Has the OU got a history?
For David Sewart, at first the OU was:
like Athena springing fully grown and fully armed from the head of Zeus [it] appeared to have no mother and never to have had the opportunity to have been an adolescent, let alone a child … I began to realise that the UK OU was part of a world wide phenomenon – and a late entrant at that, to the world of distance education.
Review, Open Learning, June 1995, pp. 62-63, (p. 62).