History of the OU

The notion of a correspondence course was transformed when the OU started to send out home experiment kits and computers by post. 

This is HEKTOR, a ‘home computer’ dating from 1982. It could be plugged into a TV which became its monitor and plugged into a cassette recorder for storage. Initially students were encouraged to write programs in BASIC but later it was used for other purposes, including on a control engineering course.

Launched on 8 May 1972 this publication was sent to all students (about 35,000 of them) and staff (about 5,000 people). It was designed to be a news service and the first issue carried a piece by Ray Thomas about who was using the OU and why. It was revealed that there was an interim editorial advisory group chaired by Michael Drake. Professor Drake said: ‘It must be more than a vehicle for student outrage or Walton Hall pap. It has got to be be seen to be independent’. It was predated by Open House ‘a weekly journal of news, views and information for and by the staff of the Open University’ which was launched in March 1970.

In ‘The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains (Norton, 2010) Nicholas Carr suggested that acquiring new tools and skills changes us because using them forms new connections in the brain. This echoes the ideas of Marshall (the media is the message) McLuhan, who once said that ‘the future of the book is the blurb’. Long before him Plato also took the view that our tools affect our thoughts.

There is plenty of evidence that the brain is adaptable. A London cab driver who knows how to get about the capital, that is has ‘the knowledge’, has a hippocampus (the part of the brain where such information is stored and used) larger than most of the rest of us. Brain scans indicate that the web strengthens our “primitive” mental functions (quick decision-making and problem-solving). Many studies (in Nature and elsewhere) have concluded that gaming leads to improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. Bjarki Valtysson ‘Access culture: Web 2.0 and cultural participation’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 16, 2, 2010, pp. 200 — 214, demonstrated how digital communication and new media platforms enhance cultural participation.

However, Carr argued that another aspect of this plasticity is that, given the opportunity to dip and sample, we tend to be more easily distracted and interrupted and to use the processes associated with reading less. To employ the analogy of the brain as a computer, our circuits are being reprogrammed by our gadgets. (more…)

On 15th July 2010, former Labour councillor and economics lecturer at Glasgow University, Vince Cable MP who was, according to his autobiography (‘Free Radical – A Memoir’)  ‘one of the first generation of Open University tutors” made his ‘first attempt to set out my views on the university, and wider, HE sector and my aspirations for it’ (see here). In regard to The Open University, which he called ‘a world leader in distance learning’, the  Business Secretary in the  Department for Business, Innovation and Skills proposed that more students could be encouraged to save money by staying at home and studying for university degrees externally, along the lines of Open University courses. (more…)

The journal ‘Open Learning’ celebrates 25 years under its current title this year. it can be accessed here. The current editor Anne Gaskell, former editors Graham Gibbs and Greville Rumble and Chair of the Editorial Board David Sewart have recorded podcasts highlighting important articles and issues over the last 25 years.  These can be heard here.

There were echoes of some of the debates about the OU which have occurred over the last half-century in a meeting in Brighton on 29th April 2010.  Debate about where HE is going based on an understanding of where it has been is welcome. To judge from the report it looks as if an understanding of the development of the OU could be of value to those debating the future of HE elsewhere.

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‘How about taking exams in the comfort of your own room?’ Asked BBC reporter Katherine Sellgren before going on to suggest that ‘New technology, boasting anti-cheating software, could soon make this a possibility’. (more…)

Professor Gráinne Conole

Gráinne Conole, Professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University wrote: I argue in this paper that we need to expand the notion of openness, to take account of the affordances of new technologies and the new patterns of user behaviour we are seeing emerge. There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). Read more here

Advertisements in trade journals indicated the benefits of machines which could support learning.

A popular at the time when the OU was being created was that machines could be used to support students learning at their own pace. It appeared possible to create systematically designed step-by-step courses with clear evaluation of the learning objectives. From before the war psychologists had showed that animals appeared to learn effectively when their learning was accompanied by rewards and Sidney Pressey had invented a keyboard-operated teaching machine which was supposed to allow students only to acquire new material once they had mastered the previous steps. Although there was not much interest in such machine in the 1930s, the ideas were adapted in the 1960s as interest in scientific management grew. This appeared to facilitate scientific control over the labour process. Programmed instruction was based on a behavioral model of learning that emphasized prompting for behaviors and responses that could then be reinforced (or not) and used to guide the learner through the course materials. Programmed instruction, later programmed learning, was popular in the 1960s. James Finn’s work at University of Southern California, connected programmed learning to audio-visual facilities and on behavioral psychology. There was also work by Arthur A Lumsdaine and Robert Glazer (eds.) Teaching machines and programmed learning, NEA Publications 1960 to which Burrhus Frederic Skinner contributed. The latter argued that the learning process should be divided into a very large number of very small steps and rewarded offered to the successful.  He created a mechanical teaching machine. A learner could respond to a series of questions studied at their own rate. There was a reward for a correct response. The student had to compose an answer as there were not multiple choice answers. There were prompts and hints for students.  The intention was to bring a single person into contact with a large number of students and a programmed instruction movement developed. Susan M Markle was an early exponent of Skinner’s programmed instruction in her work at the University of Illinois.

In the UK a Central Training Council was created in 1964. It promoted programmed instruction in industrial training and a survey in 1966 suggested that the idea of programmed learning was now accepted within industry. Universities also took it on and in 1966 Association of Programmed Learning formed. By 1968 it was being used in at least 29 universities in the UK. Electronic systems were developed such as the Edison Responsive Environment, known as the ‘talking typewriter’ and audiovisual material was also used. Programmed learning was used in a variety of trades and by the armed services. It was also used within teacher training.

During the1970s the idea fell out of favour, being deemed to be too mechanistic and rigid because programmed learning units and computer marked tests gave the student no chance to question the ‘teacher’ or to ask for elucidation. Cognitive approaches were becoming more popular within psychology and more flexible regulatory regimes were becoming more familiar within industry. Possibly, ‘there was a gendered effect in programmed learning, with conception and design being largely male areas, while delivery was more mixed’.’ (John Field, ‘Behaviourism and training: the programmed instruction movement in Britain, 1950-1975, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 59, 3 September 2007, p.326).  As the popularity of the socio-constructive paradigm for instruction grew, interest in supporting collaborative learning, social networking and virtual worlds developed.