England's Open University, Walter Berger, Wien: Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1987, 320 pages. |
VOL. 5, No. 2, 96-98
England's Open University, by Dr. Walter Berger, appeared in 1987 as a monograph in the series "Schriftenreihe Fernstudien an Universitäten." Not surprisingly, the monograph received positive reviews in Austrian and German academic and serious press publications. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no comparable attempts to consider this work in English. This bears embarrassing testimony to the lack of linguistic competence and the narrowness of vision amongst British and American academics, even within the more arcane sphere of comparative education.
Berger's work has a number of very real advantages. It is written by one well qualified to appraise this important and still relatively recent British institution from a foreigner who has enjoyed lengthy academic association with Britain. Furthermore, beyond describing the institution, its workings, and many of its innovative impacts on higher education, both in Great Britain and elsewhere, Berger sets the intellectual debate concerning "distance" and "open" higher education in the context of policy generation imperatives and opportunities in Austria. It is here that the historical significance of the OU intersects with perceived needs in the Austrian context and, at the same time, sets up challenges to similar and dissimilar institutions worldwide, challenges which are cited and adumbrated tangentially throughout the study. Whilst the study is not always easy reading, it rewards effort by teasing out, with the added dimension of the professional comparative educationalist, the politics of education that either underpin or undermine open learning, and which sometimes inextricably confuse "open" with "distance" learning by conflating issues of status with issues of access.
Berger's work is well-rooted in careful study and wide reading. He brings together an impressively well-digested, extensive bibliography and carefully weaves together important strands that should interest both British students of educational development and European students of British education.
Berger has correctly, in this reviewer's view, juxtaposed institutional and credential access with newly defined higher educational courses and curricular development. Whilst there is more to be said about the important redefinition of knowledge, both philosophically and sociologically, Berger exhibits an awareness of these concerns and properly identifies them as being central to the fundamental rethinking of pre-course entry requirements that are at the heart of the debate regarding the further international development of genuinely open higher education. If educational policy programming is to take place, policy which seeks as its fundamental aim to successfully engage large numbers of learners with few, or even no, formal academic qualifications, this is where the battle is to be joined. If life experience and commitment are to become the significant determinants of accessing higher education, then curricular development that takes on broad new definitions of knowledge, new technologies and methodologies of teaching, and learning must occur. This, surely, is what we mean by open learning and openness to client-centred need. Berger's study addresses these points with sensitivity and understanding.
Berger shows absolute clarity in his appreciation of the institutional importance of the OU at the outset of his study, thanks to his careful bibliographical researches:
Ungleich bedeutsamer und spektakülarer in den weltweiten Auswirkungen ist die Rolle des OU als innovativer Vorgriff in Richtung auf ainen alternativen Universitätstyp, dessen katalytische Tragweite noch nicht abzusechen ist. (p. 14)
It is the wide ranging import of these insights that Berger has internalized and used throughout his study to set the OU in a broad context, which he then uses to evaluate and challenge similar efforts outside Britain.
Readers who are at home with the origin and development of the OU will find little of particular importance in the detailed analysis of the student populace and demography, or the comprehensive designations of courses and credits and internal structural issues. Where Berger becomes increasingly interesting is in Section 3 and 4 of the monograph. Here he focuses on the media, technology, and pedagogy of the Open University and identifies points of potential interest to educational policy makers and educational program developers in countries other than Britain (especially Austria). Here the work becomes exciting, as Berger moves from description to prescription, and his knowledge is used to promote creative thinking in his national context: this is surely the very purpose and value of comparative study.
Berger is somewhat coy in dealing with issues of cost-benefit analysis and fights a little shy of input- output models of education. However, he does clearly recognize the various benefits that accrue to students of the Open University, though he does pose the question "Is the OU a university?" The high success rates and relatively low drop-out rates of students are ample witness to the reality of the OU as an educational institution. Summer schools and telephone conferencing are surely, by his own analysis, seminars and tutorials in a modern context.
Not surprisingly, Berger turns to professional and economic arguments to show where the motives lie for developing a similar OU innovation in Austria. The need for medics and engineers, as well as teachers and other professionals, to update their skills regularly is self-evident internationally. Austria is no exception. Like its British counterpart, Austrian industry employs a rather small proportion of higher education graduates of all kinds. Needs, challenges, and opportunities abound in the Austrian context: a British read-ership will find much of this uncomfortably common ground. If there really is any need for further discussion, Berger avers that Klagenfurt's own centre for the study of educational economy and sociology is singularly well-placed to pursue this issue. Frankly, Berger's monograph offers a series of blue-prints and critiques that once set in a further socio-economic analyses would show clearly the way forward!
Issues of personal development and economic necessity are juxtaposed by Berger clearly, sensitively, but not particularly imaginatively or originally. However, that does not take away from their valency or importance. Questions that touch the thorny problem of credit transferability are also raised: they are technical and of a second order and he does well not to lose his way among them. In showing how Austria might learn from a British innovation and by reminding us of how we in Britain learned from Prussia a century ago, Berger justifies his labor and invites us to give his work a wider forum.
G. F. Benham
Director of Education
London Borough of Brent
P. O. Box No. 1
Chesterfield House, 9 Park Lane,
Wembley, Middlesex
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