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studying through the Open University, including 30,000 post-
graduates. Seventy per cent of the students are in full-time
employment and 25,000 live outside the UK. It is effectively an
international learning institution that crosses boundaries of time
and space and it is becoming increasingly virtual; not in terms
of the television programmes that many of us will remember but
through on-line conferencing. Students themselves are now
beginning to produce their own conferences as a means of
interacting with and learning from each other.
But that great UK institution pales into insignificance besides the
University of Phoenix – a private university founded in the US in
1976. In university terms it’s pretty new but it’s already one of the
largest businesses in Arizona with an annual revenue of $2.3 billion,
230,000 students and a 130 ‘campuses’ which are actually bits
of space integrated into the community where students can come
together for periods of time – bits of shopping malls, bits of
downtown areas – by no means the traditional university campus.
Students can buy into a range of learning modes, choosing how
and where they learn, whether in a physical or virtual context or
a mixture of the two. It’s up to the individuals to control their own
learning programme in terms of time and space. Students taking
University of Phoenix the ‘physical’ route only spend four hours or so a week on
‘campus’ but they also learn in teams at other locations. The
‘virtual’ students go online when it suits them, they can take
part in conferences at three in the morning if they like.
What I think is wonderful about this incredibly virtual, hi-tech
institution is that there’s still room for physical space, in fact space
is recognised as a powerful aid to learning. The University has just
paid $155 million dollars for the naming rights to a football stadium,
when they don’t even have a football team. What this indicates
to me is that this new generation of higher education institution,
which is heavily involved in promoting new kinds of virtual learning
experiences, still has an almost primal need for symbolic space,
a brand – something you can touch and identify with.
What does it say about the Returning to the reasons behind the particularly high rating by
future of the physical university, students of their Open University courses, I think this is partly
if what is essentially a virtual explained by the fact that students themselves have changed,
and have very different expectations from previous generations
university is perceived to
about what they’ll gain from education and how they’ll engage
provide the best quality with it. Fifty-five per cent of UK HE students are 20 or older, and
university learning experience? 45 per cent of them study part time. Those who do study full time
14 Further and higher education
