Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to this interesting event. I am delighted to be in Oman for the first time at this distinguished university.

I have taken as my title ‘The challenges of enhancing the student experience in the 21st century’. Under that heading I shall identify some of the major trends in higher education, noting particularly international developments. I shall talk about the need for change in higher education and the requirement for higher education management systems to be linked to social and economic trends and to developments in the rest of the world.

Let me begin with a simple proposition about what enhances the student experience. It is that students enjoy – and benefit from – discovering powerful ideas.

I have been a university student for much of my adult life since I first went to university full time at age 19. I mean no disrespect to the ancient universities of Oxford and Paris, where I did my full-time undergraduate and doctoral education, when I say that many of the most powerful ideas that I use today I found in the courses and programmes that I did later on as a part-time student.

A particularly fertile source of such ideas was a Master’s programme in Educational Technology that I began in 1971 and only completed in 1996. By taking twenty-five years to complete the programme I did not intend to be a living symbol of the age of lifelong learning but I guess I am.
In my defence, I should tell you that I also studied other programmes and courses with other universities within that period.

Requisite Variety
One of the powerful ideas that I picked up in that educational technology programme is relevant today. I refer to the principle of requisite variety, which I discovered in a course on Educational Cybernetics. The principle of requisite variety states simply that for a system to survive in a complex and changing environment it must have a variety of responses that at least matches the variety of changes to which it will be subject.

I guarantee that by the end of this conference many speakers will have evoked the rapid pace of change in today’s world. Against that background, assuming that we want higher education to survive and prosper, we must ensure that higher education has the increasing variety of responses necessary to respond to its changing environments.

This is a problem because there are forces that homogenise our higher education systems. Just calling them systems tends to make us think of their components as homogenous even though, according to my principle of requisite variety, they really need to be highly diverse.

There is even a risk that quality assurance systems can become powerful forces for homogenisation even though those who operate the systems swear that they aim to encourage diversity.

Don’t misunderstand me. I strongly believe in quality assurance systems. During my time as vice-chancellor of the Open University the United Kingdom placed enormous emphasis on quality assurance and quality assessment. This was good for the Open University because the assessments showed the world that the OU was a leader in the quality of its teaching.

When I left for UNESCO the OU stood at number five out of over one hundred universities in the league table of teaching quality produced from national data by The Sunday Times. You can see that the Open University ranks just above Oxford University, where I did my first degree. This is a very good example of how new universities – and new models of higher education – can compete successfully with established institutions.

While I am on the subject of established universities let me also suggest that it is not good for governments to give the established universities a monopoly on publicly funded research. This clearly runs against my principle of requisite variety and is a risk for the future. All universities should be encouraged to develop new knowledge and brand new fields of research do emerge in less prestigious universities that must do research on small funds and therefore have to think harder.

My general point is that we must avoid creating monocultures of higher education, even if they match our own prejudices about what higher education should be. Any monoculture is a fragile ecosystem. Higher education cannot afford to be fragile in the 21st century. Robust ecosystems need biodiversity; robust higher education systems need requisite variety.

From where I sit at UNESCO each national higher education system looks more homogeneous than it does to those within it. Even the American system, which is the world’s most diverse system, has a superficial sameness. A university bookstore on an American campus will closely resemble those on other campuses, save that the size and scale match the university that houses it.

I am alert to sameness and difference because I have worked in an unusually wide range of academic settings. I began my academic life in two ancient universities, Oxford and Paris, but have spent much of my career, which has taken me to nine universities in six jurisdictions, in modern universities that opened their doors after 1970.

I have managed both small and large universities. As president of Laurentian University, Ontario I had overall academic responsibility for the Collège universitaire de Hearst, which was then listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest university, with 30 students.

This is a tiny college serving the French-speaking community of Hearst, in the lowlands of Hudson’s Bay. I believe that if you draw a line from Hearst to the North Pole it only crosses one road – which is unpaved. I moved from that job to the UK Open University, which has nearly 200,000 students.

