ABSTRACT
Distance education began in 1963. In that year Michael Young and Brian Jackson were establishing the National Extension College as a pilot for an open university; Harold Wilson, soon to become prime minister, was calling for one; UNICEF was planning to use distance education to train refugee Palestinian teachers, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure at St Cloud was beginning to experiment with what came to be called educational technology. The Robbins report on higher education noticed with approval and surprise that the Soviet Union was using correspondence education. A global flurry of activity has followed. The Open University was established in Britain to be followed by thirty more across four continents. Radio campaigns have been used for public education in Africa, and open schools set up in Asia. Today, between 5 and 12 per cent of university students in industrialised countries are likely to be studying at a distance; in developing countries the figure is often between 10 and 20 per cent. The pace at which this has happened, and the scale it has now reached, make open and distance learning worth critical analysis. This book attempts that analysis, asking how well open and distance learning has responded to the educational needs of the south in the late twentieth century. Open and distance learning has grown because of its perceived advantages:
First is its economy: school buildings are not required and teachers and administrators can be responsible for many times more students than they can accommodate in a school. Its second main advantage is its flexibility: people who have got jobs can study in their own time, in their own homes, without being removed from their work for long periods. Its third advantage is its seven-league boots: it can operate over long distances and cater for widely scattered student bodies.
