History of the OU

The use of technology to promote co-operative and collaborative learning goes back to the earliest days of the OU. Despite initial complaints from the GPO, which ran the UK telephone system at the time, since 1973 telephones were used to support the physically isolated, the itinerant, the housebound and the shiftworkers who were often unable to attend tutorials. Expert strategies were developed and a pack produced. Advice was offered to tutors about encouraging students to gather around a loudspeaker telephone for self-help activity ‘with the added bonus of you taking part from a distance – like an academic Cheshire cat’. Soon audio conferencing, which could involve up to eight people on telephones in different locations, was  employed as were faxes, personalised audio-cassette messages and video-conferencing.

In 1988 the OU introduced courses which required students to have access to a desktop computer. It presented Information technology: Social and technological issues, DT200, (1988–94). This used computer conferencing. By 1990 about 2,000 students were using CoSy to communicate with tutors and with other students. Programming and programming languages, M353 (1986–99) required a home computing facility, while Matter in the universe, S256 (1985–92) provided computer assisted learning for home computers and employed interactive videotape. Students were given opportunities to buy or rent computers. In 1995 twenty courses, with a total of almost 21,000 students, required undergraduates to have access to an MS-DOS machine. Conferencing enabled students to select a time which was convenient to them to respond. This did not offer the immediacy of quick-fire debate but it did provide opportunities for reflective dialogue. The large-scale use of this facility on Information technology, DT200, helped to shift the focus within the OU away from the individual learner towards consideration of how best to support social interaction. Individual students were encouraged to construct personal meaning and to contribute to their own learning and that of others through online discussion.

Information technology: Social & technological issues, DT200 (1988–94) introduced many students to computer conferencing with this electronic map of a virtual campus.

A new text-based conferencing system was developed. In 1994 FirstClass was provided for undergraduate courses following successful trials of the collaborative learning activities that it supported. It was considered to be much more intuitive a system than CoSy and within a year 5,000 students were conferencing. By 1996 there were 13,000 and soon 50,000. Initially the conferencing facility was used for interactions previously carried out by phone or letter. Tutors offered advice and responded to requests via FirstClass. The house-bound and those overseas began to exchange ideas with other students, particularly if conferencing was structured and linked to assessment. The university began to devise guidance for tutors on conference moderation and ideas about conferencing were further developed for an online course You, your computer and the net, T171 (1999–2005), which enrolled around 10,000 students in its first year and had 12,500 students by 2000. In addition to access to an extensive website students received a CD-ROM of software and set texts.

As new ways of providing interactive and individualised support for learners became possible so the importance of maintaining face-to-face contact declined. The OU study centre had begun life as ‘a “Listening and Viewing Centre” with the express purpose of providing access to VHF radio and BBC2’. Used for counselling and other purposes, many initially cost little to rent. The increased use of home video players and desktop computing cast some doubt on the value of study centres.

Typical FirstClass screen, 1996

On Discovering science, S103, computer-mediated communication was optional for students but a requirement for ALs. They used FirstClass to access a national conference at least once a week and they could also exchange messages using conferences designed for the localities in which they were based. ALs were provided with guidance as to how to teach in the interactive seminars and offered practical advice which reflected the ethos of OU teaching practices. It was suggested, for example, that they ‘adopt an informal, friendly tone. Start a message with a greeting such as “Hello” … avoid the more formal “Dear Chris”.’ In addition, they were told that ‘CMC is a medium devoid of warmth and you need to compensate for this’.

Learning was integrated with practice and students were required to submit their work electronically. They communicated not only with the central computing facility but also with one another and their tutors. Groups of about fifteen worked collaboratively on projects in their own tutor-moderated conferences. Reflection was integral to the assessment. Students were required to provide evidence of participation in online discussions. The intention was to use the new delivery modes to ensure that the OU’s environment remained congenial and supportive of the creation of knowledge by learners.