Both extremes of the continuum from urban to rural are familiar to me. As vice-rector, academic of Concordia University in downtown Montreal I worked in one of the world’s largest academic buildings, the Hall Building, and watched many thousands of part-time students stream through its doors at 6pm each day. At Laurentian University in Northern Ontario my parish, with its three affiliated colleges, covered an area the size of France and possibly contained more beavers than people.

I have enjoyed managerial responsibilities for organising both classroom teaching on campus and distance learning all over the world – and for serving both full-time and part-time students.

I’ve divided my time evenly between francophone and anglophone institutions and also headed a bilingual university, which was excellent preparation for working at UNESCO, where our meetings wander to and fro between English and French. Finally, I have experience of working with both bicameral and unicameral systems of university governance.

By now you will have concluded that I can’t hold a job. Clark Kerr once said that he left one university as he joined it – fired with enthusiasm. But I can’t use that great line. It was always the attraction of the next challenge that moved me on.

What all this has taught me is that there are many ways of giving students a good experience and that broadly speaking diversity has been driven by student needs. Take my little Collège universitaire de Hearst with its thirty students in the Hudson’s Bay Lowlands. Most people would say that a College with thirty students is completely unviable, but think of the alternatives. The nearest universities are hundreds of miles away. The nearest French-language universities are even further away.

Furthermore, the option of going away is only available to full-time students, those who want to study while keeping their employment in Hearst can only do it through distance education or through a college on the spot. It is clear that the presence of this little college has done a much to maintain the viability and vibrancy of Hearst as a French-speaking town in the northern reaches of Ontario. Whilst a narrow analysis of cost per student might suggest it was an expensive luxury, I suspect that a deeper analysis of the economic, social and cultural costs and benefits of the college to the town and its region would show a very different and positive story.

Education: A Public Good
My work at UNESCO covers all levels of education worldwide. My primary job is to help countries extend schooling to the hundred million children who never see the inside of a classroom and the hundreds of millions more who do not stay there long enough to learn anything useful. While working on that challenge I must not forget world’s adult illiterates, nearly a billion of them – or one in four of the global population – whose lives are blighted for lack of this simple skill.

However, UNESCO addresses all levels of education and resists the idea that any one level holds the key to development. Our small, dedicated and effective Division of Higher Education works in three main areas. First, it facilitates the general reform of higher education, particularly in the developing countries. Second, it helps member states, and the international community generally, to address the challenges and opportunities that globalisation presents to higher education. Third, we operate a network of some 500 UNESCO chairs in over a hundred countries. Many of them are linked through twinning arrangements under our UNITWIN programme. Its aim is to encourage South-South and North-South academic collaboration on topical issues related either to development or to the values for which UNESCO stands.

Our work on higher education reform and globalisation leads us straight into disputes about the nature of higher education institutions that almost amount to war in Latin America. Two camps contest the territory.

One camp believes that all higher education should be provided by the state and most in this camp also argue that it should be free – that is to say without tuition fees. The other camp takes a more catholic approach and holds that there is room in a national higher education system for a diversity of providers: state universities, private not-for-profit universities, universities operated by religious organisations and even universities run for-profit.

At the centre of the dispute is the notion of higher education as a public good. This takes us to the references to education in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is worth quoting in its entirety – I refer to article 26:

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2)Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children

Before commenting on higher education let me say that after some wobbles at the end of the 20th century the major international bodies, including the World Bank, are still fully committed to the proposition that elementary education should be free and compulsory. More and more countries are including the right to education in their constitutions. Recent years have seen dramatic increases in primary school enrolments in countries such as Kenya and Malawi that have abolished fees at this level. Having quality catch up with access will be a longer process, but it is clear that fees – and hidden fees such as paying for uniforms and books – have been a brake on the universality of education.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights says that higher education should be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. I suppose that if we were writing it today we would probably say ‘accessible to all able to benefit from it’ rather than ‘accessible to all on the basis of merit’. However, back in 1948 access to higher education was much more limited than it is today and the concepts of merit and competition for places were much stronger. The inclusion of higher education in the Declaration indicates that higher education is a public good, which is an important concept.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is itself a global public good. Much of our work at UNESCO is aimed at creating other global public goods, not only international conventions but also global mechanisms for the coordination and support of various activities, such as the support of the worldwide campaign for education for all that I mentioned earlier.

