From the Triangle to the Pentagon: Open Universities in the 21st Century

Abstract

I have entitled this address From the Triangle to the Pentagon: Open Universities in the 21st Century. In the light of current events I hasten to add that I am not talking about the Sunni triangle and the building in Washington from which the war in Iraq is directed. Many of you know my fondness for explaining the success of educational technology in general, and open and distance learning in particular, in terms of an iron triangle made up of the vectors of access, cost and quality. Some colleagues in India even call this the Daniel Triangle, although I disclaim any ownership. // The importance of these three parameters in education is obvious. I first heard them used as a way of analysing developments in higher education when I was a new university president attending one of my first meetings of the Council of Ontario Universities in the mid-1980s. The then president of the University of Toronto, George Connell, used these three vectors to analyse Ontario government policy for higher education and the idea has stayed with me ever since. Today, however, I am going to add two more vectors and look at today's challenges to open universities as a pentagon.