Introduction

One of the most prominent types of educational institutions that makes use of distance learning is the open university, which is open in the sense that it admits nearly any adult. Since the midth century the open university movement has gained momentum around the world, reflecting a desire for greater access to higher education by various constituencies , including nontraditional students, such as the disabled, military personnel, and prison inmates. The origin of the movement can be traced to the University of London , which began offering degrees to external students in In the University of South Africa , headquartered in Pretoria, began offering correspondence courses, and in it was reconstituted to provide degree courses for external students only.

By the end of the s the university had 25, students, and it has since grown to annual enrollments in the hundreds of thousands. As one of the most successful nontraditional institutions with a research component, the Open University is a major contributor to both the administrative and the pedagogical literature in the field of open universities.


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The university relies heavily on prepared materials and a tutor system. The printed text was originally the principal teaching medium in most Open University courses, but this changed somewhat with the advent of the Internet and computers, which enabled written assignments and materials to be distributed via the Web. For each course, the student is assigned a local tutor, who normally makes contact by telephone , mail, or e-mail to help with queries related to the academic materials. Students may also attend local face-to-face classes run by their tutor, and they may choose to form self-help groups with other students.

Tutor-graded assignments and discussion sessions are the core aspects of this educational model. The tutors and interactions between individual students are meant to compensate for the lack of face-to-face lectures in the Open University.


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From the start, correspondence courses acquired a poor academic reputation, especially those provided by for-profit entities. As early as , as a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation found, there was widespread fraud among correspondence schools in the United States, and there were no adequate standards to protect the public. While the situation was later improved by the introduction of accrediting agencies that set standards for the delivery of distance learning programs, there has always been concern about the quality of the learning experience and the verification of student work.

Additionally, the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors.

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Because many distance learning programs are offered by for-profit institutions, distance learning has become associated with the commercialization of higher education. Distance learning, whether at for-profit universities or at traditional ones, utilizes two basic economic models designed to reduce labour costs. The first model involves the substitution of labour with capital, whereas the second is based on the replacement of faculty with cheaper labour.

Proponents of the first model have argued that distance learning offers economies of scale by reducing personnel costs after an initial capital investment for such things as Web servers, electronic texts and multimedia supplements, and Internet programs for interacting with students. However, many institutions that have implemented distance learning programs through traditional faculty and administrative structures have found that ongoing expenses associated with the programs may actually make them more expensive for the institution than traditional courses.

Characteristics of distance learning

The second basic approach, a labour-for-labour model, is to divide the faculty role into the functions of preparation, presentation, and assessment and to assign some of the functions to less-expensive workers. Open universities typically do this by forming committees to design courses and hiring part-time tutors to help struggling students and to grade papers, leaving the actual classroom instruction duties, if any, to the professors.

These distance learning models suggest that the largest change in education will come in altered roles for faculty and vastly different student experiences. The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs in the first and second decades of the 21st century represented a major shift in direction for distance learning. MOOCs are characterized by extremely large enrollments—in the tens of thousands—the use of short videotaped lectures, and peer assessments.

The open-online-course format had been used early on by some universities, but it did not become widely popular until the emergence of MOOC providers such as Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and Udacity. Although the initial purpose of MOOCs was to provide informal learning opportunities, there have been experiments in using this format for degree credit and certifications from universities. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles.

New kids on the box: Distance education enters its third generation

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Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Postsecondary-learning options range from distance education and short-term courses to extended residential stays and postgraduate work at world-class institutions. Some of these trends stem from advances in communications and international travel.

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Developed countries not only provide more students with a greater variety of study options but also invest more…. Technologies that promise to bring people together to share knowledge and life experiences, conversely, may also lead to the isolation of….


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Education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization e. Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a…. University , institution of higher education, usually comprising a college of liberal arts and sciences and graduate and professional schools and having the authority to confer degrees in various fields of study.

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SAGE Books - India's Indira Gandhi National Open University

Title Author Advanced Search. View All 1 other possible title s available Paperback 1 Apr Should be essential reading for any university manager or government administrator concerned about the future of universities in the 21st century. Increase 'guided independent resource based learning'. Use interactive multimedia to improve understanding of core topics.

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Students to emulate professional use of computer applications. Use cable, satellite, networking to widen student range. Improve advice to students on course choice. Improve retention and pass rates with better advice systems and enhanced quality of learning. Recruit from new groups though improved access and better learning experience. See whether new technology attracts academically demotivated students. Use shells, templates, shared resources to increase productivity of technology based courseware. Use computer based assessment to improve staff productivity. Exploit desktop publishing to turnaround materials faster.