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Essay Comparing Two Open Universities

Decent Essays

Comparing two Open Universities within the Common Wealth:
Athabasca University and the Allama Iqbal Open University at Islamabad

When the Open University of the United Kingdom (OU UK) opened its ‘doors’ in 1969 it was considered a revolution in higher education by many pedagogues. In the forty years that followed 80 similar higher open education institutes were established (Peters, O. 2010, p57-81). The common denominator of this new generation of distance universities is that they are open. During the OU UK inauguration Lord Crowther stated: “We are open ‘as to people’; ‘as to places’; ‘as to methods’; and finally ‘to ideas’” (cf. Tunstall 1974, in Peters, O. 2010, p 62). What this openness entails, depends largely on the social, economic, and political circumstances in the country in which an open university is founded. Two former British colonies and members of the Common Wealth, Canada and Pakistan, were among the …show more content…

It was modeled after the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California. It aimed to have a small student population and focused on liberal arts (Byrne 1989). When it was founded, there were 3 more public universities in Alberta. There seemed to be room for a fourth university as the discovery of oil fields had resulted in a significant growth of both economy and population. Against expectations enrollment remained low and the government of Alberta decided to reform the UA into an online university as a pilot project (Byrne 1989). The pilot was started in 1972 and would run up to five years. It would be considered successful if enrolments would substantially increase or if it would attract students that otherwise would not have enrolled themselves in a university (Byrne, 1989). It was so successful that UA outgrew its first campus and was moved from Edmonton to Alberta in 1984

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