This article (15 page PDF) is a good way to open IRRODL's special issue on open and distance universities (ODU) even if it is based on only eight interviews of instructors from two open universities. The article revolves around three themes: "a) openness: excessive openness and a lost sense of mission; b) technological innovation: moving online and long-lasting resistance, and c) teaching: transactional interactions and feelings of loneliness." In this it manages to capture the tension on ODU today: "The people who started this university purposely went out to find every radical thinker they could find... a bunch of rebels. They are my age or older, they are on the way out." Everybody else, it seems, is becoming an ODU. What makes these institutions distinct? Or needed at all? Image: NPR.
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