Online conferencing enabled data to be recorded for later analysis of how students learn and which were the most effective teaching strategies. Illustrations from Morris, R.M., Mitchell, N. & Bell, M. Student Use of Computer Mediated Communication in an Open University Level 1 Course: Academic or Social? Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 99, 2, 1999.

I work in a building named after Asa Briggs. It is on the OU’s Milton Keynes campus. But why was he significant to the OU?

Briggs, 1921-2016, was a member of the OU’s Planning Committee 1967 ─ 1969 and chair of its working group on students and curriculum. He recalled that

Harold Wilson’s original idea was to connect existing extra-mural departments, the Workers’ Educational Association [Asa Briggs was President of this body] broadcasters, correspondence courses and night classes together to create a scheme for degrees to be awarded by an established university. He did not initially envisage an institution with a charter and autonomy but a consortium of existing universities using television and the post, facilities for home study, nationally-organized correspondence teaching and a structure open to a variety of people.

Briggs addresses an  OU Awards Ceremony.

Asa Briggs went on:

I was very keen that there should be some kind of gateway element, an introductory element into the courses … there should be some inter-disciplinary element and that there should be no great gap in the university between one set of courses and another. That there should be very considerable freedom to move from one course to another… that people should take as long as they liked to get their degrees. And I found all this extremely exciting… not a great deal of resistance on the Committee, but an immense amount of scepticism outside’.

Briggs also ‘believed very passionately and still do, in getting the access questions right.’ All these elements were introduced to the OU. Wilson’s ‘educational trust’ and Jennie Lee’s engagement with conventional wisdom were developed by Asa Briggs. As Ritchie Calder, a colleague of Asa Briggs on the Planning Committee said, ‘we stripped down the conventional university to its chassis and examined the essentials’.

Briggs taught modules at the OU. While the 1966 White Paper The University of the Air’ argued that OU programmes should bring ‘lecturers of distinction within easy reach of everyone’, the Planning Committee concluded that television ‘should not be wasted in the straightforward visualisation of lectures’. Asa Briggs took the opportunity to explore this idea. For the Arts Foundation Course, he presented a television programme, ‘Leeds: a study in civic pride’. Using film and music it is far more than a dry lecture to camera, or a travelogue. This is history which contextualises the level at which people lived their lives within broader regional, national and international perspectives so that those new to studying and with only one opportunity to watch the programme (this is before video playback machines were commonplace) could get a sense of why history is important and relevant to them and how it can be created by ordinary learners everywhere. Watching the programmes years after they were made you see both an expert enthusing about his subject and somebody who makes support for learning central and who wants to provide learners with opportunities to construct their own understandings, to be producers of knowledge as well as consumers of education. He also worked in some of the course teams. These comprised of academics, BBC producers and editors and created the teaching materials. He recalled that ‘sometimes I was on ones where I found myself in, to some extent, in disagreement with many other members of the same course team. But the idea of pulling together a group of people was important’.

As well as being an influential planner Briggs was Chancellor of the OU 1978 – 1994. He brought to the post his experience of work on the University Grants Committee and at the universities of Sussex and Leeds. He also used his Bconnections to well-established networks enabled him to help resolve disputes. Sir Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Education, 1981-1986 expressed concern at that which he considered bias in OU materials. The Vice Chancellor, John Horlock recalled being ‘summoned to what proved to be a very difficult interview’ with Joseph. He concluded: ‘I am sure that he [Joseph] would willingly have closed the OU down if it had been politically possible to do so, particularly after the affair of academic bias’. Asa Briggs was familiar with Keith Joseph ‘because I’d written a Nursing Report and when he was Secretary for Health’. When the Minister sought wanted advice about the best books on the history of his constituency in Leeds from the author of Victorian Cities the OU Chancellor used the opportunity to address ‘his fears and doubts of bias in Open University courses’.

