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Mainstreaming Equal OpportunitiesPolicies in the Open University:Questions of DiscourseDiane BaileyPublished online: 07 Jul 2006.

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Mainstreaming EqualOpportunities Policies in the OpenUniversity: Questions of Discourse

Diane Bailey

In this article Diane Bailey of the OU UK East Anglian Region and formerly Director of Equal Opportunitiesidentifies different discourses at work in the development of equal opportunities in the OU: the liberal tra-dition of adult education, with its focus on access; the 'business case' for equal opportunities; and episte-mologies of difference. These relate, respectively, to student, staffing and curriculum issues. The authorargues that the tensions and divergences between discourses need to be addressed if the process of main-streaming equal opportunities is to succeed.

Like every university in the UK, the OpenUniversity has an equal opportunities policy.Relative to most others this policy is extremely

comprehensive, encompassing as it does student,staff and curriculum areas. Over a decade the over-arching policy statement has been translated intoaction through a wide range of codes and guidelines,covering such areas as curriculum design, languageuse, access strategies, staff recruitment and treat-ment, dealing with harassment and bullying, caringresponsibilities and equitable relationships betweenstudents and staff. A detailed action plan wasadopted in 1990 and until 1996 a small EqualOpportunities Unit spearheaded the work. Between1994 and 1996 the action plan was redirected towards'mainstreaming'. Modest resources were committedto staff training and student monitoring systems. Theambition was to align equal opportunities moreclosely with the OU's strategic plan, the plans of allunits and the personal objectives of individuals.

Needless to say, by 1998 progress is patchy. Oneevaluation notes that to achieve change on thisscale a multi-layered approach is needed, involv-ing crucially 'the commitment of senior and middlemanagers' (Bailey, Costello and Taylor 1997).

However, in a period of acute environmentalchange - the advent of a Labour government, newfunding arrangements and much keener competi-tion for part-time mature students - OU managershave had other priorities.

Despite many gains, there is a current loss ofmomentum in the drive for equal opportunitiesimplementation. The huge pressures now on uni-versities to do more with less partly explains this.But it is also the case that mainstreaming, espe-cially within an open learning institution, brings anawareness of contradictions and disjunctions inhow 'equal opportunities' is construed and mea-sured by different groups. Beneath the homoge-neous culture of the OU exist various sub-culturesand constituencies. The arguments about how weresource equal opportunities work in the futurereveal differing perspectives. Asking how far wehave 'mainstreamed' makes us ask what we meanby our policies and how good is good enough. Theaim of this paper is not to measure the success ofmainstreaming to date but to identify some of thediscourses which underlie current discussions soas to clarify problems and to urge the continuingevolution of equal opportunities strategies.

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The term 'equal opportunities''Equality' is a potent word. It has proved morerobust and accommodating than 'liberty' or 'frater-nity' in post-Enlightenment culture. Even in thelate twentieth century some of the potencyremains. 'Opportunity', to a lesser extent, alsostrikes historical reverberations. Enhancing oppor-tunity was supposedly a cornerstone of merito-cratic post-war society. Indeed, opportunitystructure theory in the 1970s critically appraisedhow far economic redistribution and social mobil-ity had resulted from this supposed meritocracy ineducation and life chances (Roberts 1981). Since theeighties the term 'equal opportunities' (EO) hasgained wide currency in legal, moral and socialcontexts. Simplistically, this has been understoodto mean treating everyone the same. This, however,leads to the erasure or under-recognition of humandifference, which is a necessary feature of any sys-tem of democracy and justice (Bock and James1992). The argument runs that we need an abstractappeal to equality in developing such a system, but'a politics that tries to transcend difference is onethat confirms the inequalities that exist' (Phillips1993). Over time, therefore, EO policies haveshifted from a focus on the same treatment for all toattempts to respond to human and cultural differ-ences. EO also has a strong psychological chargefor individuals, both positive and negative, oftenpromising more than it can deliver.

