All this does little to dissuade Professor Fleck from his view that the OUBS has advantages over its rivals. “Some people think the traditional MBA market is collapsing but there’s huge demand globally. Distance-learning programmes can meet that demand.”Even its competitors acknowledge that one of the OU’s main strengths is the user-friendly nature of its text books. Over more than 30 years it has built up a huge amount of expertise, designing printed and now on-line materials to help students learn outside a traditional classroom.
Not everyone at the business school will be delighted to learn that its new dean is taking a second look at how these course materials are developed. “The expertise is fantastic,” he says, “but it can take a long time to refine and produce a course. We need to be more flexible and respond more quickly to demand.” This, he says, is where partnerships come in “We don’t have to develop everything ourselves. And we need to ask whether our skills are geared too much towards a printed text which can’t be revised quickly.”Taking the business school even further down the road towards virtual learning may also have risks. The Open University’s own foray into the American distance-learning market met with little success and was abandoned in favour of a more modest partnership arrangement with one university. A recent decision to remove some compulsory residential study sessions from the current MBA programme led to complaints from alumni – who argued that the face-to-face teaching had been an important attraction of the programme.
But the business school claims an increasing number of applicants can’t afford the time away from work or families to attend residential courses. Professor Fleck, who introduced outward-bound sessions for new MBA students at Edinburgh, says he has no intention of turning the OU MBA into a completely on-line experience, though more could be done to exploit the technology. The initiative was designed to offer UK universities a chance to deliver their degree programmes on-line to a global market but failed to take off. “We already have the tools needed to deliver high-quality education. Of course there are universities with a world-wide reputation but even Harvard isn’t a global university in the correct sense, with students studying all over the world.
But we are in a position to become a truly global university.”Critics may argue that this is stretching ambition too far. In the 1990s, some of the best known American business schools tried to expand through e-learning and found it harder than expected. Universitas 21, an e-learning venture capitalising on the expertise of universities across the world, is making inroads into the MBA market in Asia but still has to prove itself in Europe or the US. Fleck is keen to see this idea bear fruit and wants to explore the possibility of similar projects elsewhere. He forsees a day when staff from the Milton Keynes campus could form part of a community of academic experts contributing knowledge and teaching on a range of specialist management programmes – not all of them run by the Open University.
The patronage is awesome.The Scottish composer James MacMillan got the treatment. While it is fascinating to be able to hear so much of one composer’s music at one time, fatigue is an enemy. Deals are made for punters willing to stay the course, but after such saturation, bleary ears would seem the reward. And another danger is that the odd work included by a different composer may assume greater prominence just because of the “relief” factor.MacMillan is a special case. Coming from the land of low light, his propensity is towards the dark and the dour, and, indeed, this weekend’s subtitle was “Darkness into Light” – but I seemed to catch little of the latter. MacMillan is a devout Catholic, a church where suffering sits high on the agenda. On the final day of the weekend, a lunchtime chamber- music concert had included – at the composer’s request – works by Alfred Schnittke and Galina Ustvolskaya, two composers whom he greatly admires and, as was evident, is greatly influenced by.