This fanfare, the sting, the first few bars of Divertimento for three trumpets and three trombones, opus 49, was composed in 1959 by Leonard Salzedo and, from 1971, was used by the Open University as the signature to radio and television programmes. In this respect it is framed by the 60s as also are the origins of the OU. The music was also associated with the logo. The OU was announced by Harold Wilson in April 1963, developed by Jennie Lee and granted its Royal Charter in April 1969. Those few bars was the sound of my youth in the 1970s. They were a signal that my Mum was switching identities, was ceasing to prioritise being maternal and was instead to be an OU student. However, the Open University did more than disrupt my life. It enabled ‘university learning’ to enter millions of people’s homes and to transform their lives. It also disrupted the higher education sector and indeed the very idea of the university.

Those five bars can each work as a reminder of the OU to listeners and viewers. As you sat on the sofa in front of the television you were being told that the next programme was evidence of a society which wanted to improve itself, which was run by a supportive government, that was using the most up-tp-date technology and systems for social benefits and that higher education was not confined to either young radicals or the campus.

This was an affluent society. Wealthy enough to own televisions, mass literacy, mass access to broadcasts and, from 1964, BBC2. Television, it was argued could be transformative, acting as the window on the world.

This was a government, the BBC was state-run, which promoted social justice. Labour’s Nye Bevan, had opened the NHS in 1948, now his widow, Jennie Lee was expanding provision. The OU demonstrated the worthiness of the state vs commercial broadcasting pirates. Within a few months of a newspaper interview with Edward Short, the Postmaster-General, which was headlined ‘Why I’m sinking the pirates’, he became Secretary of State for Education. Questions of “education” and of “pop music” should not be treated, as separate historical topics. Nor at the time were they kept in entirely separate files. The agenda and the chronologies of education and pop music criss-cross. Educational television was, it was claimed ‘a symbol of a new type of government’.

Reaching a mass audience was a symbol of mass production business model and a systems approach. Encouraged by the Wilson government, a new car company the British Leyland Motor Corporation was formed in 1968. Within a year it employed 250,000 people at the largest car plant in the world. Most UK universities which opened in the 1960s initially catered for a few hundred students. By contrast, when the first round of applications to the OU closed, over 42,000 people had applied. There were only 621,000 students in higher education.

There was cross-party support that state should build more universities. The Robbins report of 1963 was approved by all sides. However, by the time OU opened, students were perceived as a pampered lot, wasting time and taxpayers money. ‘Youth’, lamented lecturer E.P. Thompson in regard to Warwick University where he taught, ‘if left to its own devices, tends to become very hairy, to lie in bed til lunch-time, to miss seminars’. That most of the members of the Angry Brigade, who faced trial for a bombing campaign in Britain between 1970 and 1972 had been students was not lost on the press: ‘Dropouts with brains tried to launch bloody revolution’ claimed one headline. By contrast another paper claimed OU students were ‘Short-haired students keen to work’. Those five bars told viewers and listeners that technology could be used to support learners. University studying could occur in locations which had not previously been used for such purposes. At its foundation in 1969 the first Chancellor called the OU ‘disembodied’. Students in front of the television set could rearrange the conventions of time and space. They could create a laboratory or seminar room. One space could become several. Students could hold a mirror up to the mainstream, could recognise normality by observing what it could be, what it has been and what it is not. Through broadcasting spaces in which the social order could be made and remade were created.

Walton Hall in the mud as the rest of the OU campus in Milton Keynes was being constructed.

The building has medieval origins but is largely a late 17th Century manor house, extended in the 18th and 19th centuries. The University leased the building and the land from Milton Keynes Development Corporation from 1 September 1969 and subsequently purchased both land and property during the 1990s. Walton Hall is the site of OU’s foundation stone, laid on 18 May 1970 by Earl Mountbatten. In common with the OU he had links to unconventional education in that he was educated at home before he attended a school and then the Royal Naval College. After serving in the First World War he became a mature university student. He later returned to the Royal Naval College as an adult learner. His membership of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and presidency of the United World Colleges were reminders of the OU’s international and economic roles and its appeal to prescient technocrats.