What does it mean to say that higher education is a public good? It means, at least, that the states signatories to the Universal Declaration are committed to equity of access to higher education. After that the parties to the dispute about the provision of higher education part company.

For some, the public good is indissociably linked to provision by the state. This leads to the proposition that all higher education must be provided by the state – and often to the further proposition that the only way to achieve equality of access on the basis of merit is to make higher education free – in the sense of no tuition fees.

For others the public good means that the state must create a framework to ensure that higher education is equally accessible to all on the basis of merit or some other criteria. However, it does not require that the state be the monopoly provider or even the main provider. The framework that the state provides may include systems of financial support to students, subventions to institutions and arrangements for quality assurance.

The dispute between these two views of how the public good should be assured is more acrimonious, notably in Latin America, than my laconic descriptions would suggest. One reason is that those who argue for the state as monopoly provider of free higher education realise uneasily that this principle will inevitably limit the provision of higher education, at least in democratic countries. Even in the richest states, governments assume that the electorate is not ready to underwrite all the costs of lifelong learning in an era of mass higher education.

The other stimulus to the debate comes from the globalisation of higher education, particularly the phenomenon of transborder education. Those who put the role of the state as a provider at the centre of their thinking feel threatened by the arrival of foreign higher education providers in their countries, whether operating through distance learning or out of local campuses.

Some of those who see the state as the guarantor of the public good rather than as a monopoly provider also look askance at some of the manifestations of the globalisation of higher education. They are, however, better equipped to respond to it because they can adapt their national frameworks for higher education to cover transborder provision.

The Student Viewpoint
This dispute is, however, largely a matter for academics and policy wonks. Countries come down on different sides of the issue but there is no North-South pattern in the way they do so.

Meanwhile, students in all parts of the world vote with their feet for the option that gives them the better chance of gaining access to higher education. They see higher education as the route to a better life and higher status and they want it. Most countries have consistently underestimated the future demand for higher education. It is little consolation for an eager student to know that she has an equal chance of accessing, on the basis of merit, a higher education system that can accept only one in twenty of her age cohort. She wants to go to university now and will look favourably, paying fees if necessary, on a university that will take her, whether it is private, public or for-profit.

Potential students today are as varied as people are varied. This diversity drives the diversity of higher education systems. The answer to the question: ‘what enhances the student experience’ must have a similar diversity of responses. To take an extreme example, the for-profit University of Phoenix locates its many mini-campuses across the USA near to motorway exits, ensures ample parking, and gives students priority over staff for the parking nearest the building. This definitely enhances the student experience for the University’s busy working students and removes excuses for not observing Phoenix’s stringent attendance requirements.

My own career has given me a particular interest in older students. Last year I slept with an older student, who is my wife. She was taking an Open University course, which means that she was now busier than I am so that we have to arrange our life around her availability rather than mine. The opportunity to observe an Open University student at close quarters has been both fascinating and sobering. As vice-chancellor of the Open University I was aware, in theory, of the millions of person-hours of work that University was imposing on the human race. Seeing it at first hand is something else.

What enhanced my wife’s student experience seemed to be much more related to the intrinsic content of the course than to the extrinsic aspects of student life that might appeal to a younger person. She studied science and found earth and planetary sciences completely absorbing. She can wax poetic about the rock cycle. On the other hand she regrets that the course does not provide more practice exercises in mathematics. Her course makes explicit how each section and assignment relates to the objectives of the course and also flags the general skills that she is acquiring. This leaves her fairly cold, yet I imagine that a younger student would find it quite useful.

