holiday for the birthday of B.R.Ambedkar. You may know that the Andhra Pradesh Open University is named for Dr. Ambedkar. I also note that our Chief Guest, Professor Prasad, is a former Vice-Chancellor of that University, so we see that life, as it so often does, goes in circles!
Thank you.

Endowment Lecture :2005

'Extraordinary Education for Ordinary People'

by: Sir John Daniel, President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada,

Click here to view accompanying power point presentation

Introduction
It is an honour and a pleasure to be here with you today. Ever since I first visited Netaji Subhas Open University for your convocation ceremony last year I have been looking forward to coming back. I thank your inspiring Vice-Chancellor, Professor Surabhi Banerjee, for inviting me to give this endowment lecture.
My title today is Extraordinary Education for Ordinary People. Netaji Subhas Open University leading a revolutionary modern trend in education. My aim today is to put that revolution in context and to explain the significance of what this University is doing.
Globalisation is the best word to describe the wider developments that have created the context for Netaji Subhas Open University to thrive. I pronounce the word with hesitation, because it resonates with both negative and positive echoes. Globalisation is a new word, but it designates a phenomenon that is not new, namely the exchange of ideas, products, services and technology across the world. I shall draw your attention particularly to movements of ideas and technology.
As the world has grown smaller through easier travel and faster communication, ideas from many sources have flowed together and blended into new syntheses. Among them are some of the core values from the great religions of the world. Open universities emerged from the blend of two core values: the importance of education and the importance of the individual.
The Individual and Education
The great texts of Hindu and Muslim scriptures contain many references to the importance of education and wisdom, but rather fewer to the importance of the individual. By contrast the Christian scriptures have rather little to say about education and wisdom but return constantly to the idea that each individual is made in the image of God and infinitely precious to him.
We can understand that great assertion of secular humanistic values, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a bringing together of all these great religious traditions. That is especially true of the statement that education is a human right, which combines the assertion of the importance of each individual with the belief that it is through education that individuals can fulfil their personal identities and contribute to the cultural, economic, social and spiritual development of their communities.
Many of the great figures of our era have demonstrated in their own lives the dual commitment to the individual and to education. When I visited Vice-Chancellor Banerjee’s office, I felt privileged to be in a building which had known the presence of Mahatma Gandhi. How can I mention the name of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the great founders of the Indian nation, in the same breath as the word globalisation? But Gandhi was an internationalist. He wanted people of diverse origins to live together peaceably and believed that education could remove the obstacles of prejudice that stand in the way of harmony.
The same is true of Nelson Mandela. What a coincidence it is that both Mandela and Gandhi shared the experience, at an interval of fifty years, of spending time in a South African jail. Both were imprisoned for standing up for human rights. Nelson Mandela has written an interesting comparison of their experience. In those fifty years between their times as prisoners, the conditions in gaol, even the prison uniforms, had hardly changed at all. What had changed – for the worse – was the repressive apparatus of the state. Gandhi purposely broke the law and then gave himself up. The security police came for Mandela in the middle of the night.
Global Trends
Open universities are a river of opportunity created at the confluence of two vigorous streams: the growing respect for individual human rights and widening belief in education for human fulfilment. Other global trends have given practical reinforcement to these fundamental values. In its position paper Higher Education in a Globalised Society, UNESCO identifies four key elements of globalisation:
First there is the growing importance of the knowledge society and the knowledge economy, something that features strongly in your political discourse in India and colours the choice of your programmes at NSOU. A key implication of changing economies is that people have to continue learning throughout their lives.
Second, there is the development of new trade agreements that cover trade in education services. What is known as cross-border education is, for the moment, a negligible phenomenon within India, but NSOU is taking Indian education to other countries, not least through your teaching of the Bangla language to the large worldwide diaspora of Bengalis through the medium of eLearning.
Third, there are innovations related to ICTs. India is a global player in the provision of services using ICTs and this too is reflected in your courses and programmes at NSOU.
Finally, the emphasis on the market and the market economy is an important support to the development of open universities, as I shall show in a moment.
Expanding Higher Education in Developing Countries
These four elements of globalisation have combined to reinforce the conviction amongst policy makers that higher education must be made widely available. In the last fifty years student numbers in higher education have increased massively, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the population. That increase continues. China has recently doubled its enrolments in a short period.
Making higher education available to all who can benefit from it must start with the will to do it. But will alone is not enough, governments, institutions and people must also have the means to expand access. The great expansion of higher education in the rich industrialised countries that occurred in the later decades of the last century was achieved essentially through the expansion and multiplication of conventional institutions. There were two reasons for that. First, the means were there to expand higher education, largely through public expenditure, because the countries were rich. Second, at least in the early years of the expansion, there were no obvious and effective alternatives to face-to-face teaching.