The building is where the Vice Chancellors have had their offices and the entire campus is often referred to by the named of this Grade II listed building.

The Hall is also home to several portraits of Jennie Lee and many of the Vice Chancellors. The basement is where a bar is located. Following a grant from the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Trust, its cellars were converted into rooms for social and recreational purposes, in order, noted the Report of the Vice-Chancellor, January 1969–December 1970, to ‘establish friendly contacts with members of the general public and other institutions in the area’.

Through Jennie Lee the former home of the Rixbaunds, the Beale family, the Gilpins, the Pinfolds, Dr Vaughan Harley and the Earles, the building used by the Development Corporation and to house WRNS working at Bletchley Park was connected to the man credited with creating the NHS. Jennie Lee made the link to her late spouse, Nye Bevan, by ceremonially hanging his cap and portrait in the cellar bar. Bevan had become a miner on leaving elementary school. He helped to pay for his sisters to attend college and he wrote of how ‘tenaciously we clung to the hope of superior educational opportunities for those of our family who could benefit from them. Jennie Lee recalled that the origins of the OU went

The quotations above manage to insult the students (Spectator) the founders (Christopher Chataway) the staff (Robert Jackson) the idea (The Times) and the Scots, Welsh, Irish and others not based in England (Times Educational Supplement). This was a university which failed as:

• it was not a community of scholars, it failed as a university
• it strove to be a university, it failed those best served by technical colleges and adult education provision
•  it used television, it failed to educate and only managed to transmit
• it was party political, it failed to be objective.

These criticisms had an impact. To prove it was intellectually sound the OU made strenuous efforts to present scholarly television programmes. as a result some of them ended up speaking to academic peers, not interested learners. To prove that students were being thoroughly tested to a high standard the OU’s assessment system has long been rigorous. For many years there were external examiners for every module, not simply every degree and there is checking on the marking of tutors through a system of monitoring and tutorial visits. The accusation that it was the creature of the Labour Party shifted. Some teaching materials were accused of bias.

However, slowly, the OU came to make the transition from an ‘electoral gimmick’ (to quote Chataway) to its current status of ‘national treasure’ (in the words of the Vice-Chancellor at another university). As it became more popular, so more politicians claimed it as their own. Winnie Ewing, Scottish National Party President 1987–2005, suggested that the honorary doctorate she received from the OU in 1993 was ‘in recognition of my role in establishing it’. One Liberal claimed that, ‘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 OU achieved national, indeed international, fame through its use of television for teaching purposes. However, it was teaching so much that the time allocated to OU broadcasts soon became inadequate. The BBC wanted to broadcast a range of materials. As noted under Object No 31, the number of television transmission slots available to the OU did not grow at the same rate as the number of OU broadcasts. By 1978  about 20 per cent of OU television broadcasts had only one transmission. The percentage of students watching the broadcasts fell and the OU’s Video-Cassette Loan Service was introduced in 1982. As only about 8 per cent of OU students had a VHS player at home, machines were distributed to the regions. OU study centres began to be stocked with collections of videos and replay machines. In 1981 students could attend centres in order to use Europe’s first ‘interactive videodisc’.

Soon the technology spread. By 1986 60 per cent of OU undergraduates had a video player in their homes. Britain had the highest ownership of video-cassette recorders in Europe, and OU students’ access to such technology was ‘well above the national rate’. A survey found that only 14 per cent of OU under- graduates could not arrange access to a machine. In 1992, 90 per cent of OU students surveyed had a VCR and 80 per cent of them recorded OU programmes. From 1993, instead of mailing video-cassettes to students, the OU arranged for the night-time broadcast of programmes for students to record.  Video-cassettes liberated students from a fixed viewing schedule. OU Professor John Sparkes argued that ‘it was a mistake to try to teach conceptually difficult material by broadcast TV. It goes too fast and cannot be slowed down to allow for thinking time.’ Using video, students could skim, pause, rewind, fast forward and search. They could integrate reflection on of other teaching media. By contrast, a third of students who watched television material focused on the details and failed to draw out the general principles.  For courses with fewer than 650 students each year it was cheaper for the OU to distribute returnable video-cassettes than to broadcast the material. he OU had its own purpose-built television studio complex at Walton Hall. This enabled it to produce a video which generated three-dimensional images of the brain for the Biology: brain and behaviour course. The OU began to produce course-specific, non-broadcast materials (for group viewing at residential schools, for example).

