Ben Wildavsky [via Brookings] director of higher education studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York, and policy professor at SUNY-Albany: “Forty-five years ago, when Britain’s Open University (OU) began broadcasting its first lectures over BBC television and radio, there were many reasons to discount its importance. For one thing, the concept of providing higher education at a distance wasn’t new: the first correspondence course, teaching shorthand, was offered in the 1700s; the University of London began offering distance-learning degrees to students around the world in the mid-19th century. For another, would-be reformers had a long history of over-promising and under-delivering when it came to educational technology; as far back as 1922, for example, Thomas Edison declared that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system.” Little wonder, perhaps, that the OU’s radically democratic experiment in open access education was greeted with widespread hostility by many commentators inside and outside Britain’s traditional class-bound universities. (The shadow chancellor of the exchequer called the idea “blithering nonsense.”). Yet somehow the OU quickly put itself on the map. When it opened its virtual doors, 25,000 students soon enrolled, at a time when the combined student population of all other British universities was around 130,000. Before long, the new institution was transforming the world of distance education by granting respected, inexpensive university degrees to older, part-time students who could matriculate without conventional qualifications. Sir Eric Ashby, a former vice chancellor of Cambridge, called the university’s creation the most significant event in the history of higher education since land grant colleges were created in the United States a century earlier…”