A volume entitled Beyond Distance Education: Cutting-Edge Perspectives on the Future of Global Open Universities, with Jing Degang, secretary of the Party Committee and president of the Open University of China (OUC), as chief editor, has been published and delivered by the OUC Press to global authors and received unanimous recognition and favourable comments.
The University of London (UoL), an OUC programme partner, released a review of the book on its official website with the hope of recommending it to more readers and sharing knowledge and information.
Professor Alan Tait, fellow of UoL’s Centre for Distance Education, was once a pro-vice-chancellor (academic) of the Open University, UK (OUUK). He participated in the research and writing of this book on behalf of the OUUK and UoL, respectively. Professor Tait gave the following brief introduction of the book to UoL’s teachers and students: Beyond Distance Education: Cutting-Edge Perspectives on the Future of Global Open Universities was launched based on an initiative proposed to global open distance education institutions by the OUC during the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, inviting related institutional leaders to explore the future of global open universities against a changing pattern of higher education. The book gathers a collection of articles written by leaders from 16 open universities around the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, the Arab Region, North America, and Australia. The authors discuss the profound impact of COVID-19 on the practices of open universities and higher education more widely in their respective countries. Focused on this, they also expound in detail the achievements and contributions made by open universities to higher education in their respective countries and reflect on the challenges of an open-university model that is now more than 50 years old. The book also discusses the development trends of the world’s most representative open universities and shows the future opportunities and development potential of Open Universities as a specific type of diversified model of higher education. It is worth reading in-depth and will be widely referred to in the future.
In addition to presenting the achievements of and challenges facing the OUUK over the past 50 years, Professor Tait also gives an account of UoL’s contributions to the establishment of a single modality for the university in terms of its external learning projects. He recognises that the research project has strengthened cooperation between the UoL and the OUC. Beyond Distance Education: Cutting-Edge Perspectives on the Future of Global Open Universities will be kept by both the OUUK Library and the UoL Library.
To cope with the difficulties of international communication caused by COVID-19, the OUC and the UoL have jointly planned a 2021 online training programme for the OUC teachers, with the aim of training 250 backbone teachers for China’s open university system. Registration for the 12-week long training programme (excluding Chinese and British holidays), which is scheduled to start on 13 September, has been completed and the applicant list has been verified.
By OUC