A Report of the OUHK 10th Anniversary Specialised Workshop on Institutional Research in Open and Distance Learning Held on Wednesday, 13 October 1999

The Specialised Workshop on Institutional Research in Open and Distance Learning was attended by 25 participants, the majority of whom were senior managers from countries including: China, Japan, India, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Zimbabwe, Philippines, Mauritius and Czech Republic.

The workshop proceedings were initiated by five guest facilitators: Dr. Judith Calder (The Open University, UK), Dr. Hilary Perraton (International Research Foundation for Open Learning, UK), Prof. Terry Evans (Deakin University, Australia), Prof. James Taylor (The University of Southern Queensland, Australia) and Prof. Abdul Khan (Indira Gandhi National Open University, India).

From the discussions that followed, it clearly seemed to be agreed that research about distance and open learning is an essential component of the future development of our universities and other distance and open institutions. However, some questions were raised about who should be doing the research:

• Should it be a designated research centre within the university?
• Should it be the discipline experts who have much to contribute and gain but have clearly defined and time-consuming roles that make research participation difficult?
• Should it be structured in such a way as to make research an important aspect for every member of staff?
• Should the research be subcontracted out to others on the basis that most distance education institutions are too busy running programmes to do anything else?

There may not have been agreement about how to answer these questions, but some other important issues were discussed.

Issue of 'competitive vulnerability' - need to consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of using research to generate knowledge ourselves (which of course involves financial and other commitment) vs leaving it to the conventional universities to generate the knowledge and borrow from their models - raises the issue of which of these choices we need to make in order to be regarded as 'proper' universities

To do the former implies a commitment to provide training for academic staff - and probably some service staff as well - in distance and open learning research methodologies, and also to provide assistance to identify research issues that can be of direct benefit in their own contexts. It also implies the need for a top-down approach in which the incentive, support and management of allocation of resources and of outputs come from the management.

While research that seeks solutions to short-term and/or local problems is important, it is also important to undertake long-term research that can be generalisable to other contexts and contribute to the growing body of knowledge. It was suggested that to do this can lead to multiple benefits - including financial benefits.

It has been suggested that there can be value in collaborative research where researchers based in various institutions are all contributing to a common focus, i.e. doing research that responds BOTH to institutional needs and feeds into the international level - even though it takes a large investment in terms of both money and time. This was supported by Professor Taylor's proposal that there is a need to develop a research framework for open and distance learning to take account of the levels, utility and foci/areas of need for research. Dr. Perraton has issued an invitation to participate in further discussions about the potential for such collaboration.

A further question that arose about inter-institutional collaboration was:

• Will these initiatives work more effectively if generated from the bottom-up, i.e. from like-minded individuals, or top-down from institutional level?
• Another was the question of the potentially inhibiting effects of competitive issues (e.g. both parties wanting to be the managing institution) vs. mutually beneficial sharing of resources.

In the final discussion, one of the participants noted that 'research in distance education is a contestable notion'. While no clear answers were reached for the questions and issues that were discussed, the Workshop succeeded in generating some thinking and further discussion, and it seems that there is potential to develop these thoughts into practical steps forward.

13 October 1999

Programme Details and Papers Presented