Most large public and private organisationsadvertise themselves as equal opportunityemployers, with explicit policies if not alwayssound procedures to back them up. EO require-ments within HE have recently become more strin-gent. Most universities now have an action plan toimplement EO policy, though with variable scopeand resources (CUCO1996,1997). The Committeeof Vice Chancellors and College Principals haspublished a Guide to Higher Education andEquality, setting out standards for student and staffrecruitment and treatment (Powney, Hamilton andWeiner 1997). Even more compelling, the QualityAssurance Agency includes equality measures inwhat it requires universities to self-assess.

One difficulty with institutionalised equalopportunities is the often divergent assumptionswhich underlie it. Because of the ubiquity of theterm it has acquired a deceptive universality.'Equal opportunities' evokes not only an a-historicideal, an unproblematic moral standpoint fromwhich right actions can be readily determined, but

also a stable and unified subject whose rights andresponsibilities can be codified. Partly, it does thisby attaching to itself a number of differing dis-courses whilst eliding their historical origins. Theplural discourses on which EO draws may be var-iously dominant or dormant within any giveninstitutional framework or set of practices, work-ing in ways which are either counter-cultural orcollusive with the status quo. Within the slipperyconjunction of older and newer discourses severalmain strands are detectable: the liberal traditionsof adult liberal education; human resource man-agement theories - what is often called 'the busi-ness case' for equal opportunities, includingaspects of marketing and consumerism; anddebates about epistemologies of difference. Theserelate respectively to student, staff and curriculumareas and can play out differently in relation toeach.

The liberal tradition of adulteducation

Within education 'equal opportunities' has becomea node around which older discourses of the lefthave coalesced, especially those of equity and jus-tice in relation to continuing education. Within theUK at least, EO has espoused liberal rather thanMarxist critiques of institutionalised learning. Forexample there is no trace of Althusserian analysesof education as ideological state apparatus or of theradical accounts of the politics of schooling under-taken by, amongst others, the Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies in the seventies(Athusser 1966). EO has generally occupied a morepragmatic and adaptive politics. Especially in the1980s EO was closely allied to work on studentaccess and widening participation. Indeed, theAccess movement in the UK proved a vital stimu-lant to serious work on equal opportunities withinuniversities which had dragged behind other pub-lic sector organisations in this area. In the past adulteducation has been driven by the need to offer com-pensatory opportunities to disadvantaged groups,especially to those who for whatever reason missedout on compulsory schooling. Education has had akey role in the redistributive mission of socialism,as R.H. Tawney's Equality argued (Tawney 1931).Allied to this has been a view of culture - the 'high'culture accessed via the academy - as redemptive.Arnold and, after him, Leavis stressed the moralseriousness of learning and the university as its

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gatekeeper. Education was to be morally as well associally emancipatory. The access movement, withEO in its wake, revived this strand of liberalism.

This tradition has been very influential in howsome sections of the OU configure EO in relation tostudents. Higher education is a right for all whocan benefit, including poor, disabled, low qualifiedand imprisoned applicants, and the OU has a par-ticular role in serving these groups, despite the factthat, relative to other groups, they cost more to sup-port and progress less quickly. For many OU staffeach policy change is interrogated in terms of itspotential outcomes for these vulnerable students,with student support especially evaluated for itscontribution to equalising learning opportunities(Bailey, Kirkup and Taylor 1996).

However, this version of access is no longer soincontrovertibly central to the OU's mission. In1990 access was the key element in the EO plan,with a target of increasing by 10 per cent the pro-portion of entrants with low qualifications in fiveyears. Currently there is no such target and theOU's forward plan is much vaguer about whichgroups it aims to serve. The reasons for this shift arecomplex, as the OU renegotiates it location withina changing HE structure and an increasingly globaldistance learning provision. In relation to EO threepoints on access are worth considering.

