The Open University

The Open University (OU) has been a pioneer in higher education for more than four decades to ensure that neither distance nor academic background is a barrier to learning. As Britain's only specialist, dedicated distance learning provider, the university has delivered learning through a rich mixture of media bringing scalable, flexible, high-quality learning to its 250,000-plus students.

The OU has developed its own style of online learning called 'supported open learning' giving its students flexibility to study when and where suits them best. This is in keeping with the university's founding mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.

Supported open learning means OU students have:

• support from a tutor or online forum to help with module material, activities and assignments
• student advisers and study facilities in their own region, and
• contact with other students at tutorials, day schools or through online conferencing, online social networks and informal study groups.

The university has focused on developing pedagogy to enable the widest range of learners studying from their homes and workplaces.

Increasingly learners are accessing their learning through mobile technology and the university enables learning on smartphones and tablet computers. The culture of innovation is institution-wide with the Knowledge Media Institute providing a focus for research and development and the Institute of Educational Technology having a role in pedagogic support and staff development. The use of technology is built into the course development process from the outset with learning materials produced by interdisciplinary teams.

The OU virtual learning environment is integrated with student records and systems for curriculum design and e-assessment. About 500,000 assignments were submitted online in 2009, resulting in more rapid and flexible feedback to students on their progress.

The university's systems help students to link to each other online and get the right syllabus, content and assessments. At the heart of the virtual learning environment is Moodle, the leading open source learning management system. The OU has enhanced the system considerably and fed improvements back to the Moodle community.

The OU now has 164,000 active users of Moodle and is receiving hits from as many as 50,000 separate individuals every day. It has 545 active module sites which is almost all of our courses. The OU's web-site generates 50 million page impressions a month with content spread across 2,000-plus web-sites.

The university's customer relationship management system (known as VOICE), using Siebel technology, is critical for compiling a comprehensive record of a student's contact with the OU. The system handles one million service requests per year.

The OU is also harnessing the reach and power of the web and of social networks to bring learning opportunities to millions more people internationally. Open University iTunes U has had more than 25 million downloads and the OU View area of YouTube.edu has attracted over 3 million views.

The university hosts a dedicated web-site, OpenLearn, offering free and open access to OU course materials. The site, which has received 14 million visits, delivers over 8,000 hours of study materials in 12 subject areas from access- to postgraduate-level courses.

These online tools and environments developed by the OU are powering major international development programmes in some of the poorest nations. Examples include the TESSA teacher education programme which is helping nations in sub-Saharan Africa deliver both teacher training and curriculum materials to improve opportunities for young people and contribute to wealth creation. Over 300,000 teachers have enrolled on the programme which was awarded a Queen's Anniversary Prize for Further and Higher Education in 2009.

This technology is also used in the HEAT health education programme which currently has a $4 million UNICEF grant to educate more than 30,000 rural health workers in Ethiopia.