Rethinking Open Universities: What Makes Them Unique?

This paper considers the current state of the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) and the implications for the evolution of higher education, whether through open or traditional institutions. Although 50 years have passed since the establishment of UKOU, the first open university, such institutions seem to be losing their ground, notably because they face challenges in creating a clear identity for themselves. By definition, they have been distinguished from traditional universities by offering both open access and open admission. However, some cases of open access (i.e., distance teaching through the adoption of various technologies) are found in China, South Africa, the USSR, and the US. Even so, the introduction of open admission policies can be considered a core feature of open universities. Such policies have been criticized for creating a so-called revolving door, with students failing almost immediately. To counteract this, UKOU developed a particular quality assurance system, which allowed them to be an authoritative higher education institution. Specifically, they structured regional networks with shared responsibilities, to offer all the elements that make up a university including headquarters, regional offices, and even spaces for students. This form of networked university is what differentiates open universities from the traditional university model and constitutes a unique feature of this type of educational institution.


Introduction
It has been 50 years since the establishment of the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU). Since then, UKOU has been introduced as a university model directly or indirectly in a number of countries, which have established their own open universities. However, UKOU, the original open university, has been undergoing significant changes while its identity has also been threatened. The majority of its regional offices, which were responsible for direct education and student support, have been closed. Also, in 2018, a large number of faculty members were made redundant. The university has been suffering from financial difficulties for some time, especially as a result of government funding changes for part-time students. While these kinds of changes may be inevitable, they have raised the concern that "the OU as we know it" (Swain, 2015, para. 4) will be destroyed and reduced to being "a digital content provider" (Taylor, 2018, para. 4, 11). Although it is unclear what constitutes the 'OU as we know it' exactly, the changes seem to be threatening the university's identity.
Open universities have long agonized over their identity, because of how they differ from more traditional university models. When the OU was established, many greeted it with skepticism, scorn, and ridicule (Perry, 1977, pp. 18-19). There have been studies about its efforts to become "a real university" (Student Research Centre, 1986, p. 14), distinguishing UKOU from "genuine universities" (Keegan & Rumble, 1982, p. 246). As UKOU was a new type of university, it had to prove how it was different from conventional universities, including the specific advantages it offered, as well as how it could, nevertheless, be an authoritative academic institution like a traditional university.
Today, open universities are destined to ask themselves the same questions again. In the past, the cause for self-questioning was to distinguish between the two types of institution, but now, the differences between conventional and open universities are disappearing. The open university model has spread around the world and has been able to attract numerous students, and gain recognition and credibility. However, with the introduction and development of information and communication technology (ICT), the boundaries between traditional universities and open universities have started to disappear. Traditional universities are developing and offering more courses online, replacing some conventional undergraduate or graduate courses and credits. The emergence of these competitors was foreseen some time ago (Raggatt, 1993). More recently, Tait (2018, pp. 14-15) argued that the first-mover advantages that were once enjoyed by open universities have already been eroded due to the emergence of new competitors. According to Tait, at least four open universities in Europe have been threatened with closure or mergers, either because of new, competitive challengers and/or perceptions of their own poor performance. Many open universities are experiencing both a decline in student enrollment and a loss of the monopoly position they previously enjoyed in the market, leading to financial difficulty in some cases (Garrett, 2016, p. 41).
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the core features of open universities and their particular structure for quality assurance by revealing the fundamental differences in their educational model compared to that of conventional universities.  Jung (2006, pp. 58-59) and only 50 by Tait (2018, p. 14). Among these institutions, UKOU appears to be the most influential prototype model for open universities (Daniel-Gittens, 2016, p. 884;Open University, 2000, p. 2086. Also, according to Ramanujam (2009, pp. 31-32), the success of UKOU has inspired policy-makers in various countries to establish their own institutions: (a) Thailand (established in 1971, 1978); (b) Pakistan (1974) (Daniel & Smith, 1979, p. 64). Several open universities have started to form a single identity and community. One representative example is the In the 1970s, Rumble and Keegan (1982a, pp. 206-207) conducted a comparative study of the characteristics of the then established open universities, including UKOU. They used the term distance teaching universities in their study, but it can be regarded as equivalent to open universities as described in this paper because the institutions selected for Rumble and Keegan's (1982a) study were mainly inspired by UKOU. They observed two main sets of shared characteristics of those universities, namely that (a) that distance teaching reached a new target group of adults who, for a variety of reasons, have been unable to study at a conventional university or who wanted to study at the same time as they continue in full-time employment; and (b) that no formal educational qualifications were required of applicants, and only the normal minimal entrance requirements for universities in their country must be met.

