History of the OU

Intending to make an impact at least as momentous  as the earthquake which rocked the Portuguese capital in 1755, though aiming to be considerably less destructive, and dreaming of being received as raptuously as the Carnation Revolution, which started in Lisbon in 1974, Chris Bissell and Dan Weinbren, both from The Open University, will be making contributions to the History of European Universities. Challenges and transformations conference currently being held at the oldest university in Portugal, the University of Lisbon (founded 1288-90). Chris Bissell’s topic is ‘The Open University of the United Kingdom’ while Dan Weinbren is going to be talking on ‘Openness, universities and national identities’.  He will be arguing that while the market model is widely used as a metaphor for understanding universities, and that specifically the ideas of Clayton Christensen have been applied to contextualise the development of the OU, there are wider political structures which also need to be considered.  He will propose new parameters which can be employed to understand the impact of the OU.

 That is how AHRC Council member Rick Trainor described the Economic History Society session on ‘The Big Society’. In recent days there has been much debate about the role of the AHRC in regard to The Big Society. In regard to this matter there are comments and further links available via the Times Higher and the New Statesman and there is an account by James Sumner. The academic conference debate attended by Professor Trainor was was an example of academics coming together to assess the idea within a historical context.  The government might not frame its social, educational and economic policies in the light of the ideas constructed and contested by academics but it now has to option to consider their views and analysis.

Speaking to the Universities UK Spring Conference David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, quoted above, made a few general points regarding his vision. He wants to give students ‘better value and greater choice’.

 He noted that ‘the growth of higher education in England between 1850 and 1950’ was based on local colleges which taught students for existing degrees at the University of London and elsewhere. This system meant that ‘students at new institutions could obtain degrees or other qualifications from prestigious and well understood institutions’. He went on

The external degrees of the University of London are now largely for foreign students. They should, once again, be widely available across Britain.

This was the model rejected by Jennie Lee when the design for the OU was being discussed.  While the current Minister may have considered Jennie Lee’s rationale and rejected it he does not refer to this route to his conclusions.

He argued that ‘We are committed to improving social mobility and we recognise that better access to higher education is one of the most effective ways to do that.’ However, his method was not to focus on learning. Instead he talks of putting ‘the quality of teaching where it should be – at the heart of the system’.

The government has distinctive ideas regarding the development of the HE sector. But will it draw on the most useful historical analogies and models and the best research? For a different view of this speech see Doug’s blog.

In 1976 TAD292 ,Art and environment, was first presented at the OU. It dealt with

the processes and attitudes of art not so much as these were evidenced in products of art but as they underlie the very act of doing art. This can be seen already from the titles which were given to some of the units in the course: ‘Boundary Shifting’, ‘Imagery and Visual Thinking’, ‘Having Ideas by Handling Materials’.

Students were offered a range of projects. These included the suggestion that the student stop activity and engage in listening. Another was to compose a score for sounds made from differently textured papers and a third was to enumerate the household’s activities and categorise these in terms of role and sex stereotyping. The aims of the course were attitudional, sensory and subjective rather than cognitive, relating to feeling rather than knowledge. They were ‘more phenomenological than conceptual in nature’. Assessment involved a student not only submitting the product, such as a self-portrait photograph, but also notes describing the process and rationale. The criteria were not specific but involved formulations including enthusiasm, imagination and authenticity. This course took the OU some way from the image of standardized, central control. (more…)

Following a leader in The Times Higher on 3 December 1971 which attributed the origins of the OU to Harold Wilson’s speech of 1963, a letter from Laurence Edwards was published in the newspaper the following week, 10 December 1971. Edwards claimed that Wilson was not first British politician to enthuse about an open university. Rather, he wrote, ‘the idea owes its inception to a meeting at the Liberal Party Council at least a year earlier as any Liberal pamphlet for the year 1962 can amply demonstrate’. The Liberal Democrat History Group Secretary helpfully investigated this claim and has concluded that the Liberal Party manifestoes for the 1959 or 1964 General Elections did not contain a commitment to set up anything like the OU (although this was also true of the Labour Party manifesto as the idea only appeared there in 1966). Furthermore, Jo Grimond, in The Liberal Future, Faber and Faber, London, 1959, p. 127 (written when he had been Liberal Party leader for three years) argued that  

of adult education I am sceptical. The intense desire for knowledge which existed fifty years ago seems to have evaporated or is now satisfied by TV and the papers. By all means let universities run extra-mural courses but modern adult education of people over twenty-five is largely a matter of providing ‘third programmes’ in various ways outside the educational system itself.