First there is now uncertainty about how weconstrue 'disadvantaged' groups. Women andminority ethnic groups (singled out within theOU's earlier 10 per cent proxy target) are no longerunrepresented in HE. Women now equal men innumber and black and Asian students constituteover 11 per cent of entrants, whilst being only 5-6per cent of the population, although these trendsmask considerable differences across institutionsand subjects. For the OU these changes, plus therapid expansion and diversification of HE, haveprompted a need to widen its competitive appeal,for example to younger students, post-graduates,and vocationally oriented people.

Secondly, the OU's shifting role has some paral-lels with the much wider evolution of socialistthinking in post-Thatcherite Britain. Radicalismhas become the province of the right and no broadalliance of the left has emerged to redefine thelegacy of socialism. The rationale for the expansionof HE has been framed largely in economic termsrather than in terms of individual rights or socialand redistributive equity. Skills shortages andunemployment have been the spurs.

Thirdly, the access 'philosophy' itself has beensubject to strong critiques. Creating ladders andbridges by which groups constructed as 'disadvan-taged' may enter the academy positions them asexternal petitioners. The focus on entry can leavelargely unexamined the role of the curriculum - letalone the composition and treatment of staff.Access may become more about accommodationthan transformation, ameliorating rather thanremoving structural inequalities (Wildermeerschand Jansen 1992). The reappraisal of the whole lib-eral tradition, sustained by its large narratives ofprogress and by Enlightenment discourses of ratio-nality and emancipation, makes impossible anysimple approach to either access or equal opportu-nities. Thus there is a need to rethink 'access' interms of target groups and to ask more searchinglyaccess to what? The Open University more thanmost has to address these questions.

The 'business case' for equalopportunitiesAs the rationale for equal opportunities based onaccess has become more muted, the business casehas grown in prominence. The main argument,derived from human resources theory, is thatstrong EO policies enable organisations to recruitand retain the best staff from the widest pool.Supplementary arguments locate EO within a mar-keting approach that identifies the individual asconsumer whose entitlements can be codifiedwithin some form of charter. EO is a kitemark ofquality (Gewirtz 1996).

Human resource theory, well established in thecorporate sector, is slowly gaining ground withineducation. In large organisations compliance withmajor legislation (the Equal Pay Act 1970, SexDiscrimination Act 1975, Race Relations Act 1976,Disability Discrimination Act 1995) has been fol-lowed by extensive monitoring of such EO keystonesas fair selection procedures, non-discriminatoryadvertising and compulsory equality training formanagers (Warwick 1990; 1994). From the seventiesthese elements have played an increasing role inindustrial relations and the creation of a corporateimage. The recent case in which Ford was found tohave changed an advertisement so that black peoplewere made to appear white, supposedly to appeal todifferent markets, revealed how disastrous suchlapses in EO could be for business (Legge 1996). Morerecent theory advances even strong arguments for

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widening and managing diversity amongst staff as ameans of widening your customer base (Kandolaand Fullerton 1994). First, customers feel comfort-able if they can identify themselves within an organ-isation. Secondly, diverse staff can influence productand service development so as to increase their mar-ketability. This explains why 'managing diversity'has been taken up most seriously by the financial andretail sectors, including, for example, AvonCosmetics whose staff and products have to betailored to segmented markets. More radical argu-ments that diversity should extend to boardroomlevel have so far had less effect, as a much-quotedstudy of women in organisations, Shattering theGlass Ceiling: the Woman Manager, (Davidson andCooper 1992) shows.

How far have these arguments influenced uni-versities? An extensive study of EO policies withinHE notes legal compliance as an important stimu-lant to further developments (Farish et al. 1995).Codes and guidelines have followed to prescribeappropriate conduct or secure fair treatment. In theOU these include codes on fair selection proce-dures (with compulsory training for selectors), theemployment of disabled people, harassment andbullying, and personal relationships between staffand students. However, procedures for monitoringthese (outcomes, appeals, number and type ofcases etc.) are rudimentary compared with those inplace in some corporate organisations. The legalis-tic approach assumes an organisational culture ofrational, technical managerialism, in which imple-mentation and data collection become routine.Universities may be moving towards this, but theircultures remain more complex and contradictory.

