Look around the Open Polytechnic home base in Waterloo, and you won’t hear the chatter of students getting ready for class, or see a stampede of feet for the cafeteria. There are no future chefs in cooking lessons or trades workshops being used, in fact there’s rarely a student to be seen or heard here. That’s because of a change in the way many people want their education these days.

“Education has evolved,” says Open Polytechnic’s new CEO Caroline Seelig. “It’s no longer just about 18-24 year olds that go into University, get a degree and that’s it. Many people now want to learn constantly, throughout their lives, and have the option to do that without dropping everything to go back to it at set times.”
Caroline has been in the sector for 16 years, coming to the job from being Deputy Chief Executive at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, so she has watched this evolution take place.
“We are increasingly a lifelong learning society where the need to keep learning is constant. We are learning informally all the time. For example all of a sudden you might have to learn how to use internet banking. That’s the sort of society we live in. So education needs to be delivered in a way that recognises and suits an individual’s financial situation, family commitments, technology access, speed of life, and that fits around their work or other activities.” Here at the Open Polytechnic the education is flexible, and delivered to students in “their” world – whether home, workplace or community. Whether you are moving cities, living on a boat, travelling overseas, studying at another tertiary institution, have never studied before, or work fulltime, you can still study with the Open Polytechnic at a time and in a way that suits.
The logistics of this kind of flexible delivery are quite mindboggling. With 30,000 part-time students and 500 staff, even just collecting and returning assignments is an enormous task. Caroline compares the Open Polytechnic to a powerhouse, linked with an underground pipeline of information. “It is literally everywhere, in homes and workplaces throughout the country. But it’s also nowhere. There are no big obvious campuses, and if you turned up in Taumaranui you wouldn’t know that there are Open Polytechnic learners there.” This is modern education: a virtual network of learning, and an invisible information flow going through every part of the country.
Most of the Open Polytechnic’s students are people combining jobs and study, making the organisation one of New Zealand’s major educators of people in the workforce. The current economic climate has intensified the need for education for Kiwis. Caroline confirms: “a lot of people are thinking that they need to retrain or upskill, because they may be at risk of losing their jobs because of the recession. This creates huge demand for the Open Polytechnic.” Though the government is watching their spend too, and has capped the enrolments for tertiary education institutions – in the Open Polytechnic’s case at a lower number than Caroline reckons they could probably bring in.

The organisation has also responded to the current recession by offering 1500 fee-free courses for firms using flexible work and training strategies to stave off job losses and for workers who lose their jobs during the current downturn. “We tried to think of ways we could provide extra support. The fee-free courses are a resource that we hope will give firms and workers another option as they work through this tough time.”
Caroline points out that underneath what is going on in the global economy, New Zealand still faces longer-term skill and worker shortages, so upskilling people currently in the workforce is fundamentally important. “It is a national priority which has been identified by the Government and Department of Labour. We need to be investing in skills now for the upturn when it comes, so we can stay competitive as a nation.”
The challenge, of course, is how to do this in the most cost-effective way. Says Caroline: “To keep providing skills at the level New Zealand needs we’re all going to have to work smarter, and this has been recognised. Every government in the world is saying the same thing: How do we get better at making skills available, accessible and cost effective? Open and distance learning is a very cost-effective way of delivering education, whether through direct delivery to students or through different forms of collaboration with organisations working together.”
A key part of such collaboration is the national network of supportive industries, employers, and other learning institutions. “We are a very strong supporter of national programmes and work closely with Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) and other professional bodies. We provide nationally consistent vocational skills-based training, and industry really values that kind of service. Firms also sometimes use our services for their own training programmes.”
“We also complement the regional Polytechnics with a different type of education for a different type of learner. Nearly all of our students study part-time and want flexible learning to fit in with other demands in their lives. But more and more there will be areas in which we can co-operate with other Polytechnics. We can provide courses and services anywhere in the country, for example, and that can be something that other Polytechnics use to cost-effectively expand their own provision. Certainly I get a very positive response when I’m talking to my colleagues in the sector. ”
These developed relationships are part of Caroline’s vision for the future – to be a much more networked institution. “Difference is good – we can all bring different things to the table for increasing skills uptake. We’re all under pressure financially and that’s not going to go away in the current economic climate. One of the challenges for the Polytechnic sector is to find better ways of collaborating, and getting the most value out of it for the good of New Zealand. We are a part of the response to that challenge.”
So where to from here for this ever-changing scenery that is learning?
“For the New Zealand export education industry, the first phase of growth has been to bring foreign students into the country. This has become extremely successful and a major earner for the nation. The second phase is about a much stronger element of offshore delivery. As an open learning organisation we can deliver education and work with partners anywhere in the world, and that’s a big part of our thinking for the future. We’ve also got a very strong reputation in our field internationally. World class organisations like the UK Open University are very keen to explore partnership opportunities with us.”

So in every way, the future is open for the Open Polytechnic and its flexible network of learning.