Special Issue: Open Universities: Past, Present and Future

Fifty years since the establishment of the Open University in the United Kingdom (UKOU) seems an appropriate time to evaluate the current status of and outlook for the world’s open universities. There is much to celebrate, not only in the UK, but also in the 60-80 (depending upon definitions) open universities around the world. The rapid development of communication technologies has both enhanced and challenged the particular role of the open university. This special issue of IRRODL offers a number of perspectives on its evolution in many different national settings – what it has achieved, the challenges it faces and its options for the future.

else, open universities have struggled, at least in some countries, to gain a reputation for quality or to achieve acceptable levels of programme completion and graduation.
The early open universities pioneered a number of features that were truly radical. The invention of the Open University mission for mainstream rather than marginal inclusion of new audiences at such a largescale changed the broad social understanding of who could go to university. Secondly, and concomitantly, there had to be a new focus on learning and teaching to support students who were first-time entrants from families without prior higher education and for whom the challenges of learning at a distance demanded study skills, self-confidence, and social capital which could not be assumed. Thirdly, open universities committed early and firmly to the deployment of new technologies to support learning and teaching, pioneering industrial methods of course production and design and student services. Fourthly, the very idea of such large-scale universities was significantly different, though not unique. Lastly, and more broadly, open universities thought of themselves as having embedded innovation. They existed in order to change how post-secondary education was conceived, and acted as a vanguard for the move from elite to mass higher education systems.
This special issue was born out of the concern that the first-mover advantage of the open universities has been substantially eroded by developments elsewhere in the university sector in many countries, and, further, that this has in many cases not been adequately noticed nor indeed addressed by the open universities themselves. Many of the features that were developed for the first time on any significant scale by open universities are now more widely shared as the move to mass higher education is near universal in developed countries and increasingly the case in middle income countries. These features include a much wider recognition that part-time routes to study have to accompany the traditional full-time campus-based modes, and that the much wider range of student backgrounds in mass higher education has to be accompanied by commitments to reform teaching and student support. New entrants, notably online universities and traditional institutions moving significantly to online and blended learning, provide significant competition for longer established open universities, some of which have struggled to move from earlier distance education methods into online modes. So, in most countries, open universities are increasingly struggling to maintain their primacy in a much more competitive and complex environment of blended learning and dual-mode campuses. While a few governments have kept the monopoly position of their open university to deliver part-time and distance education for the country, this is less and less sustainable in the face of burgeoning new technologies for teaching on so many campuses.
Projecting ahead 15 years or so, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals propose, as both necessary and desirable, a major increase in post-secondary education and lifelong learning, in effect moving to deliver mass higher education in upper, middle, and many lower middle income countries. This pertains to nations on the scale of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, or, more widely, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Some 30-50 years ago, the natural solution to such large-scale provision of lifelong higher education was restricted to the Open University model. Today, the question is whether this model retains the dynamic energy and innovatory character to be entrusted with that task. Or will a wider range of models including blended delivery, dual mode campuses, and new online universities (notably private for-profit organisations) crowd out the place of open universities in the higher education landscape?  (Paul 1990;Paul 2011;Tait 2008b), and it is in the development of high-quality distributed leadership in open universities that the capacity to innovate can be most effectivity sustained. We would summarise our evaluation of the present situation with the SWOT analysis in Figure 1.

Strengths
• Commitment to openness, flexibility, and access.
• Capacity for large-scale provision.
• Support for part-time students, working adults.
• Commitment to technology-enhanced learning.

Opportunities
• World-wide access to the Internet.
• UN's sustainable development goals for major expansion of higher education.
• Use experience to develop quality assurance for mass higher education systems.
• Trends to international collaboration, open educational resources.
• International trends to lifelong learning and continuous professional upgrading.

Weaknesses
• Completion and graduation rates.
• Reputation and brand.
• Staff resistance to change.
• OU model based on very large student-to-staff ratio.

Threats
• Burgeoning mainstream university involvement in online and blended learning.
• Governmental disenchantment with OU model.
• Supreme value of elite education.
• MOOCs and other innovations from mainstream universities. There are two priorities for leadership at all levels that we propose for particular attention. Firstly, open universities have a tendency deriving from their uniqueness in their national contexts to become inwardlooking and to fail to study the changing external environment with insight and to develop accordingly.
Secondly the claim of quality has rarely been made effectively, leaving the public discourse identifying quality as the work done by highly selective rather than open institutions. In too many cases, the quality of curriculum as well as learning and teaching and student support have fallen short. It is with this range of concerns that this special issue has been drawn up.  (Paul, 1990) and the challenging role of the Canadian university president (Paul, 2015 (Paul, 2016;Tait, 2008a;Tait, 2018).

Grouping of Articles
The papers in this special edition are organized into four general themes:

History/Evolution
Two

Current Challenges
The special issue concludes with a focus from two of the best-known practitioners on the

Conclusion
None of the concerns and challenges posed above takes anything away from the very significant achievement of many open universities over the last half-century. It is true to say that they have changed the understanding of who can go to university from the perspectives of gender, geography, ethnicity, disability, and social class. Open universities have won many battles of ideas about accessibility and how technologies can be used to create systems of learning, teaching, and student support at large scale.
It should be noted that many countries with large populations distributed over large to occupy leadership positions in the provision of higher education for many more countries. It is our conviction that sober reflection is necessary to strengthen the case that open universities, as an educational model, will be as influential in the future as they have been in the past.