Significantly, the concept of managing diversityhas made little impact within HE, at least in the UK.Compelling arguments for employing more minor-ity ethnic groups, women and disabled people,especially in academic categories, in order to createa more vibrant and critical curriculum have beenadvanced by the Association of UniversityTeachers. But these have had restricted currency,despite an alliance with the Commission for RacialEquality's 'Race for Opportunity' campaign (CRE1995). Senior managers have a distaste for anythinglike positive action. Also belief in the self-evidentnature of academic excellence remains strong, as arecent analysis of EO versus elitism in universitiesnotes (Duke 1997). Universities are concerned withhow staff are recruited and how they behave, butnot with who they are. Within the OU measures to

widen the workforce have been driven mainly byactive minorities. The Code on the Employment ofDisabled People has met little resistance, but lacksa resourced and monitored strategy to make iteffective. OU membership of Opportunity 2000, anational project to advance the progression ofwomen in organisations, has had low priority. Asmall-scale initiative to attract more black staff andstudents has not yet been widely adopted.

Another aspect of the business case links EO toconsumer rights and service charters. Modernorganisations increasingly specify what the user oftheir services can expect, if he or she behaves in cer-tain ways. The consumer may not be the direct pur-chaser, as in the case of the National Health Service,but he or she is the proxy for a range of stakehold-ers entitled to value for money. Rights - and to amuch lesser extent responsibilities - are codifiedand published. Within the lexicon of new manage-rialism the narrow concept of consumer rights,alongside the language of performance and qualityassurance, has displaced the broader concepts ofcitizen's rights and social equity. Equal opportuni-ties in such contexts often becomes an aspect ofconsumer relations. Within this narrow construc-tion of the person-as-consumer, all are treatedequally, irrespective of irrelevant distinctions.However, the status of consumer may be conferredonly when the individual meets certain conditions,most obviously the ability to pay. Remaining a con-sumer is not a right granted in all circumstances, asbad debtors and those at the end of hospital wait-ing lists experience.

The OU, as all universities, now has a students'charter, stating its commitment to equal opportu-nity and openness to 'every section of the commu-nity'. The charter sets out the services available tostudents who meet their side of the contract, suchas submitting assignments on time. Such chartersclarify the accountability of universities as well asthe rights and responsibilities of students.Concurrently, complaints procedures are becom-ing more robust, a trend noted in The Times Higher(12.7.96): "The customers - hateful as the term maybe to many - are getting stroppy. What with citi-zens' charters, an increase in students' financialcommitment as grants dwindle, and a growth inlitigiousness, students are becoming more criticalof what they get and more willing to seek redress'.Published standards (a reply to a letter within 10days) define a sameness of service, irrespective ofwho or where the customer is.

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A related aspect of the business case is the codi-fication of professional practice. As organisationshave drawn up client charters, professional bodiesare drawing up codes for individual practitioners,often as a condition of professional membership.Such codes often include ethics as a defining aspectof practice. Open University staff, for instance,might subscribe to codes for personnel, coun-selling, management or other professions. Whilstequal opportunities policies mainly concern insti-tutions (although sometimes codifying.acceptablebehaviours), codes of ethics apply largely to indi-viduals. Some employees, therefore, are subject toboth.

