Systems Practice at the United Kingdom's Open University

Abstract

The Open University (OU), the UK’s largest University was established in 1969. It has since inception pioneered and supported open distance learning (i.e. all students have a course related tutor and entry is open to all at undergraduate level without prior qualifications). In 1998/99 the OU had 166,000 students of whom 28,000 were in taught post-graduate courses. In all the OU had 200,000 customers in 1998/9; Daniel (1996) has described it as a mega-university. Some other features of the OU include:

• • An increasing number of students are from outside the UK (19% of students in 1998/99);

• The median age of new undergraduates is 34;

• Over 80,000 students study interactively on-line as some component of their courses;

• The Open University of the US (Inc) was established in 1998/99 as an independent subsidiary of the OU(UK);

• It is at the forefront of innovation with technology to support learning; £12.5 million has been allocated in 2000 for further expansion of e-university capacity;

• It is ranked amongst the top Universities in the UK for teaching quality (Technology, including Systems, received 24/24 in sector-wide teaching quality assessments in 1998);

• 26 subject areas have been recognised in UK-wide assessments as having research of international or national excellence.

This paper relates the emerging focus on systems practice within the Systems Discipline at the Open University. Recent innovations have occurred in the changing environment of the University (Lane 1999), the higher education sector (Ison 1999) and the systems community more generally (Maiteny and Ison 2000).