British education must embrace a new world

In the last of our summer series on education at the end of the century, Howard Newby asks if UK universities are up to the challenge of globalisation

In recent years higher education in the UK has undergone a severe bout of introspection. Official reports have been produced on further education, lifelong learning and work-based learning, culminating in the Dearing report, The Learning Society, which attempted to plot the course ahead for the next 20 years.

Many of these reports can be characterised as pointing the way ahead while looking through a rear-view mirror. Or perhaps what can be detected is a bereavement process, following the demise of the former elite system.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on, ignoring our aspirations for a decent interlude while we sort out such little local difficulties as student finance, quality assurance, teaching accreditation, and so on. While we have contemplated the minutiae of funding council formulae, the forces of globalisation have been gathering.

Higher education is not immune to these forces, so apparent in business and commerce. This is already obvious on the research side of most universities: top-quality researchers have long had their own international network of peers who take on the roles, variously, of deadly rivals and friendly collaborators. However, in recent decades this trend has also been apparent in most areas of academic activity, including the arts and social sciences, encouraged by the European Union and successive Framework programmes. Moreover, the nature of recently emergent scientific problems - global environmental change, the human genome project, and so on - has also demanded scientific analysis, organisation and cooperation on a truly global scale.

Responses from higher education institutions in the US provide strong indications of how matters may develop in this country. At one extreme, the University of Phoenix, a for-profit organisation owned by Apollo Communications Inc, produces high-quality courseware accessed through more than 50 study centres established in major US cities. Both profitable and popular, it opens its first centres in Europe this autumn.

Public universities in the Midwest and northern Rockies region have joined together to form Western Governors University, a distance-learning activity that is a partner in the new Open University of the United States, which will offer learning degrees across the US as well as to overseas students. A number of major American research-led universities and "knowledge providers" in the private sector, such as Time Warner, Disney Corporation, Microsoft and Cisco, have discussed partnerships to develop courseware and support to attack the global market in the 21st century.

While the universities provide most of the academic expertise and the "branding" necessary for market credibility, the partners provide production facilities, distribution and marketing, as well as much of the underlying technology that will allow the operation to proceed on a truly global basis.

In the UK there are few signs that these kinds of partnerships are being formed, despite the quality of British higher education and the wealth of creative talent in the UK media sector. Nevertheless, high-quality distance learning fulfils an important need, particularly in professional development, which also happens to be a profitable area of higher education in the UK.

These possibilities will also be assisted by changing patterns of student demand for teaching and learning. The conventional three-year, full-time, residential course was based upon what might be called a "just in case" philosophy of learning. For the vast majority of subjects most of the knowledge gained is not used directly during their career lifetime, but we have continued to teach it "just in case".

Recently the increasing flexibility of access to higher education in the UK has provoked a discernible shift to more "just in time" forms of delivery. In the future, however, there may well be a further shift towards "just for you" forms of learning, where, from a vast array of courseware, students can access the elements required to meet their individual needs.

The market for the conventional three-year, full-time, residential degree may well be smaller than at present and institutions may increasingly have to choose their niche. The developments exemplified by Phoenix, for example, therefore represent both an opportunity for and a threat to UK higher education. We seem to be rather like the British motor industry in the 1960s - on the brink of participating in a global market, but poorly organised to take advantage of the opportunities available.

The universities' mission is quite clear: to aid economic competitiveness and promote social inclusion. This implies a quite radical adjustment of the structure and functioning of universities - changes which universities have, on the whole, been responding to rather than controlling. I doubt whether the present structure of higher education is adequate to meet either the demands of lifelong learning or the challenge of emerging global markets.

The present response to the latter - recruiting more overseas students - will not in itself be sufficient. Individual universities will need the scale and strength to develop market clout on a global scale that few currently possess. A few with strong global brands might make it on their own. Most will need to band together in alliances and partnerships to meet the challenge.

Many collaborations, such as Universitas 21, will be transnational - which will provide some interesting dilemmas for essentially nationally based systems of funding, governance and quality assurance. Such is the strength of British university education that this is a trend that we should be leading, not following. This will benefit the nation, our universities, but most of all our staff and students.

Howard Newby is vice-chancellor of the University of Southampton and president of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Prinicpals. This article is written in a personal capacity.