Keywords

5.1 Peoples-uni

When, in 2006, I retired from my post as Professor of Public Health at the University of Manchester in the UK, the School accountant doubled the fees for overseas students on the master’s course I had developed. This was one the earliest fully online courses in the field of Public Health, and was aimed at building the capacity to develop and assess the evidence underpinning the ways we can improve population health. The need for this is much greater in low-resource settings where there are few numbers of skilled practitioners and educational opportunities. I had managed to keep course fees low for overseas students—you will have seen my previous comments about the ethics of charging high fees for overseas students. I channelled my annoyance at the fee increase by deciding to try to develop a low cost course for health professionals in developing countries: the Peoples-uni (official title People’s Open Access Education Initiative http://peoples-uni.org).

The timing was good, as the internet was becoming more available globally, and the open source and Open Educational Resources initiatives were growing. A small group of colleagues and I put together the notion of a fully online programme, where we would create a number of course modules, each with a standard framework and populated by Open Educational Resources with a narrative to take students through these resources. Discussion forums to help students understand the concepts were to be run by volunteer tutors with relevant experience, who would also mark assignments. We held an initial meeting for those interested to join as tutors, and as the meeting room filled with academics and service professionals from all over the UK I realised that this could work (later on all our communications with tutors, students and support staff were fully online). We were then lucky to find wonderful IT experts with skills in educational technology platforms, who set up an open source platform for the programme and developed the supporting software. The Peoples-uni was born.

Registered as a UK charity, we developed a very flat and lean administrative structure with only one committee (to approve assignment results). Each of the 18 course modules had a leader who ensured that there are at least 5 tutors to guide the students through the semester, with each tutor only active for a two-week period in the semester. Although this was a master’s level programme, anyone could enrol but entry to the master’s course itself required students to pass at least two modules. This reduces the administrative load of viewing and checking students’ previous educational and language certification, and ensures that those who enrol in a master’s course have the language and learning capacity to achieve at this level. A small administrative fee was charged to the students, with a bursary scheme to waive or reduce even these low fees for those unable to pay. The online nature of the course modules allowed immediate changes to incorporate new resources identified during the discussions or course revisions. All activities were captured online providing is full transparency to allow internal quality control and external scrutiny of academic standards.

By the end 2020, more than 400 experts from 55 countries had been active tutors—each bringing their perspectives from their own academic or service experience, a truly international faculty. Students came from around 100 countries, 70% from Africa. More than 150 students graduated with a master’s degree in Public Health, either through Peoples-uni or one of our university partners. Many more have sampled some of the modules. An external evaluation was very positive (Sridharan et al. 2018) as have been external examiner reports. Students have attributed promotions, new jobs and entry into PhD programmes to their experiences with Peoples-uni. Volunteer tutors also report positive experiences. You can read full details in this paper (Heller et al. 2019) or on the website http://peoples-uni.org.

We also developed another site for continuing professional development through free online courses on various aspects of global health, mostly developed by Peoples-uni but some hosted for others. There have been around 7000 enrolments from over 4000 students from more than 150 countries.

I have not met most of the tutors, or any of the students. We had no buildings or offices. All activities were online. One of our objectives to “Work with the graduates of the educational programme, and other relevant partner organisations, in teaching, research, implementation of evidence-based health policy and advocacy to improve the health of their populations” is realised through graduates being enrolled in an Alumni group who have performed collaborative research leading to publications, and a number of graduates have joined as tutors. We have published our experiences regularly and widely.

As testament to this success, Peoples-uni was the subject of a hostile takeover by a US led educational organisation in 2021. After 15 years, Peoples-uni closed down, but its work continues under new leadership.

Of course I am very proud of these achievements, but add this case study to illustrate some of the points in the book—many of which have been shaped by my experience with Peoples-uni.

  • High trust in staff with absent managerialism

  • Transparent processes and materials allow review and quality assurance

  • Environmentally sustainable with no buildings or need for physical meetings

  • Increase in availability of high quality education for those in developing countries to reduce global inequalities in access to education

  • Responsive to needs and new resources

  • Collaborative approach to course development and delivery, with university partners and with Alumni

  • Tapping volunteer tutors who relish and gain from the experience.

I do not expect that this kind of education will totally replace the traditional university approach, as it is small in scale and cannot be generalised too broadly, but it does show that new approaches are feasible and sustainable. The scope of the book is broader than the experience of Peoples-uni provides, but the book is informed by this experience.

5.2 Conclusions

The start of the book identified a number of organisational problems, including managerialism, the adoption of the competitive business model and the downgrading of teaching in reward systems. Linked to these are the overdependence on overseas student income at the expense of tackling global inequalities in access to education, and the failure to foster collaboration or to respond to changes in the way people learn or the need for environmental sustainability.

Solutions include increasing trust and collaboration, and the creation of the Distributed University utilising open educational resources and online education underpinned by modern and future technology. Collaborative programmes for global education and increased access to open educational resources are proposed. A case study of a fully online global master’s programme offers encouragement that at least some of these ideas are feasible, and finally there is reassurance that these solutions will save money.

The term the ‘Distributed University’ is used to indicate the distribution of education to where it is needed—both reducing global inequalities in access and emphasising local relevance in place of large centralised agglomerations. It massively reduces impact on the environment. It distributes trust in place of managerialism, and collaboration in place of competition. It distributes education online—which is the key to all of this and allows each of the above features. It sets up the higher education sector to adapt to the changes in the ways we work and learn today and which will be required to adapt to and take advantage of the fourth industrial revolution.

Many of the ideas, both the presentation of problems and the proposed solutions, may be painful for university managers to contemplate. However I really hope that those interested in the future of the higher education sector are open enough to take note of at least some of the ideas canvassed in this book. I also hope that the braver organisations will see the need to transform, and that governments and philanthropic organisations will sponsor the change needed. This would include the three new programmes which I have suggested: the ‘International Tertiare (International Degree) Programme’, the ‘Global Online Learning Programme (Australia Online)’ and ‘Plan E for Education’. Each of these will complement the move towards the ‘Distributed University’ which will allow the higher education sector to have a sustainable future.