Labour should learn from its own lessons and open up university course materials and exams

By Leo Pollak

Ten years ago to this day, David Blunkett delivered his then much-lauded and now much-forgotten “Greenwich speech“, announcing Labour’s ambitious plans for Britain to be “a world-leader in the burgeoning global market for e-learning”, making British university courses available online, for the intended benefit of millions at home and abroad. The e-Universities initiative, organised alongside the new University for Industry or learndirect, was launched as a commercial venture with designs on a multi-million pound flotation, and with a remit to provide intermediate and higher skills to an under-skilled populace.

Four years, £63 million and a paltry 900 students later, e-Universities was effectively wound down, one of the many victims of early New Labour’s policy purge, with Parliamentarians attributing its failure to poor management, insufficient market research, wilting commercial prospects and a lack of demand for online learning. The following year, in 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a budget half the size, limited market research, no commercial goals and a simple remit to extend their educational mission, released their first batch of Open Courseware course materials online – free and simple-to-use course notes, video and audio lectures, reading lists, past exam papers, problem sets and all, with no registration, and no managed learning.

That this one university’s open courseware went on to attract over 60 million users testifies not only to the extraordinary loss of foresight that had set in by 2004, but also to the energy and haste that Labour did possess in the early years of the government. e-Universities failed because in terms of access and appeal its remit as a commercial venture hindered its potential as a public offering capable of achieving critical mass, and because in terms of the web coverage and the bandwidths that could carry the variety of educational materials, it simply jumped the gun. From MIT, via UC Berkeley, Kyoto and, most impressively, at Yale, variants of open courseware proliferated by the hundreds then thousands, with straight publications of existing course materials (including several enlightened faculties in British universities) impelled by accompanying movements in open access research and open educational resources (of which the Open University’s intermediate and learner-managed OpenLearn is a leading proponent).

Here was a classic victim of New Labour’s big intellectual mistake, that where capital could be deployed to benefit labour, the issuing out of commercial pickings would be always privileged over the prospect of a public commons. However, it is a mistake that is slowly but surely showing signs of morphing into an insight within the Labour Party, as demonstrated with the recent opening up of public sector datasets in an easily found, easily licensed and easily-reused release. I would argue now that with our universities suffering the mortal dread of “swingeing cuts” to pay for our £1.2 trillion guarantee for the banks, with inequality higher and social mobility lower than in comparable countries, with the bar of high intellectual standards (and the knowledge, skill and disposition that comes with it) increasingly obfuscated in the wider public culture, and with civic trust at an all-time low, that one small investment could go a very long way indeed.

Would it be entirely implausible to imagine from the start of the next academic year, all university course materials having their licenses returned to their maker, and course materials being recorded, scanned and uploaded online into user-friendly, managerspeak-free and modifiable formats, with a refreshed and renewed Labour Party evangelising their use to Britain’s excluded minorities, adults, and students at pre-university age?

And furthermore, is it totally outside the realm of even the most miserly imagination to envisage such a Labour government looking to incentivise the use of such a new higher education commons, by opening up the university exam and certification system to the taxpaying citizens who pay for it?

A simple fee to cover the cost, and you’d get a laptop, a dongle, and the chance to sit the same exam as face-to-face students do somewhere down the line. Would employers not welcome that, would ambitious boys and girls, intelligent men and women not be enticed by the opportunity and heartened by a timely reminder of what a pioneering Labour party can be for Britain and the wider world?

With all the cosseted, sector-focussed and Quango-protected agendas forming a rather untidy thicket – in adult learning, e-learning, knowledge transfer and controlled access – each over-tailored and over-managed via a tussle between think tanks and unions and the corporate revolving doors – hasn’t the prospect of meaningful equality of opportunity and the emancipatory potential of the internet been horribly overlooked? In short, would not dormant muscles begin to stir once more?

Several promises could follow in the shape of a new deal for opening up universities in this way. Where for too long there has existed an inbuilt assumption that the opposing goals of academic autonomy and public accountability and impact were somehow intractable, a comprehensive and varied offering of British open courseware could engender a means of enhancing both under one transparent system, boosting trust between academia, state and public in the process. Via distance auditing, reduced paperwork would free up time for actual research and teaching, as would the prospect of easily-administered options for additional revenue streams through the kind of devolved sponsorship arrangements and online advertising networks that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.

As for students, far from losing the benefit of paid courses, present and future fee-paying students would see the added value of a face-to-face education – with tutor-student interaction, intensity of a time-scheduled workload and the broader benefits of the university experience – reinstated. The effect of scanners on our course notes and cameras in our lecture halls would be to promote an invigorated co-operative and competitive platform for higher quality and more diverse teaching, and promoting a closer correspondence to certificates and skills.

In the technology-rich and globally-oriented economy that the political class never tire of reminding us of, the window of opportunity for Britain to once again demonstrate the possibilities of opening up university education are enormous. The economic gains from such a system would initially begin with the regulated development of support services – essay feedback, supervision, exam practice, etc – for those using a university’s open courseware and pursuing its open degree. However, the multiplier effects of a more critically engaged public, the wild promise of celebrity lecturers, and an impetus given to the public to broaden their learning at the click of a button are, if harder to pin down, certainly more considerable. It would represent one big way of making the best of what existing resources are already available, while reassuring the public that the cuts aren’t blind.

But it is the longer term cultural ramifications that are most enticing, while so many individuals – of different age, background and constraint – continue to find their development thwarted and potential squandered to a system that does not always fit their learning styles, their passions and their disposition. Such a system of fuller access to course materials and simplified access to exams would allow any person, at any point in their life, to take whatever course they want, taught by whomever they want, and at the pace that they want. Young people ten years from now in a world of higher bandwidths and super-cheap computing would grow up having at least this escape to hand, however difficult their situation may be, however challenging their environment.

With great home-grown institutions in the Open University and the University of London’s External System, Britain has in its past been the pioneer of opening up universities. While Labour has thus far missed the trick of the Internet age, it can well draw upon these traditions and those of the open source, open education and labour movement in general, to offer something to the British people that would bring open learning and equal opportunity to an entirely new level.

If Labour doesn’t exist as a vehicle for progress and justice, improvement and learning, for real people in their actual lives, then what else is it for? Go on Gordon, go on Mandy, take a punt and stick this in your manifesto. A public, not impartial to useful things made free at the point of use, might warm to a reminder of what we’re about.

An abridged version of this article appeared on Comment is Free.