OU videos, unlike broadcasts, were designed for students not general viewers and could be and replayed by the students. The OU considered how best to use the equipment. Research was carried out at the OU into the effectiveness of teaching by non-academic organisations, such as British Telecom (which used interactive video to train managers dispersed throughout the UK) and Price Waterhouse (which used a videodisc-based training programme to acquaint employees with potential computer security risks). An ‘Alternatives to print for visually impaired students: feasibility project report’ was produced for The Mercers’ Company and Clothworkers’ Foundation. A team from IET worked with Rank Xerox EuroPARC in order to design effective computer-based support for collaborative learning where people were located at different physical sites and connected via various forms of technology.

The OU made a number of videos as part of its Continuing Education activities. A video for Talking with young people, P525, included forty- three sequences. Students were invited to watch in groups and consider their reactions. The constraints inherent in a 23-minute broadcast slot did not apply to a video-cassette with a number of independent sections of varying lengths. For Social psychology, D307 (1985–95), students were invited to analyse a drama by referring to letters in the corner of the screen and a grid provided in the video notes. The presenter explained:

watch the excerpt straight through first time, even if you can’t get it all down in your notes, you’ll have a chance to replay this section of the tape later on. Doing this analysis in real time will be good practice for when you do your own observation.39

Similarly, the, video associated with Matter in the universe, S256 (1985–92), included the instruction that viewers should watch it more than once and that they should address questions related to the numbers in the corner of the screen. For Engineering mechanics: Solids and fluids, T331, 1985–2004, students were expected to measure the time period of an oscillating pendulum, and then stop the tape and apply the data to an equation. The impersonal broadcast to an infinite crowd had been adapted to enable personal use by members of the OU’s student body.

By the 1990s for Studying family and community history: 19th and 20th centuries, DA301 (1994–2001), students were encouraged to develop their transferable skills by making audio and video recordings.

Between 1971 and 2006 the OU used television to deliver some of its teaching materials. Initially these were not treated seriously by the OU’s critics. During the period of its creation, 1963-69, they had argued that it was not a community of scholars, that it did not serve those best served by adult education provision, that it was party political and that television could transmit trivia, but could do little else. Concerns about using television were numerous. They included

Concern that control would lie in the hands of the BBC, not the academic institution. The BBC sought to support the education of citizens and the national interest. The OU had different concerns. Sometimes there were clashes over scheduling and content.

Concern that broadcast material should not be assessed as some people were out of broadcast range (because they lived in remote areas or in prison) and some people would not be able to see the programmes (due to shift work or competition from family members, or because they could not access a television).

Concern that costs were high. For most courses (modules the OU could afford one programme of 24 minutes which included film and a second programme filmed in a studio, often consisting largely of talking heads.

Concern about the content. As it was assumed that students would see each broadcast only once. The number of television transmission slots available to the OU did not grow at the same rate as the number of OU broadcasts and, by 1978 about 20 per cent of OU television broadcasts had only one transmission. There was quite a lot of repetition in broadcasts. Moreover, as the programmes were aimed at general viewers as well as students, the material was not always focused on the module.

Concern that few academics were good at using television to aid communication and support learning.

Concern that academic critics would see the ingenious models and well-made films and conclude that the OU was an academic lightweight. Some OU programmes appear to be almost deliberately dour, perhaps to give the impression that learning is a serious matter.