Now we are in a different era. Even though demand for higher education continues to expand in some developed countries, the main challenge is to transform the higher education systems in developing countries so that they can serve a much larger part of the population. The conditions for this transformation are very different. First, these countries do not have the wealth for a massive expansion of the system on the old model. Even where economies are growing briskly, as here in India, there are many other calls on public funds, not least the expansion of basic education and the modernisation of the infrastructure. Second, there are now effective and cost-effective alternatives to face-to-face teaching.
Netaji Subhas Open University is a brilliant exponent of one of those alternatives. I ask you to bear with me whilst I try to explain why the significance of the application of technology called distance learning goes far beyond its manifestation in particular open universities like this one.
The Iron Triangle
The metaphor that I use to explain why distance learning is a revolution I call the iron triangle. The challenge that has always faced those who want to expand education is to achieve a balance between three objectives. The first is to make education accessible to as many as possible; the second is to ensure that the quality of the education provided is worthwhile; and the third is to do this at a reasonable cost. The triangle is made up of these three vectors: access, quality and cost.
I call it the iron triangle because it explains why it is taking the world so long to achieve education for all, despite declarations about the importance of bringing education to all that go back 50 years.
Face-to-face teaching is a successful and durable form of education that will always be important. Its strength is that it requires one individual to plan and execute every step in the teaching process. The teacher plans the lesson, prepares any materials that will be used in the class, teaches the students, assesses what they have learned, and then reflects on the whole process to see where it might be improved. Individuals are flexible, so face-to-face teaching is a robust method that can be applied in many different situations, from the teacher who gathers children under a tree to the professor taking a graduate seminar in the historic halls of a university.
But look at this method of teaching through the lens of the iron triangle. First, the access that it allows is limited because a single teacher can only handle so many students. If you want to increase access you must find more teachers, which costs money. Second, quality is variable. Well-trained and motivated teachers stimulate high quality learning. But not all teachers are well-trained and motivated, as you know only too well in India. Third, providing well-trained and motivated teachers is costly, and the cost increases in a linear fashion as the number of students increases. There are, in other words, no economies of scale.
The basic constraints of the iron triangle have been a brake on the development of education throughout history. Indeed, when many people think about education they instinctively link quality with exclusivity, usually without realising what an insidious link they are making. They assume that access to good education must always be limited, for reasons of cost. They then restrict entry though examinations and other barriers. The final step is that those barriers become the surrogate for quality. We assume that an educational institution must be good if it is difficult to get into, regardless of what actually happens to students once they are admitted.
Once the linkage between quality and exclusivity has been made it is only a small step to assume that a quality education for all is a hopeless delusion. Fortunately technology has now broken the insidious link between quality and exclusivity. How has it done so?
Breaking the Iron Triangle with Technology
Let us first be clear about what we mean by technology. Technology is the application of scientific and other organized knowledge to practical tasks by organizations consisting of people and machines. I emphasise two parts of this definition. First, we are not engaged in a futile search for the perfect method of learning. We are applying ‘scientific and other organised knowledge’. That can mean tacit knowledge, crafts and organisational experience, not to mention a good dose of common sense.
Second, we are living in a world of people and machines. Good use of technology always involves people and their social systems. A simple and useful way to think about how to combine people and technology in education emerges when we reflect that learning involves two types of activity.
Learning blends two types of activities. First, there are activities that the learner conducts independently, such as reading a book, viewing a TV programme, listening to a lecture or an audio-cassette, writing an essay and doing mathematical calculations. These activities constitute the bulk of the student’s learning, at least in higher education. They are also – and this is the key – the activities that allow you to use technology to increase access, improve quality and cut costs. That is because the basic tools of independent learning such as print, audio material and TV programmes cost relatively little to reproduce in volume once you’ve made the investment in the first copy.
Volume helps to increase access and cut costs. It also allows you to improve quality, because once you are producing materials at scale you can afford to invest in making them excellent.
That’s fine, but the evidence shows that most learners do not succeed on independent activities alone. Technology must involve people and their social systems. You also need interactive activities. ‘Interactive’ is a very slippery word that gets a lot of abuse. I use it to mean a situation where an activity by the student evokes a response by another human being – a teacher, a tutor, or another student – that is specifically tailored to that particular student.
Today is an obvious example. As you listen to me now you are each involved in independent learning. If you ask me questions afterwards we shall have an interactive event. Other interactive activities are face-to-face sessions with other students or a tutor in a study centre, having your assignment marked and commented on by a teacher, getting a response to a query by e-mail, and so on.