The Liberal Democrat History Group has also checked the list of Liberal Publications Department pamphlets issued between 1956-76, as contained in the catalogue of the  British Library and there is no publication listed which deals with the question of university, adult or further education.

Perhaps Edwards’ was misremembering events. If you know the sources to which he was referring, do let us know.

Research from the Higher Education Policy Institute (a thinktank created on 1 November 2002 and which says that it is the ‘UK’s only independent think tank devoted exclusively to higher education’) indicates that 40% of students from England who were accepted on to university degree courses last year achieved lower grades than two Es at A-level. The comparable figure in 2003 was 24%. Bahram Bekhradni, the HEPI director, suggested that the values of the OU have become mainstream when he said “It is one of the strengths of the UK higher education system – and a feature that sets it apart from most others in Europe – that second-chance higher education is possible”. As Bekhradni worked at the Department of Education and Science for nearly 20 years and presided over the RAE it is likely that he is aware of the history of the term ‘second chance’ (as it is used in para 23 of the Executive Summary). It was often applied to the OU. In 1971 over 30% of the first students at the OU had less than two A levels or equivalent. The report also noted that plenty of people who apply for higher education, even though they have fewer than 80 tariff points, are not offered a place at a conventional university.

Collaborate to compete. Seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher educationis a recently produced report to HEFCE by the Online Learning Task Force. The authors include OU Vice-Chancellor Martin Bean, Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive, HEFCE, a number of academics and representatives from Microsoft, Apple and also the President of Higher and Professional Education, Pearson Education Ltd. 

The report employs understandings of the history of the OU noting both that ‘this country set a world standard for distance learning by establishing, some 40 years ago, the Open University’ and that

The Open University has developed its own style of online learning called ‘supported open learning’ giving its 250,000 students flexibility to study when and where suits them best. This is in keeping with the university’s founding mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.

 The report also noted that

Learners are increasingly able to navigate high quality, open and online resources and can do this through social networks, which in some cases are more supportive contexts in which to develop skills. New broadcast and distribution channels such as iTunes U17, Youtube and Wikipedia demonstrate this trend. Learning environments and contexts are becoming increasingly participative and the learner’s contribution is highly valued by teaching professionals….The Open University, for example, has successfully attracted students by placing small segments of content for informal learning on iTunes U.

Can you help us explore the history of this trend of support for informal learning so that we can better comprehend it and assess the impact of the OU? (more…)

The University of the Air

The term ‘University of the Air’ was used by Harold Wilson on 8September 1963 when he announced plans for the body which became the OU. He said

Today I want to outline new proposals on which we are work in, a dynamic programme providing facilities for home study to university and higher technical standards, on the basis of a University of the Air and of nationally organised correspondence college courses.

He used the term again in a speech at the Labour Party Conference on 1 October, 1963. On 25 February 1966 the Labour government published a white paper, ‘A University of the Air’. George Catlin used the term in 1960 and Michael Young in 1962.[i] Anglia TV broadcast a series called College of the Air in 1963. Versions of the term had been used before prior to this time. (more…)

Wilson’s speech in September 1963 is often seen as the beginnings of the OU. It is called ‘Wilson’s vision’, here. But from where did he get his ideas? One source was William Benton. Benton sponsored Harold Wilson’s trips to the USA in 1960, 1961 and 1962,and Wilson felt that Benton’s ‘heart was in academics and in politics’ (Harold Wilson,  Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, London, 1986). It was Benton who suggested in 1963 that Wilson and he have dinner with Geoffrey Crowther, the Vice Chair of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) who, as chair of the Central Advisory Council for Education was responsible for the The Crowther Report – Fifteen to Eighteen (1959). Benton chaired EB. Crowther went to become the Foundation Chancellor of the OU.  The first Vice Chancellor of the OU, Walter Perry, argued that Benton was one of the men whose vision of education for all, through correspondence teaching and the use of the mass media contributed to the decision to found the Open University (Walter Perry, Report of the Vice-Chancellor to the council, 1972, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1973, p. 30) (more…)