I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply […] The post A personal history of distance education. 35: Brazil, 2004 first appeared on Tony Bates .
Listen to Post Low-cost appropriate distributed learning for isolated, nomadic, rural communities In 2004, I worked on a major project, mainly in Mongolia, for the World Bank. I had previously some strong connections with the World Bank. Debra Beattie was a leader of the World Bank Institute, an in-house training group. Under Debra’s leadership, several […] The post A personal history. 34:…
Listen to Post I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant to […] The post A personal history: 33 ETH Zurich and the challenge of new digital technologies in…
🔊 Listen to Post I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant […] The post A personal history: 32. Distance education in Germany – and the Volkswagen AutoUni…
I thought I would try to capture what I see as the three major developments in higher education during 2025, at least from a North American perspective. I then thought I would ask Chat-GPT the same question, and compare answers. I’ll start with my answer (which I wrote before consulting Chat-GPT). 1.The erosion of trust […] The post A review of higher education in 2025: a personal view first…
I published my own review of higher education here: https://www.tonybates.ca/2025/12/27/a-review-of-higher-education-in-2025/. I messed up my initial Chat-GPT response, running it on the Chat-GPT tool on my web site. However, this only trawls my own web site. When I ran the same question on the general Chat-GPT tool today, I got the following response (you will see […] The post A review of Higher…
Reference: United Nations (2025): ‘Online university or other equivalent platform to support university-level science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in the least developed countries‘ New York: Secretary-General A/80/426 Report of the Secretary-General The United Nation’s Secretary-General has recommended that the UN should take the necessary steps to ‘launch an Online…
Nichols, M. (ed.) 2025 Mega-Universities and Opening Education by Design ICDE, Oslo, Norway Preliminaries I haven’t been posting much recently, reflecting my fully retired status. However, this book is definitely worth reviewing, so here goes. Open and distance learning, 30 years on Mark Nichols, the current President of the International Council for Open and Distance […] The post Book Review:…
Mishra, S. and Panda, S. (eds.) (2025) Handbook of Open Universities Around the World New York: Routledge, 692 pp. Who are the authors? Sanjaya Mishra is a specialist in technology-enabled learning at the Commonwealth of Learning and a leading scholar in open, distance and online learning. Prof Santosh Panda is the former Director of the […] The post Book review: Handbook of Open Universities…
I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched […] The post A personal history: 31 – Learning Catalan – and about Catalunya first appeared…