These kinds of activities are important to the success of most students. However, they are also more expensive because they do not lend themselves to economies of scale in the same way as independent activities. Making twenty extra copies of book costs relatively little whereas additional interactive activities require more people. However, even here it is possible to improve quality and cut costs compared to traditional instruction.
What I am saying is, of course, well known to those of you associated with Netaji Subhas Open University. The world’s open universities provide a good example of independent and interactive learning at work. NSOU’s extraordinary growth, from 3,000 students in 2001 to 50,000 today has given you direct experience of the benefits of operating at scale. Now that you have large numbers you can produce high quality materials at relatively low cost. You are becoming an important publisher and I was delighted to read of your increasing success and impact at the Kolkata book fair.
The ability to make a significant investment in order to create a quality product also applies to new media. I congratulate you, for example, on the online course in Bangla that is bringing the Bangla language to the vast Bengali diaspora. What a brilliant example of the positive benefits of globalisation!
Even though interactive activities are more expensive they too benefit from what we can call effectiveness of scale. When you had 3,000 students they were well scattered around the state. Now that you have 50,000 there are far more NSOU students in any one locality. This means that you can provide them with better service. I am so pleased to see the expansion of your system of student support through the steady growth of the number of NSOU study centres to well over one hundred, the creation of special centres for tribal and disadvantaged communities, the development of the personal contact programme, and your new campus at Kalyani. I count it a great privilege to be associated with its formal opening.
These student support activities are vital parts of NSOU’s academic life, but it costs relatively more to expand them than to print more books or to repeat a radio broadcast. However, by using part-time tutors, taking advantage of their specialised knowledge and by training them to tutor in a distance learning system you can give students high-quality support in a cost-effective manner.
Cost curves for open universities
You can represent this schematically by plotting the cost curves of independent and interactive activities, which I have done here in a very simple manner (Figure 1). The total costs of the system are plotted against student numbers. Depending on how you blend the two you can get a steeper of a flatter curve, in other words the marginal cost per additional student can be greater or smaller.
These cost curves show the great benefits that NSOU can derive from its impressive growth in student numbers. Because of the efficiency of the system, even with low fees, the University becomes a very solid financial operation. This is the key to the successful further development of NSOU because it gives you the freedom to make choices. It should also make you very popular with government, because you can expand your programmes and services without having to go to the government for funds all the time.
One of the important developments that NSOU is promoting is the use of media, like the Gyanvani FM educational radio channel, whose hours have been extended, your use of video conferencing, your interactive radio counselling and your application for time on the EDUSAT satellite.
The use of media in the interactive aspects of the programme, like your radio counselling initiative, is an important new development. The cost curves for these kinds of activities fall somewhere between lines for independent media and the lines for face-to-face interaction (Figure 2). Obviously it will be a terrific breakthrough if media with the cost characteristics of independent learning could be used in a genuinely interactive manner. If we could achieve this then there would be no effective limits on the size of the University except our ability to manage it.
So search for genuinely interactive media is important and I am glad to see that NSOU is engaged in it. But let us be cautious. The people who matter are the students. Only they can really tell us whether a medium is interactive in the true sense of responding to their particular queries and concerns. Only they can tell us whether a new medium is a convenient part of their study pattern or a tiresome additional obligation. The deployment, use and evaluation of new media must be done in consultation with the students so that they can become increasingly effective.
The quest for quality
The growth of numbers in NSOU is truly impressive. However, the best advice that I can give you is not to judge yourselves by numbers alone. Numbers are important, because serving many people is better than serving fewer people. Numbers are also important because, as I said a moment ago they give you the opportunity to develop the University. That development should always go in the direction of enhancing the quality of NSOU, and most especially the enhancement of the student experience.
Never forget that not very long ago distance learning had a poor reputation, here in India and around the world. That was because the earlier form of distance learning, which was called correspondence teaching, did not bother much about quality and, in particular here in India, did very little to support students on an individual basis. The creation of the national network of open universities was meant to change all that – and it has done so to an impressive extent.
However, you can never take quality for granted. Being called an open university does not, in and of itself, make you better than a correspondence school. What makes you better is constant attention to quality in both the independent and interactive aspects of learning.
Creating an academic community
A quality teaching and learning system is a springboard for creating a vibrant academic and intellectual community. Here I must congratulate Vice-Chancellor Banerjee and all the staff for the very impressive strides that you are making. Too often, open universities content themselves with being good systems of open and distance learning. That is indeed the vital foundation, but beyond that the aim must be to create a university in the fullest sense of the term.