Core Features of Open Universities
Open access is a term that signifies that admittance, usually to higher education, is guaranteed at any stage of life, and regardless of the student's location and time availability. One way to ensure this access without any limitations is through distance education, often thanks to the use of advanced technology. People can go to university whenever they choose and wherever they are living. To participate in distance learning, it does not matter if students have a full-time job, are disabled, bringing up a child, or even imprisoned.
However, these features are not indigenous features of open universities. There were higher education institutions offering distance learning degrees even before UKOU was established. For example, there is evidence that the Peking Television College in China already used television (Abe, 1961, p. 159) prior to 1969.
Similarly, it is also widely known that distance education had already been adopted at higher education institutions in South Africa, the USSR, and the US before the founding of UKOU, and, indeed, some of these institutions had an effect on the establishment of UKOU itself (Briggs, 2001;Crines & Hickson, 2016;Perry, 1977;Kanwar & Daniel, 2010;Rumble & Harry, 1982;Simonson, Smaldino, & Zvacek, 2014;Weinbren, 2015 have been attempts to provide more higher education opportunities for the public than in the past. Yet these opportunities were mostly limited to qualified people. British higher education was monopolized by the ancient universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, for centuries, but the foundation of the University of London in 1836 contributed to ending the monopoly. The University of London also ran an external degree program, allowing students in remote locations to obtain a university degree if they were able to pass the university's examinations. People were able to study at colleges in their area as well as by themselves and could take the examinations at provincial examination centers. This tradition was inherited to build the structure of UKOU (Bell & Tight, 1993, p. 128). However, there is the view that London's external degree model could hardly be characterized as a full university, but that it constituted a federation (Flexner, 1994, p. 5;Kerr, 2001, pp. 231-232). The reason is that the university had administrative functions only, with educational functions entirely outsourced to external colleges. Thereafter, in the 1960s, through the Robbins Report (Robbins, 1963), the expansion of higher education opportunities for school leavers, based on the national need for trained brain power and egalitarianism, was emphasized. As a result, more universities were created.
At about the same time, UKOU was established especially for adults. Jennie Lee, one of the government officials involved in the foundation of UKOU, envisioned an independent university which had no requirements for entrance qualifications (Perry, 1977, p. 13). Lee's ideas were accepted; enrolment as a arguing that university admission should be prevented from becoming a "revolving door" policy that admits students as freshmen and then results in them failing and withdrawing almost immediately (Brubacher, 1977, p. 65). In other words, Brubacher's main concern about open admission was its potential impact on quality assurance.

Quality Assurance System for a New University Model
The ability of open universities to guarantee a certain level of quality education is directly related to the question of whether they can hold as much authority as conventional universities do, a question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered. When the idea for the establishment of UKOU was originally announced, British politicians and the mass media were doubtful about remote teaching and regarded it a "gimmick" or an "unrealistic idea" (Perry, 1977, p. 18, 33). Student Research Centre (1986, p. 14) wanted itself to be considered a "real university," not a correspondence college, with Keegan and Rumble (1982, p. 246) questioning if universities like UKOU are "genuine universities." Ramanujam (2017)  it is that generally allows institutions to be recognized as a genuine university. Surely, quality assurance must be one of the grounds of such recognition.
In order to consider the issue of quality assurance in open universities, the fact that their educational structure is fundamentally different from traditional universities has to be taken into account. Kerr (2001) suggests that three representative types of universities have existed thus far: the university, the modern university, and the multiversity. A university was proposed by Newman (2014), with Oxford constituting an example, as being isolated from secular society and focused on an educational, but not on a research, function. A modern university, as described by Flexner (1994), refers to a university, such as the University of Berlin, that emphasizes the importance of research and teaching at the same time. Finally, a multiversity, as defined by Kerr (2001), refers to a large-scale university, such as the University of California, that receives an enormous amount of research funding from government and national corporations. Flexner defines a modern university as an organism whose different parts all have a close relationship with one another (as cited in Kerr, 2001, p. 15). However, the multiversity differs a bit. While there are numerous communities within it, the relationship among them is weak. Instead, it is the pluralistic value of those communities that is respected. Kerr (2001) likened the different models to "a village with its priest," "a town-a one-industry town-with its intellectual oligarchy," and "a city of infinite variety" (p. 31).
Open universities are close to the concept of a university in the sense that most of them concentrate on the educational function. On the one hand, there are tens of thousands, to millions of students studying at such institutions and they constitute a number of communities as pluralism is naturally respected. In this respect, open universities may be similar to multiversities. However, open universities can also be seen as a fundamentally new type of university with less continuity compared to the relationships that exist among other university models. Peters (2001, pp. 110-111) suggested that the structure of distance education is characterized by industrialized form of learning and teaching, that is by (a) a division of labor, (b) mechanization, (c) standardization, (d) normalization, (e) formalization, (f) objectivization, (g) optimization, (h) mass production, and (i) consumption. Peters insisted that the concepts of the structure of industrialized teaching and learning was confirmed by the work of the distance teaching universities founded since the 1970s, above all the Open University (2001, p. 111). He argued that the educational structure of open universities targets a mass audience and has a technological basis, whereas the educational structure of conventional universities can be described as family-like, having small group structures, personal communication, and time-place-person ties (Keegan, 1996, p. 83).