All these aspects show how extensive and per-suasive the 'business case' for EO in organisationsis in the battle for resources. But applied to univer-sities, especially perhaps to the Open University,the arguments raise some contradictions. As fixedterm contracts grow and salary differentialsbetween senior management and lower gradeswiden, an EO policy of fair employment is increas-ingly open to challenge. The practice of 'poaching'staff for their weighting in the ResearchAssessment Exercise can flout fair selection proce-dures. Features of a modernising organisation suchas team working conflict with universities' persist-ing hierarchical division of labour. Further, univer-sities differ in important ways from other'businesses'. A key one is that the construct of stu-dent is more encompassing than that of consumer.One service which the student-consumer receivesis that of assessment, which carries with it the'right' to fail, if the rights of other stakeholders areto be guaranteed. A core Tjusiness' of the univer-sity, which sets it apart from the production of con-sumer durables or services, is the production,dissemination and validation of knowledge. In thisthe student necessarily plays an active part. By col-lapsing 'the student' entirely into 'the consumer' or'customer' this active relationship is diminished.Notions of universities as service providers canreinforce disastrously the transmission model oflearning and, whilst apparently a-political, canconstruct for them an essentially conservative anduncritical role. As one author has argued, the prox-imity of university mission statements to the lan-guage of consumption and profit can result in a lossof critical distance (Sinfield 1997). This is not to saythat the business case for EO is void, but that cir-cumspection and selectivity are needed in formu-lating it.

Epistemologies of differenceEpistemology, encompassing both knowledgeclaims and grounds for knowledge, is of particularsignificance to a university. Debates about univer-sity roles and funding, typified in the DearingCommittee report (NCIHE1997), are at some leveldebates about what counts as knowledge, whoshapes curricula and who future learners are to be.Recently, epistemology has shifted from its quietplace within traditional philosophy to become ananalytical tool for feminists, Marxists and thoseengaged in the sociology of human difference anddisadvantage. The systems of difference whichhave sustained structural inequalities - gender,class, 'race' and age - are also systems which haveprivileged some forms of knowing over others.

This line of thought crystallises in standpointtheory which argues that what we know and howwe come to know it are shaped by our cultural loca-tion (Harding 1987; Keller 1985; Belenky et al 1986).Knowledge is always more or less situated. Thesupposedly neutral 'knower' of classical episte-mology, without gender or ethnicity, is a constructthrough which exclusive and excluding forms ofknowledge are reproduced within the academy.Feminist epistemology, in particular, has exploredhow challenges to the objective nature of knowl-edge leave open the way to a disturbing relativism:'Either there is a feminist objectivist standpointgrounded in a woman's position in society, or thereis no such standpoint. If it is recognised that thereare many various, and sometimes necessarily con-tradictory, 'women's standpoints', there is no pos-sible way of deciding which one is the objectiveone' (Halberg 1990). Paradoxically, this extensivedebate on epistemology has carried over onlyslowly into how universities actually organiselearning. The OU has been in advance of most UKuniversities in including curriculum developmentwithin its EO strategy. But even there contradic-tions have emerged.

The OU's wide modular menu encouragesdiversity of content. Some courses address issuesof difference, disadvantage or epistemology quitedirectly. For instance, The changing experiences ofwomen, explores the gendered nature of bothknowledge fields, such as the natural sciences, andof women's ways of knowing. The EqualOpportunities Committee provides an annual listof such courses, interestingly drawn from everyfaculty. This, however, is a fairly crude measurewhich reveals little about implicit conceptions of

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knowledge or of the construction of the learner assubject. Rather more effective has been theGuidelines for Equal Opportunities in CourseProduction, a checklist to help make courses asaccessible as possible, for example by building instudy skills, considering how sight and hearingimpaired people can engage with the full range ofresources and using inclusive language, imagesand case examples. More radically, a few courseteams have included part-time tutors and mem-bers of key target groups in all aspects of coursedesign: for example, learning disabled members ona team producing a course on learning disability. Itis difficult to evaluate the impact of such moves,given the acknowledged imbalances in poweramongst team members and the highly structuredmethod of OU course production.