Traditionally we identify the mission of universities as teaching, research and service. Having rapidly built up a large teaching operation, I am delighted to see NSOU now promoting the other two elements of the mission, research and service. I am delighted to see the creation of the Research Department, and it is right and natural that it should focus first on research into open and distance learning. That is your core business and historically universities around the world have spent too little time and money researching their core business.
I am sure that research will lead you in other interesting directions. It leads naturally, for example, to research on ways of using information and communication technology in the development of communities and societies. I am delighted to see that, like the Commonwealth of Learning, NSOU has links with the inspiring M.S.Swaminathan foundation, whose impressive work spans the range from high science to social mobilisation.
That is one aspect of another admirable feature of NSOU that helps to build the base for a great academic future. I refer to what the NSOU Newsletter accurately calls a ‘spate’ of seminars, symposia, workshops, conferences and memorial lectures. It is clear that the Netaji Subhas Open University is an intellectually exciting place and that is good for students and staff alike.
Such activities nourish the research undertaken at the University and also support and extend its function of service to the community, another area where you are in full expansion. One of the great assets of open universities is their mastery of media and technology, so what better way of serving the community than using media to open up the work of the university to the public gaze. You may like to note that this was an important part of the motivation of Harold Wilson, the former British Prime Minister who created the UK Open University.
He had been an academic himself, at Oxford University, and he believed that it was important to open up the work of universities to the general public, not just so that they could see what their taxes were being spent on but, more importantly, so they could see the issues that were being debated in universities and take part in those debates themselves.
Through your course in the Bangla language, through your presence on radio and soon on satellite, through your publication of books, and through your Centre for Tribal and Disadvantaged Communities, NSOU is doing that. I congratulate you. Open universities have a special opportunity to bring the benefits of education to a community that extends far beyond those enrolled as students.
Development as Freedom
Last time I was here I quoted the great Cuban poet, José Marti, who said: ‘To educate is to give people the keys to the world, which are independence and love; granting them the ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals’.
I began this lecture by pointing out that open universities bring together belief in education and commitment to the rights of the individual. India is the world’s largest democracy, so its people are free, at least in the important matter of choosing who shall govern them. But as Marti said, education provides the keys to the world that allow people fully to enjoy that freedom.
That links directly to the future of India, which the rest of the world calls ‘a developing country’. What development is being sought? What is development? The distinguished Indian Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen answers these questions in his book Development as Freedom, whose title sums it all up. The purpose of development is to expand freedom. That expansion of freedom drives further development because development depends on the free agency of people.
We are talking about many dimensions of freedom: freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness; freedom to hold beliefs and to express views; freedom to fulfil our destinies within the rule of law. I believe that it is the special role of open universities to embrace the whole gamut of freedoms from the most basic to the most abstract. Your great poet Rabindranath Tagore expressed those higher freedoms beautifully when he said that ‘the object of education is to give man the unity of truth’. He also observed that ‘true modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action’.
It is that independence of thought and action to which Amartya Sen refers when he says that development depends on the free agency of people.
Conclusion
It is time for me to conclude. I called this lecture Extraordinary Education for Ordinary People. I have argued that through the way that they have applied technology to higher education by making possible open and distance learning, the world’s open universities are offering extraordinary education to ordinary people.
The Netaji Subhas Open University is now in the vanguard of that movement. A constant theme of this lecture has been my admiration for the vision behind the broad road to the future that this University is taking. It brings to mind another observation by Rabindranath Tagore when he said: ‘We can look at a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as a road that leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment.
NSOU already has attained great things. That is important for its students, it is important for the State of West Bengal, and it is important to India. No country has made a greater commitment to open universities than India. Distance learning is a major plank of the national strategy for increasing access to higher education. It already accounts for 23% of enrolments in higher education and the plan is to increase that to 40%.
Governments can make policy but it is up to people and institutions to make it work. The Netaji Subhas Open University is making a stellar contribution to the achievement of India’s farsighted policy. You are not simply enhancing access, although that is vital, but also showing that an open university can be a fully authentic university. You are creating a new and richer notion of the academic community and giving new meaning to the traditional mission of universities: teaching, research and service.
It has been an honour to give this Endowment Lecture to you and I wish Netaji Subhas Open University a great future.
Reference
UNESCO (2004) Higher Education in a Globalised Society: Education Position Paper, 28pp. Paris

