Computer assisted learning in the United Kingdom: the open university: second of a two-part series

Of all the experiments in education taking place in various parts o f the world, perhaps none has justly received mere attention as indicatin g interesting future directions than The Open university. Hence, most reader s interested in educational innovation will already know much of the detail s cf The Open University. Nevertheless, I will try to give a comprehensiv e pic t ure, as I see it, based on my two visits there. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of how The Open Univeristy works i s the production of materials. The use of materials with students is to som e extent an elaboration and refinement of the existing types of correspondenc e courses to be found in many countries, with score unique additional features. Many media are used. Currently about 40,000 students are enrolled in Th e Open courses. I'll talk first about the production mechanism here, the wa y courses within The Open University are generated, and then I will describ e briefly how i t appears from a student point of view. First, it's probably worth saying the initial intent was to brin e education to a much wider variety of people, people whc could not in mos t cases afford to take off from whatever they were doing and to devot e themselves entirely to going to a conventional university. It is oate n described as the University of the Second Chance. The idea originated wit h Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister ; he is said to have conceived the ide a on Easter Sunday, 1963. Except for some brief periods, students are rct i n residence at The Open University, and the central facility at Milton Keynes , a p ew town is Buckinghamshire, has no students. Courses are produced by teams of individuals chosen to work on eac h particular course. During my visits I talked to a team currently in th e early stages of developing a course, the Image and Information uppe r division course. The course team has specialists from the area-in thi s case primarily physics, although with some component of information theor y too-educational psychologists, media specialists of various types , (including these in The Open University's Institute of Educationa l Technology) and in this course, computing personnel also. BBC staff member s are on the team. The ideal might be that each of the members of the ccurs …