In many ways the OU's semi-industrialisedprocesses of course design and delivery reinforceauthoritarian models of knowledge production(Harris 1987). Materials make the curriculumappear more fixed and impermeable than in insti-tutions where discursive forms like lectures andseminars predominate. It is more difficult toacknowledge the cultural standpoints of learners(and tutors) who relate over distance. Withoutstrenuous efforts to create dialogue, distance learn-ing modes can position the learner passively andreinforce instrumental approaches to learning. EOwork has focused largely on enabling all groups toaccess the curriculum, with a concentration on'external' features such as tutorial times andvenues, the cost and availability of technologiesand flexible and comprehensive guidance. Muchless attention has been devoted to the intrinsicways in which knowledge is produced and organ-ised or on styles of learning fostered by open anddistance learning. The specific or sub-cultural posi-tions of minority groups are rarely seen as legiti-mate sites of knowledge in themselves or asenriching the curriculum. Research is relativelysparse, but one study considers how genderedways of knowing may be played out within anopen learning system (Kirkup 1996).

Assessment methods in the OU highlight someof the complexities related to epistemologies of dif-ference. In its early days highly traditional forms ofexamination, heavily weighted, were adopted inorder to establish academic credibility. The staplethree-hour written exam is only slowly giving wayto alternative forms like projects, portfolios andopen book exams. By 1999 all exam scripts will be

anonymously marked to reduce possible examinerbias - a practice already adopted elsewhere in HE.Tutor-marked assignments have always func-tioned as a process for learning as much as a vehi-cle of assessment. Again considerable resources arededicated to helping remote, disabled and dyslexicstudents complete exams and assessments to thebest of their abilities. However, scrutinising theassumptions implicit in exam questions is muchless common.

The accreditation of prior experiential learning(APEL) is appearing only gradually in the OU. Thisapproach raises acutely issues of the relative pow-ers of learner and institution in the generation andvalidation of knowledge. In order to be accredited'subjective' knowledge must be detached from thesite of its production and 'translated' into objectiveacademic currency - a process that is always prob-lematic and unequal (Michelson 1997). Clearly,new and supposedly more equitable forms ofassessment reveal the dilemmas around the role ofthe academy as gatekeeper.

The implications of the epistemology of differ-ence for equal opportunities practice have beenonly partially understood. OU policies have con-centrated largely on external and contingent fea-tures of the curriculum, which do, of course, affectsignificantly the subjective experiences of studentsand staff. Distance learning systems, perhaps morethan others, make it difficult to think throughissues of equality in relation to the embeddednature of knowledge. But this is a key task for thenext generation of EO plans.

ConclusionThis discussion has considered the main discoursescurrently in play as the OU 'mainstreams' EO.Equality is no longer a stable and unified constructfrom which concrete actions follow, if it ever was.The liberal traditions of adult education, the muchnewer business arguments and the epistemologiesof human differences each focus differently: on stu-dent access; employment and consumerism; andthe politics of curricula and accreditation.Divergences or overlaps may be barely recognised.The most complex and unexamined ground is thatbetween the liberal and business cases. Access phi-losophy is predicated very much on groups,whereas the business case derives from a moreindividualistic philosophy of consumer andemployment rights. The thrust of the business case

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is towards standardisation, a sameness in servicesand in the competencies of professional practice;whereas access is based on the response to cultural,economic and other differences. In fact the eco-nomics of access indicate a tension between the twodiscourses, as it demonstrably costs more to attractand support excluded groups. It is not that servingsuch groups is incompatible with a 'business' casefor EO, but that the complexities have not at pre-sent been addressed - just one sign of the ambiva-lence currently detectable in the OU's (and thegovernment's) position.

From another angle, consideration of epistemo-logical issues suggests key links with both the otherdiscourses. Access needs to be reconfigured toinclude long term consideration of the curriculumand of the subjectivity of the learner, especially asthese are shaped by new technologies. One key linkhere is with the staffing and employment issues.The business case for an open university has toencompass some careful thinking about how diver-sity amongst staff supports an evolving curricu-lum. We certainly need more black, disabled and'non-traditional' tutors because they are the publicface of the OU. But even more, we need a muchgreater diversity of staff in management, academic,technological and support roles because these rolesshape and define the learning opportunities we canprovide.

