A precursor to the open university was the
University of London external system, established in 1858. At that time, the university was a degree-awarding examination board and welcomed anyone who could pass its matriculation examination and pay the requisite fees, including students from anywhere in the world. Participants could continue to earn a living while they studied, could learn in any way they wished, and could sit their examinations without visiting Britain. However, this was purely an examining board, not providing any support or instruction, and is not considered by academics to have been a distance education provider. By the new millennium, around 400,000 students in 130 countries were taking its courses, and it had become one of the largest distance learning institutions in the world. In the
Soviet Union in the late 1950s,
Nikita Khrushchev significantly extended higher education using a system of correspondence courses with part-time education, in which students took part while remaining in the workplace. By 1965, there were 1.7 million students in this part-time/consultation model, 1.6 million full time students, and 0.5 million students taking evening classes. The support given enabled working-class students, at little cost to themselves, to become useful functionaries and members of the
Communist party. With the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the state no longer had need of the
cadre of functionaries and the system collapsed. In
Asia, open universities began to appear in the 70s.
The Korea National Open University was established in 1972, the
Open University of Israel and
the Allama Iqbal Open University were established in 1974. Similar models were implemented in other South Asian countries with the establishment of
Indira Gandhi National Open University (1985) and
Bangladesh Open University (1992). The
National University of Distance Education (UNED) was established in Spain in 1972 as a national distance-learning university with an imposed curriculum determined by the national government, leading to hostility from the
autonomous regions and the political opposition to the Franco regime. The language of instruction was
Spanish, and the university's refusal in the 1980s to consider teaching in Catalan resulted in Catalonia setting up the Catalan-language
Open University of Catalonia in 1995, which has instruction in both Catalan and Spanish since 2000. ==See also==