An interview with the Chancellor of the

Free / Open University

of the South East Globe

Vision or reality in 2018?

by

Andreas Meiszner
Institute of Educational Technologies
The Open University, UK

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An interview with the Chancellor of the Free / Open University of the South
East Globe – vision or reality in 2018?

What is the Free / Open University of the South East Globe?

The Free / Open University of the South East Globe (F/OU) is the first global university that
offers both: free and paid courses, following an adapted business model that was originally
established by the open source movement.
We do offer full degree programmes that consist of courses that also can be taken on their own.
Thus we do offer full degrees for our programmes as well as certificates for individual courses.
Students are either based one of our 5 campuses in Southern Europe, Latin America or Africa,
or they attend classes at a distance. Free learners on the other hand are almost all learning at a
distance though they might organize local meet-ups and get together.
Since its founding in 2008 F/OU has not only rapidly grown and is today one of the largest
global universities, having developed an excellent repute for its unique educational approach
and associated research.

I assume that this is naturally one of the first questions you are asked: You are offering
free and paid courses; are those separate programmes and courses?
No, actually all of our students learn in one global virtual environment, though an open and
dispersed one. Formally enrolled students learn together with “free learners” from all over the
globe. So there are not two different types of courses, but only one, following roughly the
model as shown below.

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What is the difference between students and free learners?
Well, on the one hand students follow a traditional type of curriculum in order to obtain a given
degree. Free learners on the other hand attend courses of their particular interest, though some
of our free learners also aim for attending all courses required for a given degree.

So what is free and what is paid?

Students that are formally enrolled at our courses are paying regular fees, which are often partly
funded by the government. Free learners on the other hand sometimes pay fees for assessment
of their learning outcomes and to obtain a course certificate.

What do you want to say with “sometimes”?

Sometimes means that free learner can take on the role of tutors, contributors or moderators to
collect “virtual credit points”. Those virtual credit points than can be used to pay for
assessment, certification, or diploma fees and sometimes even for the attendance of on campus
classes.

So free learners even could obtain a full degree without payment? And formally enrolled
students could reduce their fees through active contributions
Yes, this is possible. You see, some of our free learners are very well skilled in a particular
area, but on the other hand don’t earn enough to afford paying for education. Let me provide
you with some examples: Fernando for example is an accountant at a small company in
southern Spain. He wants to advance with his career and thus attends our MBA courses as a
free learner. He also supports Dr. Silva at the course “102 – Basic Introduction to
Accountancy” as a tutor virtually at the course forum. Or let’s take Sylvia, who works as a
multimedia designer in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sylvia is passionate about what she is doing and runs
here own website on graphic design. So Dr. Jones from the course “304 – Graphic design for
professionals” is using here website to provide his students with more realistic learning
environment than he could have done before. There are many ways free learner, and even
enrolled students, can bring themselves in to gain virtual credits.

You talked about students and free learner acting as tutor, contributor or moderator –
can you briefly explain this and what is the advantage?
In traditional educational settings courses start and end at given times and you have a student
turn over of 100%. Within such a setting you will need to start each time from scratch, with
educators explaining the basic questions over and over again. Within such a setting you don’t
have the possibility to establish a type of community and to gain from it. In older times we had
web forums that were rarely used as there was no real community behind. This now has
changed as free learners, and also some of our students, start and leave at different times and
some of our free learner also moderate course forums or act as a course tutor. Thus we do have
for each course “old foxes” that can assist “newbies” and also point them to answers that were

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already provided. This on the other hand allows our fixed employed lecturers to dedicate some
time to more challenging tasks and engage committed students and free learners into some
really interesting learning projects and involve them in research. Those committed students and
free learners than will share their experience with less skilled ones, in particular with newbies.
It’s actually much more about the “people factor” and less about technology (which already is
good enough to work out).
This all is nothing radically new as advanced students act as tutors for newbies in many
countries of the world. We just took this to a further level that allows us to nurse a continuous
growing community by opening up to the general public and introducing jump-on jump-off
options to participate. There is a clear benefit for each type of the learners involved:
• Free learners that just want to get a quick answer, just wants to learn a particular thing
can do so. In web terms that group might be described as the lurker, they mainly take
but don’t give much back. However, each question that they ask and that is answered
adds a value since other can benefit from it.
• Free learners that want to achieve a certification or even full degree and collect virtual
credits in exchange for active engagement as e.g. tutor, contributor or moderator. This
group is the backbone of our system as they bring in continuity and allow us to nurse
our communities and to continuously improve our structures and contents. Many
belonging to this group originally started as lurker.
• Formally enrolled students on full degree programmes and courses that are either
learning on campus or at a distance and either start at fixed dates or learn at their own
pace. This group is comparable with what we have known from traditional education
and also has individually assigned learning support in the case the community support
system fails.

When do your programmes and courses start?

