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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

The change to The Open University in the UK (to remove subsidy and drive it's fees up to ~2/3 the cost of other universities) has to be one of the worst things that has happened in the UK in he last 10 years. My Dad did an OU degree late in life and it was really important to him, I think that an opportunity - like the one in this story or like the OU - for people to find another direction later in their lives, no matter what their background, is hugely important.

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I remember when some OU tutorials were broadcast on the television (BBC) in the UK. Anyone could watch and as a teenager I remembered being entralled by some of the maths courses [1] - it probably influenced my career choices in the end.

In a way it was a precursor to similar material on YouTube and MOOCs - technical material freely open for all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVn27MHl1sA

Incidentally, it's wild seeing the physical models of 3D surfaces in the Open University video you linked -- nowadays, the equivalent visualisations can be obtained so quickly, at such low cost, and reach so many more people.

It is wild! I was struck looking at these agaim after so many years how similar they are in spirit to modern equivalents - I actually find the physical versions a bit more engaging. Both are so much better too than can be achieved in a physical classroom with just a whiteboard.

I found this OU courses [1] in the archive. Are this the ones your are talking about? i bookmarked them a while ago to check them later.

[1] https://archive.org/details/@educational_progs

Yes there are some in there - I think the full series for my link is here:

https://archive.org/details/m203analysis1tv8completenessintr...

Thanks for finding!!

Completely agree - I was enrolled in the OU at the time. It seemed like they made the change to stop the OU from steamrolling traditional universities when they introduced tuition fees for regular degrees. The OU could easily run courses for the low prices they used to charge (~£4000 for a degree?), but it would banjax our new commercial university system.

I once thought about doing an OU degree as a hobby when I got to a point in my life when I had some spare time for learning.

Wow turns out they're astronomically expensive and even a simple bachelors takes a stupid number of years.

Also maybe it's just my field but I never see any research output from the OU either, and I don't know any academics working there at all, so I don't know what kind of standard of staff you're getting.

I'm not sure who's spending money on these things?

It used not to be so expensive. :-(

I've seen strong research from OU people in knowledge management, and in knowledge representation. Their webpags give an overview of the interests in compsci.

https://www.open.ac.uk/stem/computing-and-communications/res...

Ok - they're not Stanford, but they are a pretty respectable bunch.

Hi from the Dutch OU (not affiliated with the UK one, but similar in certain aspects).

The standard of academic staff is much like any other uni: we try to get the best we can.

Here's our department's publication page (i haven't updated it since March though): http://cs.ou.nl/publications.php

(Quality: three TACAS'20 papers this year... and most of our departement doesn't target that conf)

Our programmes are accredited by the same institution as other programmes of all other unis in NL. The accreditation committee was even impressed with the quality of our bachelor theses in comparison to other universities.

I definitely think there's room for improvement, but the Dutch OU is a serious university, and aims for a high quality of teachers and teaching materials.

OU is so strange to me. Last time I looked at is, as an American, I could not qualify for any of there technical programs given my nationality, but I could try some of there legal programs. I also really like the option they provide to sort of make your own degree, but seems impractical given the biggest benefit of university, especially an online program, is solely credentialing.

> make your own degree ... credentialing

Sure, but it’s still a BA from a real and accredited university, and there are plenty of situations in life where that’s needed, regardless of the subject. Many immigration programs will take it into account, if you want to become a teacher, access to further education or professional qualifications.

In short, I don’t think a BA in Open Studies or whatever they call it is any less useful than a BA in International Relations or any number of other non-vocational BAs.

International Relations may be "non-vocational" to a certain degree (hah!), but it's much closer to certain vocations than an Open Studies degree is. (At least, a generic Open Studies degree. I suppose one could tailor a particular Open Studies degree to be quite vocational, for some very narrowly defined vocations.)

Firstly, again, I don't think it matters. A BA/BSc is a tick-box what needs a tickin' in quite a few situations in life where the subject is completely by-the-by.

Secondly, though, to pick up on your "I suppose one could tailor a particular Open Studies degree to be quite vocational", I think you can actually take that further. With reference to the link below, I think you could create a curriculum that was far more relevant for the roles most people do than most degrees are? I feel like I could pick out courses there that would make a university a far more useful developer than most compsci courses?

[0] http://www.openuniversity.edu/courses/qualifications/qd

To be clear, they removed subsidies for people to get a degree at a level to which they already had a degree, AIUI. i.e. if you already had a masters, then they was no subsidy for getting a second.

Personally, this feels fair enough - it's not clear why this sort of education should be subsidized.

If you add in a term after which you could get a subsidy, I'd agree. Retraining is going to be very important.

That's not correct. The regular prices of courses increased by large multiples.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/aug/08/open-unive...

> Personally, this feels fair enough - it's not clear why this sort of education should be subsidized.

The core aim of the OU is to help build the economy & promote social mobility. One of the ways this can occur is via easy access to retraining as job sectors die (either locally or nationally). If a degree-level education is required, OU is one of the few realistic ways of acquiring that education. Substantially increasing the price of degrees closed this path off for many. Whether a person has a previous degree shouldn't really factor into an ability to retrain if necessary (and yes, successive governments since the 80s have given lip service to the need to provide for this and done nothing, allowing this was just more of the same)

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