I first joined the OU in 1974 when all course material was delivered on paper. Course units arrived in large packs on a monthly basis. It was, as one of my students put it, “like having the narrow end of a funnel jammed in your letterbox with dozens of people around the wide end throwing stuff in as fast as they could”. You can imagine the cost of such a system with a whole OU department called Correspondence Services based in a huge warehouse in Wellingborough. But it all worked out pretty well – the Wellingborough manager Tom Robertson had...

Some while ago I was reading a book about the future of universities in the digital age. One of its suggestions was that future institutions would be using ‘JITAITS’ – ‘just in time artificially intelligent tutors’. These ‘tutors’ would be advanced computer programs which would recognise questions from students and use algorithms to answer them. Even more advanced programs would detect problems a student was having online and intervene with appropriate actions. I was reminded of this by a recent announcement from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US that it had developed such a program for a course on – naturally –...

For those of us to who worked and believed in the OU, the news of its financial difficulties in the THE last week (OU posts £7M loss) made wretched reading.  But the financial and recruitment issues are only part of the OU’s current problems, with a graduation rate now apparently down to only 13% In a Brookings e-newsletter last month Ben Wildavesky, Director of Higher Education Studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, wrote an article entitled  ‘The Open University at 45: What can we learn from Britain’s distance education pioneer?’  Professor Wildavesky identified a number of...

Is your university a ‘Darwinista’  ‘Fatalista’ or ‘Retentioneering’ institution?  After 50 years in the Higher Ed. Biz (as Tom Lehrer would call it) I’ve decided that universities fall into three groups.  There’s the: ‘Darwinista’ Group.  Staff in the Darwinista Group of universities believe that students drop out because they’re not intelligent enough, unmotivated or lazy.  They see their role as principally maintaining academic standards.  Their typical comment – “We’re here to weed out the unfit”  In Professor Carole Dweck’s ‘Theory of Self’ they might be ‘Entity Theorists’ – they believe that intelligence is a fixed quantity and can’t be changed. Then...

The closure of most of its Regional Centres is probably the biggest change in the OU since the introduction of e-teaching and will have equally far-reaching effects.  My first concern is for the many staff who simply cannot re-locate and will have to leave.  This is not only a great personal misfortune for them but will be a huge loss of expertise and knowledge to the OU.  I hope the change will be well-managed otherwise very damaging problems will rapidly ensue. But what will be the repercussions of this move on student retention?  I presume that the savings (when they...

1. “Challenging the ‘distance education deficit’ through ‘motivational emails’” in ‘Open Learning'(2015) http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/uvPCaYIjJ5eZZR8kMVNI/full It’s a report of a retention project with the Law Programme in the University of London International Programmes. 2. ‘My car is my Bond’ in the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) Newsletter Vol 1 no 2 May 2015 http://www.slideshare.net/rc_sharma/cemca-newsletter-v1-n2-may2015 It’s a short report of some research I’ve completed for the UKOU on the role of f2f teaching in distance education.  A full report is currently in reviewing for Open Learning.  

This was in response to an anonymous letter that appeared in a previous THE edition about the UKOU’s possible intention to close some of its regional centres. Your anonymous correspondent who draws attention the potential closure of many of the OU’s regional centres regrets the loss of local presence.  But there is another serious implication – the move will inevitably lead to less face-to-face teaching.  The OU’s new VC has already called for the OU to become ‘more digital’. Yet there is quite a lot of evidence that suggests that moving to exclusively online learning will have a strictly detrimental effect on...

The advert (with its ‘excellent package’) in the 18th September THE for the successor to  Martin Bean, the Open University’s Vice Chancellor, may not be a bad time to review the record of the UK’s most important distance university.  There can be little doubt about its achievements over the nearly 45 years since it opened.  As a teacher and researcher in the institution for forty of those years I’ve often come across many people who have found new lives and careers through their studies. And yet…  When the OU started in 1971 the graduation rate for that first cohort of students...

There were some interesting thoughts from Professor Diana Laurillard at the UALL conference in April this year.  She noted that MOOCS usually had a completion rate of 10% or less and that the dominant users were people who had degrees already (70% in the case of Edinburgh, 85% in the case of Coursera).  As she said, ‘the main users of MOOCS are highly qualified professionals – MOOCS are parasitic on university teaching paid for by undergraduates’. This all suggests to me that the OU’s ‘FutureLearn’ is not a game changer, but a diversion of the OU’s main business of giving...

The news that the Government’s loan scheme is now likely to be as expensive than the system it replaced due to the amount of student debt that is now unlikely to be repaid, probably won’t surprise many people. But the response that this may mean a reduction in teaching budgets and so a reduction in support to students, will be the wrong response.  Such a reduction is likely to increase levels of student dropout with a consequent increase in unrepayable debt and the entry into what bankers’ apparently call a ‘death spiral’. It’s not difficult to show that investing in...