Due to the modular structure of our programmes and courses, and the active role of formally
enrolled students and in particular of free learner courses can be attended at any time. If you are
studying for a full degree on the other hand than we provide you with the option of either
following a traditional structured programme with fixed dates, or you take courses at your own
pace, collect virtual credits upon assessment and receive your certificates or degree upon
completion.

I believe that this structure and all the different roles cause a high complexity?
Yes it does bring some complexity with it and our university is at a constant change. On the
other hand being used to constant change we are able to adapt much faster to market needs and
to offer niche courses that other universities could not afford.
The maybe biggest challenge is to assure that full degree programmes remain consistent and
will lead to a defined learning outcome.

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Why does this allow you to offer niche courses, how is this related?
Our free learners can nurse courses in the subject area of their interest; some courses just start
small and become popular over time meanwhile others just go down. Committed students and
free learners that engage with educators also frequently take the results forwards to seed new or
improve existing courses.

I understand, though I believe this raises some quality issues, not to talk about
accreditation and legal issues. But first I like to ask: How do you make sure that your
formal students are not too overloaded to complete their courses in time as they might try
to earn too many virtual credits?
Our lecturers oversee if a student struggles within a course, and tutors and moderators also
provide regular feedback. But let me ask you one thing: What do you mean by overloaded?
First of all, once entering their professional lives students would be expected to cope with
periods of high workload, tight deadlines, (unpaid) extra hours, have to face tasks that
frequently demand new skills, and fast changing work environments, or even new jobs. So do
you believe we do well by educating them in an artificial and protected world and than
releasing them into the cold water? But maybe more importantly: if students take on a more
active role and bring themselves in as peers, tutors, moderators or content developer they gain
valuable soft skills that hardly could be taught.

Now about the quality aspect, how do you guarantee this within such a structure?
Partly, like in older times too. Degree programmes and courses are regularly reviewed, lecturers
receive training and student and even free learner satisfaction is also monitored.
Free learner and students are assigned tasks as tutors, moderators or contributors based on their
current skills, which are identified through interviews and also their online repute. Some of our
free learner are now with us for 4 to 5 years and are almost like full employed lecturers.
Interestingly some of them are giving local classes themselves.
Having a community in place also allows us to benefit from the Linux phenomena (Given
enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow).

What do you mean by some of the free learner are giving local classes themselves?
Some free learners saw this as a good complementary income source and are giving classes
within their local communities. Other free learners are actually educators themselves that use
our environment for their students to learn.

So this means that other educational institutions are using your learning environment?
Yes, most of those just use it to support their students learning as it provides them with a more
information rich environment and community. But we also have more strategic partnerships
that range from joint programme and course design to joint degrees. Actually by the time we

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started we had only one campus, the current 5 ones that we have are a result of such a strategic
partnership

Do you charge other educational institutions for using your learning environment?
No, why should we do this? They actually add a value to it and on the other side if we see that
other educational institutions do something better than we than we also evaluate the opportunity
to join in theirs.
There is something that we have learnt from business very early, that is that competition takes
place at a different level. Look e.g. at the car manufacturers: Ford, Seat and Volkswagen joined
forces to build one single car that was only slightly modified to be sold under each of their
brand names. Or let us take the service sector with the best example likely to be free / libre
open source software. This software is developed globally and often made freely available with
revenues being generated on related services.
In a nutshell we are only where we are today because we went open and made our as much as
possible freely available generating revenues through services such as individual training
support for enrolled students, provision of facilities, recognition of learning outcomes through
assessment and award of certificates and degrees for free learners and customized trainings for
corporate clients. I might add that we also generate significant revenues on consulting services
for other educational institutions, governments and corporate clients since we have been the
first at the market and are now a global showcase.

You talk about corporate clients, which type of relation do you have with them?
Many companies decided to link their training sessions to our learning environments bringing
in their own courses and letting their employees learn together with our students and free
learner. You see, as long as training is not too much about internal company relevant subjects
there is actually no value for companies to run their own trainings in isolation or to employ
educational provider for this. Instead, and following the general principle of our university,
corporate employees benefit from a truly global exchange, a large pool of information and
established communities. Let me provide you with an example of BP (UK), Repsol (Spain),
GALP (Portugal) and Petrobras (Brazil) which are running joint trainings with us on subjects
related to environment and sustainability. There is a mutual benefit for all as they save costs,
share resources, and have access to a greater pool of knowledge and resources. They also
benefit from the research we are doing and partly contribute to it. BP e.g. often mentioned that
they even benefit from us as a recruiting board since their employees collaborate with our
students and free learners and thus it is an ideal space to identify adequate candidates before
employing them.

You take as an example BP (UK), Repsol (Spain), GALP (Portugal) and Petrobras
(Brazil) – this makes at least 3 different languages, how do you overcome this hurdle?
Isn’t this a problem?

