keynote at Hamburg AG-F meeting, May 2012

1. From Place to Virtual Space:
Reconfiguring Student
Support in Distance Education
AG-F Universität Hamburg, 2012
Alan Tait
Pro Vice-Chancellor
Professor of Distance Education and Development
The Open University

2. Three themes
• The development of student support at OU UK over last
40 years: a review
• The development of technologies that support this broad
historical sweep: ‘disembedding the local’
• Change and continuities for the direction of student
support for the future
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3. What is happening underneath
the surface?
• Disembedding
• Die Entbettung?
• ‘Lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans
of time-space’
Giddens (1991) The Consequences of Modernity
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4. Characteristics of Late Modernity
• Disembedding from local
• Longer historical sweep from oral to written cultures
• Role of mass communication
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5. 5

6. Regions and Nations
England
1 London
13 OU Regions/Nations 2 South (Oxford)
3 South West (Bristol)
4 West Midlands (Birmingham)
5 East Midlands (Nottingham)
6 East (Cambridge)
7 Yorkshire (Leeds)
8 North West (Manchester)
9 North (Newcastle)
13 South East (East Grinstead)
10 Wales (Cardiff)
11 Scotland (Edinburgh)
Milton Keynes (HQ) 12 Ireland (Belfast and Dublin) 6

7. Locations
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* Please note that these are part of the same CST

8. The vision for the student
experience
For students
•Coherent, personal and targeted
•Enable students to:
– achieve their study goals
– achieve their personal and career development
goals
– enhance their contribution to society
For the University
•A reputation for access, quality and achievement
•The first choice for students
•A benchmark for other HEIs
•Adapting and evolving, at the leading edge
•Meeting recruitment, retention and completion targets
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9. Three main student support
models
• 1976-2000 Tutor-counsellor, embedded in local study
centre, plus tutor more or less local, plus Regional
Centre staff
• 2000-2012 Tutor, more or less local, plus Regional
Centre Advisory staff
• 2013 - Curriculum Support Team on national
basis, plus tutor more or less local
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10. Curriculum Support Teams
• Serves curriculum programme for all territories
• Move away from geography to subject focus an ongoing
principle
• Multi-disciplinary for professional perspective
• Cheaper division of labour of +40 years
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11. An ancient Egyptian table
calculating the number of
sacrifices made of a particular
type over the course of a
specified period.
3000 BC
Ration record from Babylon
dating to the years 594–569 BC
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18. 1955
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20. 20

21. What else is new?
• Ability to make learners responsible for sourcing (some)
material
• Capacity for peer and collaborative work
• Richness of learning with multi-media
• In industrial centre-periphery open universities, ability of
central staff to engage continuously with students
• Ability to deliver near-constant updating of learning
materials
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22. Continuities
• Cognitive/affective/systemic dimensions to student
support (Tait 2000)
• Support to students to achieve their goals
Overall
• Student as subject not object
• Values which drive
• and politics which negotiate choices for policy
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23. Geological sense of development
• Layers added to layers
• Still visible
• Some fossils!
• What do we take out?
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24. Disembedding: a characteristic of
late modernity
‘Lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans
of time-space’
Giddens (1991) The Consequences of Modernity
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25. Disembedding
• Distancing from location and physical presence
• Escape from context
• Changes nature of human experience
• Key to social mobility
• From or with community?
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26. WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
December 31, 2011
Internet Penetration
Population Internet Users Growth Users %
World Regions Users (%
( 2011 Est.) Dec. 31, 2000 2000-2011 of Table
Latest Data Population)
Africa 1,037,524,058 4,514,400 139,875,242 13.5 % 2,988.4 % 6.2 %
Asia 3,879,740,877 114,304,000 1,016,799,076 26.2 % 789.6 % 44.8 %
Europe 816,426,346 105,096,093 500,723,686 61.3 % 376.4 % 22.1 %
Middle East 216,258,843 3,284,800 77,020,995 35.6 % 2,244.8 % 3.4 %
North America 347,394,870 108,096,800 273,067,546 78.6 % 152.6 % 12.0 %
Latin America / Carib. 597,283,165 18,068,919 235,819,740 39.5 % 1,205.1 % 10.4 %
Oceania / Australia 35,426,995 7,620,480 23,927,457 67.5 % 214.0 % 1.1 %
WORLD TOTAL 6,930,055,154 360,985,492 2,267,233,742 32.7 % 528.1 % 100.0
Internet World Stats
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
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28. What are principles for student
support for the future?
• Essential role in pedagogy model, and student
achievement
• Safe to assume that all relevant communities live at
ease with disembedded educational systems?
• Obligation to develop paths out of local to disembedded
worlds
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29. Our obligations as educators?
• Disembedding is independent of educational systems
• We must reflect it
• We must help our students engage and do well with it
• We must exploit its affordances
• We must acknowledge its challenges
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30. Vielen Dank!
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