'Open University as/and Ecosystem'

Remarks by: Sir John Daniel, President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada. Occasion: The inaugural ceremony of the Kalyani Campus, Regional Centre, Green Campus and Biovillage of NSOU

Honourable Minister of Public Works of West Bengal, Shri Amar Chowdhury, Honourable Vice-Chancellor, Professor Surabhi Banerjee; Members of the University Staff; People of Kalyani; Ladies and Gentlemen.
I have had great pleasure taking part in this most enjoyable ceremony, which comes a day after I became a member of the Netaji Subhas Open University community through the award of an honorary degree, and two days after I tried to explain the global significance of the work of NSOU in my Endowment Lecture. This new Kalyani Campus is a lovely place and I am honoured that my name will remain associated with it on the foundation stones that we have just unveiled.
May I begin by congratulating the Minister of Public Works of West Bengal for undertaking the construction of the buildings that will spring up here? My thanks go also to the Government of West Bengal for its financial contribution to NSOU and to this project.
We have inaugurated and celebrated four initiatives this morning and I shall comment briefly on each of them.
First, I had the privilege of opening this new Kalyani campus of Netaji Subhas Open University. Some people think that because open universities operate at a distance they somehow exist in the air. But it takes people and systems to serve a student body of 50,000 that is rising steadily towards one lakh of enrolments. The university staff work most productively in attractive surroundings. Some of the world’s open universities have created particularly attractive campuses and NSOU will now join their number. I am especially pleased to note that this campus will house activities covering the whole gamut of NSOU’s work, including research and vocational education.
Second, the Minister has inaugurated a regional centre of NSOU. In teaching their students open universities essentially do two things. On the one hand they provide study materials for the students so that they can learn independently. On the other hand they provide opportunities for interaction between students and between students and staff. The aim of this interaction is to mediate between the study materials and the students so that learning is both easier and more profound.
Producing and providing learning materials of quality is not easy – but it is much easier than providing students with the interactive support they need. This regional centre, which will be linked to a large number of study centres, is a powerful symbol of NSOU’s commitment to providing quality education by supporting students strongly.
Third, the Vice-Chancellor opened the Green Campus of NSOU. A year ago, when I was at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, we laid the groundwork for the United Nations Decade for Education for Sustainable Development that began this year and will run until 2014. Its purpose is to help governments around the world to ensure that in educating their people they are putting down the foundations for a sustainable future. The Green Campus is a symbol of NSOU’s participation in that task.
In opening the Green Campus we planted four saplings and I noted with particular pleasure that each of the species had been the subject of a poem by your great writer Rabindranath Tagore. I hope that someone will soon water them more thorougly than we were able to do a few moments ago so that they can all grow into sturdy trees!
Fourth, I had the honour of naming the Biovillage. This gave me particular pleasure because the Commonwealth of Learning believes firmly that the route to a happier and more prosperous future for the world lies through a happier and more prosperous future for the world’s villages – not just the 600 lakhs of villages in India, but the millions of villages throughout the developing world. With this purpose in mind we are working with the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation in Chennai on our programme called Lifelong Learning for Farmers, whose aim is to improve the livelihood of the world’s farmers and villagers.
I am delighted to note that NSOU is also working with the Swaminathan Foundation, whose Biovillage at Pondicherry is the inspiration for the Biovillage we have inaugurated today. Thus both NSOU and COL are taking forward the wonderfully creative ideas of Dr Swaminathan and his colleagues.
Those are my brief comments on the four new elements of Netaji Subhas Open University that we have inaugurated today. I offer my fulsome congratulations to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Surabhi Banerjee, for the tremendous dynamism that she has shown in developing this University, as evidenced by what we see around us.
I wish the Minister and the Public Works Department success with the construction programme and I noted his promise to complete the first phase by the end of October. He may like to note that in distance learning deadlines are particularly important, whether they be deadlines for the production of learning materials by staff or deadlines for the submission of assignments by students. I respectfully ask him to remember that meeting deadlines is vital in the life of open universities.
Finally, I wish NSOU a great future on this campus and I urge the people of Kalyani to support with enthusiasm this new enterprise that will soon become a very significant economic driver for the community. It has been an honour and a pleasure to be with you today.

Cultures and Structures for Quality

By: Sir John Daniel, President and CEO,Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada

Presented at:International Conference On Quality in Distance Education

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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 Uvalic-Trumbic, 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 Uvalic-Trumbic’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,