The Openness of Open Learning

In 1969, in Lord Crowthers inaugural address as chancellor of the Open University, he stated that it was open as to people, as to places, as to methods, as to ideas. If, in the same year, your had looked for a definition of open learning in the fifth edition of the Encyclopedia of Educational Research, the only mention you would have found is see distance education. In fact, when in 1975 Norman MacKenzie, Richmond Postgate and John Scupham published at the Unesco Press the book Open Learning, all the case studies described in it concerned systems of education at a distance.