Netaji Subhas Open University, Annual Foundation Day Endowment Lecture 2007, Creating an Endowment for Humanity: The role of Universities, Mega-universities and Hyper-universities, Sir John Daniel, Commonwealth of Learning // Your first accomplishment is simply growth. People sometimes say that numbers do not mean anything in India, with its population of a billion people, but I disagree. Doing anything at large scale is always a challenge but it is a particular challenge in education. // In 1994, I coined the term mega-university to designate a distance-teaching university that has over 100,000 students. This was in connection with my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. // In that book I made two key points. First, I argued that the demand for higher education was growing so fast that we needed to expand the number and size of the distance-teaching universities, since such institutions have a unique ability to expand without sacrificing quality. Second, I suggested that contemporary technologies, for which I used the term 'knowledge media', are particularly appropriate for enabling distance teaching universities to expand numbers whilst maintaining quality and continuing to cut costs.