Concern that as modules ran for around a decade, topicality was hard to arrange. For example the first, generic, level 1 arts module, A100 ran 1971-78. It was succeeded by A101 1978, A102, 1987 and A103, 1998.

Concern that the technology would form a barrier between learners and tutors when tutorials were used to play recordings of television broadcasts.

Although the OU did not take a linear journey from passive learning to support for active learning there was a general move away from the idea that knowledge could be transmitted to students towards the idea that through dialogue, knowledge was built by learners. While some early films featured authoritative men employing alienating language with little regard for participative learning there were exceptions. These included David Boswell’s sociology film, made in a hostel for ‘the mentally subnormal’ according to the parlance of the time, showed the group relationships through use of a hidden camera. There was little editing as the aim was that students could form their own opinions and use it as a starting point for discussion. The BBC producer explained that the programme ‘represented slowed down reality upon which the student can wreak his sociology’.

Assessing the teaching of history at the OU Arthur Marwick noted that ‘the emphasis throughout is not upon the teacher offering some kind of performance … but on encouraging the student to do the discussing, to develop the skills … We attempt not to purvey facts and opinions but to encourage the student to argue over and discuss various ideas.’ Marwick’s aim was ‘to leave each piece of film to speak for itself without being overlaid by an intrusive commentary’.

Sometimes it was difficult to strike an appropriate balance between academic and presentational ambitions. In the Science Foundation Course programme a presenter called fluorine ‘the Tyrannosaurus Rex of gases’ and thus triggered an animated cartoon form of a roaring dinosaur in a crown while a colleague employed the phrase ‘going down the scale’ and then played a recorder on screen.

Measuring the time spent by talking heads, how far the transmissions encouraged collaborative learning, if enthusiastic experts were introduced, if there was a variety of approaches and if the viewer was assigned the role of intelligent adult, curious and eager to learn, it is clear that as the size and weight to cameras fell and staff became more experienced the teaching improved.

This is an image of some successful OU students in Wales. They are the first cohort of students to gain the Certificate of Higher Education in Social Care Practice (Wales). See here.

Wales was not always treated as such a distinctive entity.In common with many other post-war projects the OU developed out of the centralised wartime state as a unitary institution to serve the whole nation. This reflected attitudes in the 1960s when there was little interest in nationalism in Scotland and Wales. In 1971 the editor of the Times Educational Supplement, referred to ‘England’s Open University’.

The first advertisement for a Regional Director for Wales made no reference to the need to speak Welsh. A new advertisement was written. Harford Williams was appointed. He held numerous television interviews and lectures and has been credited with the rise of over 10 per cent in applications within the country. Today the OU operates on the principle that in the conduct of public business in Wales, the English and Welsh languages are of equal status. The Open University offers Welsh medium assessment, (including written assignments, examinations, projects and theses in all subject areas) to its students and provides assessment in accordance with the student’s linguistic preference.  Wales was also where telephone tutorials were developed. Heddwyn Richards established a system in Wales whereby students used free-standing loudspeaker telephones. After press reports of this, the GPO which ran the phone system, complained but later a concession was granted. It was in recognition of the importance of all the nations that the Vice-Chancellor John Daniel paid tribute to his Welsh roots and chose to be installed in Cardiff in 1990. In 2018 OU student research on Welsh History became available online. This research was conducted by students studying the Open University module, ‘The Making of Welsh History’. Today the OU operates from Cardiff and across the country as the leading provider of part-time undergraduate higher education and supported distance learning. There are 7000 students and 300 Associate Lecturers.

In the Betty Boothroyd Library on the Walton Hall campus there is a nod towards the importance of the Welsh language on the window. See image and video discussion.

