Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Open learning

Open learning

The Open University is increasingly using internet and mobile technology to reach new students - and it's distributing content for free

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The Open University has been one of the world's foremost distance-learning institutions almost since it opened to students in the 1970s. Envisioned as "a university of the air" by a Labour Party study group back in 1963, the OU was intended as a way to educate adults of all abilities to degree level at home rather than on a campus using both radio and television.

But times have changed and so has technology - and the OU. The famous (or perhaps infamous, given their 'preserving in amber' of the early 70s fashions worn by their presenters) late-night and early-morning OU lectures broadcast on the BBC are no more, replaced by a combination of technologies including DVDs and the Internet.

Andrew Law, director of the OU's Open Media Unit, is responsible for many of the technology initiatives at the university. He's clear that technology is always going to be a significant part of the university's remit. "Our charter says we have to use appropriate technology to engage and deliver teaching. In the early days, that was print, TV and radio but since the late 90s, DVD has been a significant part, as has the Internet, with some courses delivered solely on the Internet."

The emphasis on technology, Law believes, has helped shift the OU's demographic over the last ten years. With 250,000 people studying with the OU, the average age of students is 31, with 31,000 students under 25 and only 9% over 50.

As well as simply delivering content, the OU uses technology in almost every aspect of its operations. Many essays are submitted electronically and it has a system for automatically marking some content and providing feedback called OpenMark. The university is also one of the world's largest 'Moodle' developers, Moodle being an open source virtual learning environment (VLE) in which learners can access content, lectures, and interact with one another and their tutors. The OU uses Moodle and another tightly integrated system called Elluminate so that it can run tutorials with shared whiteboards, 'face-to-face' discussions and more for all its learners, wherever they are. "We've invested a lot in Moodle and it's a big support for distance learning," says Law. "There have also been some by-products of it that have been positively disruptive."

Not the least of these by-products is the university's free content, which it publishes for the wider public. As much as 5% of the university's entire course content is currently available for free through multiple channels, including iTunes U and YouTube as well as its OpenLearn platform, representing about 12,000 hours of content, usually with at least one module from each course available and at various levels of difficulty. This makes the OU the second largest university in the world on iTunes U and the largest European university on YouTube. The university now believes there are three business models emerging emerging around free content and distance-learning in particular. The first is a fully supported, highly structured learning experience that leads to accreditation - the traditional route to an Open University degree. The second is the free or nearly free option, in which learners get no support beyond possibly access to forums, and they guide and direct their own learning. The third falls in the middle, with additional content being made available at a price, either to existing learners or the public at large.

At the moment, though, says Law, the university's position with OpenLearn is that it will explore releasing more content but only for a fee. However, the university is also looking at areas such as continuing professional development, where a full qualification may not be what students need or want. "They may just want something that says they've learnt some French, for example," he says, so 'badging' and 'accreditation' for some of the online courses is one option being considered.

OpenLearn gets about 400,000 unique visitors a month, and has five million users around the world, over half of them coming from outside the UK. Law says that because OpenLearn was based on the 'open source' Moodle, rather than a proprietary system that charged by seat, not only was it easy to 'clone' parts of the internal system to create it, there were no additional costs to having so many more users, beyond the investment in the necessary infrastructure. And since everything was built from the beginning to be accessible for those with disabilities, it makes it very much easier to recruit disabled students: as well as having 20% of its students from each of the standard A-E demographics, one of the only educational organisations in the UK to achieve this, it has a disproportionately high number of disabled students.

Law says that there are many reasons for giving away content for free, even in its highly expensive TV co-productions with the BBC, one of its few commercial partners - its 'Hairy Bikers' co-production is the university's most popular source of language referrals. "If you look at Frozen Planet, four in 10 members of the public watched that. Of those, 100,000 came to the free OpenLearn content, went through the free part of the course and then 30,000 took the rest of the course - registration was sold out in two days."

According to Law, "the best thing to do to attract someone who is not looking to make an impulse buy is to put it in front of them and let them try it for 10 hours." This goes for the foreign market as well. "The OU shield wasn't know in the States 10 years ago. Now we're ahead of the Ivy League and Cambridge in iTunes U, with 50 million downloads by users." The university is still working out how to build on this, since although it has some overseas offices and works with some partner organisations overseas, it doesn't want to be "blasé" about the challenge of taking on the likes of MIT. But it now has 21,000 students abroad - 8% of its students

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