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Peters's theory developed into a debate about the Fordism strategy, the neo-Fordism strategy, and the post-Fordism strategy. The Fordism strategy was described as a fully-centralized, single-mode, national distance education provider, gaining greater economies of scale by offering courses to a mass market. The neo-Fordism strategy extended the Fordist system by allowing for much higher levels of flexibility and diversity.
The post-Fordist strategy was characterized by high levels of all three variables: product innovation, process variability, and labor responsibility. As opposed to neo-Fordism and Fordism, it dispensed with a division of labor and rigid managerial control, and deliberately fostered a skilled and responsible workforce (Campion, 1995;Campion & Renne, 1992). These strategies can appear simultaneously, but the educational structure of open universities, at least, seems to be closest to the post-Fordism strategy. Open universities basically have a so-called headquarter-peripheral structure through having regional networks in addition to their headquarters.
The post-Fordism strategy represented the fundamental difference of educational structures between open and traditional universities. It also gave rise to a different kind of a quality assurance method between both types of universities. Fallis (2007) stated that the university has always been a "place" (p. 219). Traditional universities never seem to have considered the fact that they could be validated without this sense of place.
Even if they were able to choose to not be based in certain places, they could not have existed without having On the other hand, open universities do not require all of these facilities nor do university members come together in the same place. Instead, these functions are dispersed to regional offices and each individual student. Educational resources are delivered to each student directly, and lectures are given through various media. Regional offices are set up in certain areas as decided by each open university, with each office being responsible for teaching and managing the students living in a particular area. An open university is dispersed and its separated elements-students, regional offices, and headquarters-exist as a number of points. These points form a gigantic and imaginary plane, wherein the media becomes a line. The media acts as a bridge between each student and the university, however, the media does not take any responsibility for quality assurance. Instead, the responsibilities of assuring quality are divided up among the different elements other than the headquarters. Each regional office plays a role in assuring quality through contact with their students, such as through face-to-face tutorials, counselling, and assignments.
Depending on the exact policy of each open university, regional offices may provide facilities such as community spaces, libraries, and computer rooms just as traditional universities do. Furthermore, individual students also factor into ensuring open universities' authoritativeness as they need to be more deeply involved in their learning (e.g., by creating learning environments for themselves, and managing well as a distinctive quality assurance system, which is comprised of the headquarters, regional offices, and even students, who share responsibilities for its quality. This system enables open universities to adopt an open admission policy at the higher education level. Both the policy and the system are rarely found at conventional universities and therefore can be seen as aspects that make open universities unique. There remains much to consider beyond the scope of this paper.  Kim (1994, p. 147) observed that in times of less developed typography, the dissemination of textbooks was restricted so that teachers and students naturally gathered together in one place to create the medieval universities. On that basis, Kim insisted that universities may not need to exist in the information age, since personal research and the delivery of knowledge can now be done through the difference being that they build the majority of their virtual regional offices on the Internet. This is a system that assures the quality of distance education, and consists of a collaboration of the online and offline learning environment as seen in open universities. In that sense, it can be considered that open universities have been sent to the front line in the battle to change higher education. Therefore, it will be important to take note of how technological developments will change open universities in the future (i.e., whether they remain as a digital content provider or not). Not only does it offer clues to understanding the changing meaning of universities or even degrees, but also suggests a direction for the future of traditional universities in the information age.