This week’s object is the wheelchair, the International Symbol of Access, because as, the former OU Vice Chancellor Martin Bean once noted ‘We’re home to more students with disabilities than any other university’. Writing in 2001 about the OU, Jagannath Mohanty concluded with perhaps some exaggeration, that, ‘As there is no basic qualification for entry to the OU and most of its students are deprived or handicapped in some way or other, this University is the most socialistic in nature and spirit’. In 1972, long before legislation encouraged other universities to accept students with disabilities, the OU appointed a Senior Counsellor with special responsibility for this field. In 1973 there were 554 students with disabilities identified in the rest of full-time higher education; by comparison the OU had about 1,200. In 1975 the OU specifically undertook to ‘continue to take all possible practical steps to enable full participation by disabled students in all aspects of University life’. A study concluded that students with disabilities had higher success rates than achieved by their non-disabled counterparts, and a drop-out rate markedly lower than for the general student population. Maggy Jones reported that she had to leave another university because of lack of wheelchair access, adding that ‘for the severely handicapped the Open University is proving to be their first real educational opportunity’. Leslie Hayward lost his hearing at the age of nine, had little schooling and counted bottles at a factory for a living. He received his OU degree in 1975 because he could read materials, rather than having to listen to lectures. One student said her choice had been made because ‘due to ill health I couldn’t take up the unconditional offers I had received from traditional universities’ and that her studies dovetailed with her work as ‘a full time Mum’. A further reason for the relatively high number of students with disabilities might be because, on average, OU students were ten to fifteen years older than conventional, full-time, students. John Cowan concluded that the students felt that within the OU they ‘had a community experience in which they cared for students with disabilities’. He recalled one summer school when, at about one o’clock in the morning, on seeing a severely disabled student arriving in a vehicle adapted to take his wheelchair, he asked the student, ‘How is it going for you?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I’ve just been to a party, and I’ve never been to a party in my life. And it was absolutely wonderful.’ Students with multiple disabilities continued to be attracted to the OU because, even though legislative changes improved access to other institutions, the OU continued to offer support across a range of disabilities. These included audio recordings and 3D diagrams for the visually impaired, large-print texts and visual descriptions for screen readers

In the early days the attraction for the housebound or those with restricted access to university campuses was the possibility of study without having to negotiate buildings which were not designed for those with a range of disabilities. After 1990 there were reforms, including the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001 and the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. In compliance with legislation, universities across the UK began to treat staff and students in similar ways.  However, the OU maintained its interest in being open to people. In 2001 it provided Disabled Student Allowances to 2,200 students with disabilities. In 2003 the Institutional Disabled Students Strategy and Action Plan was launched, having been developed in the context of both Quality Assessment Authority guidelines and the Disability Discrimination Act. Although data collated about students refers only to those who have self-declared as having disabilities, by 2013 there were over 17,000 UK-based students with disabilities, health conditions, mental health disabilities or specific learning difficulties (such as dyslexia) studying at the OU.

OU Students Association trip to Rome, 1978. There is an account of the trip in the book, Disabled students on a study tour of Rome, Have wheels: Will travel (Reading: Educational Explorers, 1976).

In the 1980 play (and 1983 film) Educating Rita the OU was portrayed as a force not only for education, but for profound personal transformation of the eponymous student, who in turn changes the lives of those around her, including that of her tutor. Following a student from the time she overcomes the difficulty of entry to higher education – she is literally impeded, as she cannot open the door at the start of the play – to her final entrance and scene when she is calm and confident about her ability to succeed within the conventional academy, the emphasis was on personal liberation through learning. It positioned the OU as part of a long tradition of motivating forces within tales of women who through their own transformations transform others. Russell’s conventionally structured play echoes the tale (recounted by Ovid in the eighth century CE) of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he had carved. It also may have been inspired by the 1912 play by G. B. Shaw and a film, My Fair Lady, 1964. Russell did some of his research for the play at the OU and in the film course materials appear and are discussed.  OU academic Gill Kirkup noted that while the play ‘purports to show the change in a mature women student who takes an Open University course’ it revealed (if it was ‘indicative of common beliefs’ about the OU) that the OU’s teaching system ‘seems to be widely misunderstood’.  The OU’s pedagogy appeared to mimic that of the one-to-one Oxford college tutorial. Rita gains cultural capital through her trips to the theatre, does not mention watching the OU’s BBC broadcasts and is dismissive of the possibilities of learning through television. Nevertheless, the text was used to illuminate and support the OU’s mission. According to OU staff tutor Paula James, when students studied Pygmalion on the level one Arts Foundation course, A103 (which was presented 1998 to 2008), an Educating Liza sketch was presented for the arts event evening during the residential school week. ‘So Rita in one version or another has long been part of the OU fabric and culture!’