There is a more general point here. In the mid-1990s the UK’s Higher Education Quality Council conducted a survey of graduates with the aim of trying to define a concept called graduateness.
How does doing a university degree change someone? Graduates from all universities were included in the sample and, not surprisingly, the results did not differ greatly from institution to institution, except in one case. Graduates from the Open University, much more than graduates from elsewhere, said that university study had changed their lives.

At first sight that is odd. After all, the average age of Open University students on entry was 34 so you would think their lives had achieved a degree of stability. Conversely, you might think that the young, malleable students who study full-time at university after secondary school would be changed by the experience of university. Perhaps they were, but if so they were less aware of it than the older Open University students, perhaps because their studies were part of the general process of maturation.

How did Open University graduates say that study has changed them? These mature students give greater importance to personal development than to employability. As benefits of study they mention new careers, better job opportunities, more self-confidence, a sense of achievement, more opportunities in life and new friends as the results of their studies.

That, to me is an important way of enhancing the student experience, namely leading them to the academic mode of thinking that makes hypotheses and to the systematic scepticism that examines the evidence. As young full-time students gravitate increasingly to vocationally related courses and approach their university experience with more utilitarian attitudes there is a danger that they may graduate with little proficiency in the academic mode of thinking and an attitude of credulity to authority and the tabloids rather than systematic scepticism.

On this evidence it may be somewhat later, as lifelong learners, that they become mature students in both senses of the term: ready to seek understanding; more alert to the nature of knowledge; open to a discourse about what can be known.

Motivating Academics
My next question is how do we link higher education management systems to social and economic trends. The motivation of the academic staff is the lens through which I shall comment on that weighty subject, seen from the perspectives of the developing world and the industrialised world respectively.

UNESCO, as the UN body with the mandate for higher education, has set out standards on the main issues at the heart of the employment relationship in the sector. These are: civil rights; academic freedom; publication rights; security of employment (including tenure or its equivalent); salaries; workload and benefits.

UNESCO has a special responsibility to universities in the developing world. Here the issues of motivation are sometimes very simple indeed. The most basic incentive for a university teacher is a decent life. This means being paid a just wage, having it paid on time, and not having to have two or three jobs at once just to make ends meet.

The issues of civil rights and academic freedom may seem more abstract, but they are just as important if countries wish to harness the brains in their universities to national development.

That is why UNESCO is undertaking a global study of the status of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and tenure. Much remains to be done to convince developing country governments that in order to be a well of creativity and expertise for the nation, universities must also be a source of criticism and exposure for the government.

I make three observations about the motivation of university staff in industrialised countries – where employment rights are usually not an issue.

First, most academics choose this profession because they prefer analysis to action and discussion to decisions. This puts a special obligation on the minority of academics who do have management talent. They must step forward and take on the leadership functions.

Second, the evidence shows that academics are prepared to put up with poor pay in order to enjoy the intellectual freedom of university life. What they will not tolerate is the combination of a relative decline in wages with the lessening of their intellectual freedom through increasing administrative regimentation.

My third point, however, is that asking academics to use new technologies and approaches to teaching need not be an assault on their intellectual freedom.

A tenacious tradition in conventional university teaching is that the individual instructor is responsible for the four main components of teaching activity. He or she must plan the lectures, organise the back-up resources such as slides and handouts, deliver the lectures, and assess the students. All four components become more onerous as class sizes increase – whereas the possibility of genuine class discussion decreases. Hence teaching becomes less attractive and a reduction in teaching load is the advantage that most academics in conventional universities request when their institution asks how it can reward them without paying them more.

Distance teaching universities achieve both economies of scale – and what I call quality of scale – by division of labour and specialisation.
Different people are responsible for the various components of the teaching and learning process.

Because they can specialise in these functions they perform them better.

This is just one way in which the academic profession is changing and diversifying in order to enhance the experience of the students they teach. I hope that some of these comments relate to your important work at Sultan Qaboos University and I thank you for inviting me here.