History of the OU

Edward Pearce’s obituary of Ted Short (Baron Glenamara) who died aged 99 on 4th May, notes that he ‘took charge of the final stages of creating the Open University, perhaps the best thing any Wilson government did’. In a similar vein in 2004 Edward Graham (Lord Graham of Edmonton) who left school aged 14 and was one of the first students at the OU, attributed the creation of the OU to Harold Wilson, Jennie Lee and Ted Short.

The OU opened in 1969 and in 1970, before any students had started to study with it, a new government was elected. William van Straubenzee, the Junior Minister for Higher Education in the Tory government of 1970-74, said of the OU ‘I would have slit its throat if I could’. However, he felt that his violent enthusiasms were curtailed by Ted Short the Labour Education Minister whose ‘nifty, last-moment work with the charter that made the OU unkillable’. Perhaps this manoeuvre endeared Short to Wilson who kept him in his post at Education while Labour was in opposition in the 1970s. Read the rest of this entry »

When, early in 2012, Alan Tait, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Curriculum and Qualifications, received an honorary doctorate from the Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics, one of Russia’s leading economic institutions, in recognition of his services to distance education in Europe he gave a keynote address. This was about open and distance learning in Europe. This was to an audience of rectors from universities across the former Soviet states and also to students. A former President of the European Distance and Elearning Network and the Chief Editor of the European Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Alan noted that ‘there is currently significant effort in Russia to invest in distance education’. While MESI might be interested to learn from the OU, the OU has learnt from the USSR which provided a role model for the University of the Air.

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TAD292 Art and environment (1976-85) was a distinctive course chaired by Simon Nicholson (1934-1990) who had studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and the University of Cambridge and between 1964 and 1971 taught at the University of Berkeley, California. It sought to develop ‘strategies for creative work’ and 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’.

TAD292 students were offered a range of projects on this 30-point course. 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. See Philippe C. Duchastel, ‘TAD292 – and its challenge to Educational Technology’, Programmed Learning & Educational Technology, 13, 4, October 1976, pp. 61-66. The course received considerable publicity. In 1976 The World  At One, a BBC radio news programme, reported on TAD292 at one summer school:

Bizarre games and happenings formed a part of experimental residential course for a group of students at Sussex University. They were encouraged to make prints of various parts of their bodies. Some made bare bottom prints, other dragged rubbish through the streets and one group appeared to be aimlessly kicking a giant rugby ball about. Read the rest of this entry »

Just published is Alexandra Okada, Teresa Connolly and Peter Scott (eds.), Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources, IGI, Hershey, USA, 2012. This is a collection of the latest research, trends, future development, and case studies on how to use OER and Web 2.0 for collaborative learning.

The publisher explains that ‘the purpose of this handbook is to understand how OERs and Web 2.0 can be deployed successfully to enrich the collaborative learning experience and ensure a positive outcome in terms of user generated knowledge and development of skills’.  

The editors work at the OU and there are several chapters by OU staff including one by Andy Lane and Andrew Law. Their ‘Collaborating over rich media: the Open University and the BBC partnership’ has nine references, two of which are items on this blog. Furthermore, those seeking ‘Additional Reading’ are invited to visit the History of the OU website.

Although the New College of Humanities’ plans to charge £18,000 per year fees were mentioned almost a year ago in the Daily Telegraph, (and reported on this blog) it appears that it was only recently that geneticist Steve Jones discovered this. This led the Aberystwyth-born snails enthusiast to distance himself from the unborn institution with which he had been associated. These fees, he said, mean that ‘it can now no longer really claim to be about public education’. He then went on, through a deft classical allusion, to compare the New College of Humanities to a toilet. While other universities plan to charge fees of around £9,000, the OU will charge even less.

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The OU has long been in a league of its own. Many have seen it as rising above the others in a manner comparable to the way the inspirational tower associated with Blackpool is clearly far above the flat countryside of the Ipswich Town tractor boys. Read the rest of this entry »

Distaining to take the hint offered by Professor Malcolm Chase who suggested that ‘there are rather more histories of adult education than of other fields which would seem as deserving of historical scutiny, for example … higher education’, Vaughan College, Leicester has seized the opportunity of an anniversary, its 150th birthday, to reflect on its past (Chase ‘”Mythmaking and mortmain”: the uses of adult education history’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 27, 1 ,1995, p.52). The event will be marked by three main sessions over July 2nd – July 3rd 2012 which will look at what Vaughan College has stood for, how ‘the Vaughan tradition’ now fits into current thinking, policy and practice and the place of adult education in contemporary society.

It opens at 4.30 on the 2nd with a talk by AA100 author and AL at the OU, Dr Lucy Faire who is also Director of the HE Certificate in Modern British History at Vaughan College.  Read the rest of this entry »

David Harris author of Openness and closure in distance education, Falmer Sussex, 1987 returned to the OU this week to deliver some papers relating to his work as a Research Assistant in Curriculum Design at The Open University between 1970 and 1973. Despite his critique of the OU he said that he was a big fan and had maintained an interest in adult educaiton throughout his subsequent career. He was one of the contributors to OU teaching material which was said to have a Marxist bias (see David Harris, ‘Openness and Control in Higher Education: towards a critique of the Open University’ (with J Holmes) in Dale R. et al. (eds) Schooling and Capitalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1978). He has also written on  ‘On Marxist Bias’ aboth the OU in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, 2, 2, 1978, pp. 68 – 71.