Online Learning Article in the Guardian (UK)

Meet the online learners who fit study around their lives | Education | theguardian.com

Many comments. Useful to see what the public thinks.

 

I think that the Open U (UK) should open it's doors to US consumers.

 

They did, from 1999 to 2002, as the "U.S. Open University". But the venture was a failure, and so OU is unlikely to re-enter the US market.

 

That's true -- but it's not because the OU is targeting or servicing the US market specifically, as they tried to do in the past.

The Open University basically has three "levels of service":

1. The greatest number of study opportunities are offered to people in the UK and Ireland;

2. OU is also a major distance learning provider throughout the "rest of Europe";

3. A relatively limited subset of generic OU programs is offered outside Europe, to the "rest of the world".

The USA is part of "the rest of the world", and so it gets the Level 3 opportunities by default. But there is nothing special or unique about this -- the same default programs are offered in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, and basically every other country outside Europe. In fact, the same default OU programs are even offered (at least in theory) in Cuba and North Korea.

The US Open University was an attempt to provide a higher "level of service" to Americans. But it was an expensive failure, and is unlikely to be repeated. The OU programs currently offered in the US simply represent the OU's default "rest of the world" offerings.

 

Well, I went to the link you provided and clicked Arts and Humanities for US residents and it came up with zero programs. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say "quite a few" but in what is probably the largest category of degrees there are none offered to US residents

 

You've made my point more eloquently than I did. I'm not trying to say that there's any conspiracy going on (although I've asked the Illuminatti to look into it - of course they won't and they'll deliver an ambiguous report signifying nothing). I'm just try to say that in any meaningful way it's a school that's not available to the USA. Maybe they simply think that we've got so many DL programs of our own that they don't need to open their doors to the US.