Educational Leadership

Sometimes it can be quite useful to see us as others see us. In a Brookings e-newsletter last February Ben Wildavesky, a director of higher education studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, wrote an article entitled ‘The Open University at 45: What can we learn from Britain’s distance education pioneer?’ Professor Wildavesky identified a number of critical OU innovations, but the one he picked out as “the OU’s biggest accomplishment” was “combining scale with personalization”. He noted that “for many students… this personal relationship with an instructor is the key”.