Teaching and Learning at Scale: Foundations

The Open University (OU) offered a radical change in how higher education was considered in the UK from the 1960s. A fundamental change was to allow access to those who wanted to learn, without their needing to show prior success in qualifications. Alongside this expansion in offering access there also needed to be a rethink in how learning could operate at scale. Higher education has a tradition of individual responsibility that was not suited to the complexity of the task, rather the OU needed to take a team approach to designing, building and operating the learning experience.

Addressing such complexity is one part of the model in Beyond Prototypes (introduced briefly in Chapter 1), recognising the complexity that occurs when applying Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Each part of the model can be seen to act in the development of the OU: persistence in achieving the aims of the OU to meet the needs of a new body of students; bricolage in being prepared to experiment with new ideas and new technologies; and, an underlying dependence on evidence to help understand and address the problems that are faced at scale