The confusions about discourse are reflected inthe ambivalence which many feel about the riskystrategy of mainstreaming EO in the OU. Attitudesrange from complacency at our extensive array ofguidelines to anxiety at the loss of a dedicated EOunit. If EO is everyone's business then it can easilybecome no one's. For this not to happen the uni-versity needs debate about what equality of treat-ment, opportunity and outcome mean in theemerging world of HE. This requires a deepergrasp of all the discourses, with their contradic-tions and continuities. It also needs much bettermonitoring procedures to tell us what is really hap-pening and clear equality measures in its forwardplan. As the OU relocates itself in a changing land-scape, it is important that it reworks its approach toequal opportunities as a defining aspect of its iden-tity. •

Diane Bailey, Senior Counsellor, The OpenUniversity, Cintra House, 12 Hills Road,Cambridge, CB2 1PF, UK.E-mail: d.bailey@open.ac.uk

I am very grateful to Alan Mandell of Empire StateCollege, SUNY, for his acute and constructive com-ments on an earlier draft of this paper.Responsibility for the final version, of course,remains mine.

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Legge, K. (1996) Conference proceedings (mimeo),Human Resource Management: The inside story,Milton Keynes: Open University.

Michelson, E. (1997) '"Auctoritee" and "Experience":Feminist epistemology and the assessment ofexperiential learning', Feminist Studies, 22(3), Fall,pp.627-655.

NCIHE (National Committee of Inquiry into HigherEducation) (1997) Higher Education in the LearningSociety (The Dearing Report), London: HMSO.

Phillips, A. (1993) Democracy and Difference, London:Polity Press.

Powney, J., Hamilton, S. and Weiner, G. (1997) HigherEducation and Equality: A guide, CVCP, Equal

Opportunities Commission and Commission forRacial Equality.

Roberts, K. (1981) 'The sociology of work entry andoccupational choice', in Watts, A.G., Super, D.E. andKidd, J.M. (eds.) Career development in Britain,Cambridge: Careers Research and AdvisoryCentre/Hobsons.

Sinfield, A. (1997) Cultural Politics - Queer Reading,London: Routledge.

Times Higher (1996) Leader Article, 12 July.Tawney, R.H. (1931) Equality.Wildermeersch, D. and Jansen, T. eds. (1992) Adult

Education, Experiential Learning and Social Change:The post-modern challenge, Driebergen: VUGA.

Warwick, J. (1990) Planning Human ResourceDevelopment through Equal Opportunities: A hand-book, London: Further Education Unit.

Warwick, J. (1994) Management and EqualOpportunities, Final Project Report, ManagementCharter Initiative, London, December 1994.

Announcing:The Global Distance Education Network (GDENet)

What is it?• A Web-accessible collection of documents about distance education as a strategy of economic and

social development, part of the World Bank's Knowledge Network.

Who is it for?• Primarily for policy makers and practitioners in developing countries.

Why a new network?• Because most high quality material about distance education and development is in hard-copy and

has not yet been made available on the Web.• Because policy makers are too busy to search the mass of information on the Web, and GDENet will

do it for them.

What has been done?• A selection of 300 items of literature has been organized in four domains: teaching-learning, man-

agement, technology and policy.

What next?• In Phase 2 GDENet will include items selected and placed on regional nodes by partner agencies in

Costa Rica, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, and the Secretariat of theCommonwealth of Learning.

• Items in the pool of resources will be changed on a quarterly basis as a result of systematic scanningof new resources by Partner and core institutions, as well as by GDENet users.

• Complementary services to be developed in 1998-9 include asynchronous list-servers and synchro-nous discussion groups.

For more information visit: www.worldbank.org and click on Development Topics, Education, andGlobal Distance Education Net.

16 Open Learning February 1999

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