To celebrate forty years of the OU, in 2009, real-life Tutor David Heley and OU student Lisa Hubbard played Rita and Frank in a production of Educating Rita presented by the Open University in the South East with Pitchy Breath Theatre. This was part of the celebrations of The Open University’s fortieth birthday. The production toured the UK, playing in theatres, schools, community centres and prisons. In the written programme to accompany it there was information about the OU and links to the website. The Regional Director explained that although ‘Willy Russell’s play is not a very accurate presentation of Open University tutorials it does capture the excitement of learning with the Open University and the life changing experience which our courses can bring.’ Director and Actor David Heley said of a performance in HMP Swaleside that the audience there was ‘totally engaged’ and that ‘many of the prisoners said how they recognised themselves within the play’s action and meaning’.

In 1983 the play was deployed for marketing by the OU, which produced a flyer to accompany a professional performance.

In Educating Rita, as the play’s title implies, Rita is both being educated and educating others. Throughout the play there is a debate about the nature of learning and knowledge and the extent to which she is transformed by her own efforts compared to the influence of her tutor, Frank. Initially Rita feels that her mind is ‘full of junk’ and that a ‘good clearing out’ is required and that what she learns from Frank ‘feeds me inside’. She admits that she nearly wrote ‘Frank knows all the answers’ across her exam paper. In addition, she dismisses as ‘crap’ Howards End, a novel which involves co-operative learning between practical people and intellectuals. She expresses scepticism of the approach favoured by theorist Jean Piaget. She describes how at school the pupils would be having ‘a great time talkin’ about somethin’ and the next thing [the teachers] wanna do is to turn it into a lesson’.

As noted here perhaps one reason she changes is to fit into the academic world. She alters her accent from Scouse to that which the stage directions call a ‘peculiar voice’ but is then dismayed that she has become, in her words, a ‘freak’ and a ‘half-caste’. Echoing this, Frank refers to himself as Mary Shelley, author of a novel about the creation of a man-made person, Frankenstein. Having assessed the notion of learning as transmission, she then takes control of her own learning and makes only the changes that she requires. In addition, she is able to teach her tutor as well. Just as he asks questions, so does she. Asked why she did not attend a conventional university following her compulsory education she answers with a question: ‘What? After goin’ to the school I went to?’ Once Frank has suggested to her that ‘you’ll have a much better understanding of something if you discover it in your own terms’, she claims to have ‘begun to find me’ and she reverts to her previous name. She changes, but not into a typical student, at Frank’s ‘Victorian-built university’.

For her last appearance she does not, as she did before, unpack her notebook and pen. Instead she picks up some scissors and draws on her own skills, which she employs within the learning environment. She starts to cut hair. Neither Delilah nor Sweeney Todd, when Rita returns to hairdressing she wields the scissors in a more knowing fashion than at the beginning. This framing device indicates Rita’s circular route, her return to her roots, offering reassurance that, while learning changes people, the effects are likely to be positive. Rita, by taking flight from the humdrum, paradoxically took the university from where Geoffrey Crowther had placed it in his speech at its foundation, as ‘disembodied and airborne’, and brought it down to earth. In summarising its activities as ‘degrees for dishwashers’ Russell’s character domesticated the OU and placed it, reassuringly, if counter-intuitively, in front of the kitchen sink.