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It’s a challenge, not a problem. We learnt from open source and also Wikipedia that the people
factor has an enormous potential. We do some translations ourselves into the three different
languages with lecturers being literate in all of the languages involved. Than comes in the
people factor with individuals taking conversations and content from one language domain to
another. And quite frankly if people want to understand you they will, even if their language
skills are very basic.

Latest at this point I need to ask you about legal aspects. I can’t see how this is all going
with so many possibilities to get things wrong. I don’t think you can guarantee that
everyone is learning the right thing, the same, or does not violate any copyrights by taking
it from one sector to another over several language domains. How do you handle all of
this?
Yes, there are many points where you can mess it up, but step by step. Not harnessing the
opportunities the web provides would have been the worst option as this would mean that we
do create to parallel educational worlds – the formal and the informal.
As earlier mentioned we do take quality assurance serious, but we also know that in traditional
educational settings developing cheating techniques was a students’ subject itself as long as we
asked them to just reproduce. And there were also bad lectures because of totally overloaded or
just demotivated staff.
We now have very transparent structures, open communication policies top-down, bottom-up
and horizontal, this first of all is a pre-requisite. As also mentioned lecturers receive support
through students and free learners, which by time includes corporate employees as part of their
official training. On the other hand learners are evaluated upon their abilities to solve problems
and questions allowing them to use all resources they feel they need, being able to repeat
assessments with no limits.
Let’s now come to the copyright issue, which is not really an issue for us. All the content we
create is released under a Creative Commons BY licence, and the same we ask from our entire
partners.

By releasing all under a Creative Commons BY licence others could generate revenues
out of your work, or take it away from the public domain – doesn’t this bother you?
This is not really an issue because if someone wants to sell something that is already available
for free he would need to add a significant value to it – and if this is the case then we are fine
with it.
The alternative would just put us back to the past with the drawbacks clearly overweighting the
benefits.

Why do you think that it was the Free / Open University of the South East Globe being
the pioneer and not one of the usual strong players from the northern hemisphere?

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I believe that there are several reasons. For one the legal framework and culture in the north
worked quite in favour for us.
There seems to be a general tendency in the north to protect as much as possible and to replace
common sense by law. But step by step: Students in the south usually don’t sue educational
institutions for reasons their northern counterparts might do. I also believe that acting by
common sense is much more developed – or preserved – in the south than it is the case in the
north.
Naturally trusting information from doubtful sources or engaging with people you don’t know
can be dangerous, but instead of putting legal burdens on the shoulders of educational
institutions we work together with them to prepare students to become active citizens in a
democratic society. Thus we still have a much less overregulation by law which allows us to act
differently.
On top of this our culture is already used to the benefits that freeness and openness can bring.
E.g. Spain and Brazil where F/OU originated from were some of the first prominent examples
to commit to open source software on a large scale. Well it didn’t stop at the point of software,
but the underlying principles proved to work out in a very favourable manner and thus we took
them forward to other areas and gradually moved to where we are today.
We also for once countered the argument of the corrupted south as our policy makers
apparently quite successfully resisted the generous offers from lobbyists (laughing).

Do you still remember how this all started?

The roots of all this goes back to the 90th and started at political levels most visible in Brazil
and Spain. Originally it was about Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) only, to be
utilized within public schools, public internet spaces, public authorities but also domestic
households. Soon after this some regions in Spain established shared repositories. With this all
schools could share their learning materials one with the other, including student projects to be
displayed and presented over the web. Those school repositories were later opened to the
general public and integrated into local portals. Many less skilled adults found that to be
tremendous useful and as a consequence many public internet spaces introduced evening
schools to provide an even better support for adults. At some point it became a two way
information flow with adults feeding content and information back to the scholars and
eventually engaging into discussions. Higher Education Institutions took fare longer before
they embarked, which must have been around 2003 under the umbrella of the so called Open
Educational Resource (OER) movement. In 2008, and after 5 years of experimenting with
OER, F/OU was established as a joint initiative of two open universities from Brazil and Spain
– and the rest is history.

Aspects to be improved (not limited)

• Detail: mixed free learner, student to student and lecturer support model
• Explain: Time savings on basic student support and resulting available human resources
for higher level tasks & course / content development

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 • Explain: How prior knowledge of free learners and students is fed into courses and thus
benefits content richness and update.
• Explain: How learning processes are made visible through online interaction and thus
become learning materials themselves for future learner
• Detail: The meaning of Free / Libre

About the author:

Andreas Meiszner a research fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology of the British
Open University where he is looking at virtual informal learning environments, trying to
identify which of their aspect might be leveraged to (formal) educational settings. A focus here
is on FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software) communities and similar initiatives that are
directly targeting education like Open Educational Resource projects.
Andreas is also the project manager of the EU funded FLOSSCom project on behalf of the
coordinator Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação for which he is active since 2005.
Besides the world of academic research Andreas also worked in various business sectors and
functions during the past 14 years, having obtained three higher education degrees in
management from universities in France, Germany and The Netherlands.
Contact: A.Meiszner@open.ac.uk