IMS Global: Perhaps a good place to start is by describing for us what is OpenLearn and how did it come about?

JG: Basically, it's a website (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/) that takes resources from Open University courses and makes them available to anyone, anywhere in the world. The site breaks down into two main spaces: a Learning Space, which contains educational resources representing about 10 different disciplines with varying units of difficulty and varying lengths of material ranging from 3 to 30 hours of studying time each. It's unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare because each unit of learning has clear learning outcomes and activities linked to it, with discussion forums and peer review. The other space within OpenLearn is the Lab Space. That's the one where we're really experimenting with communities of practice developing around the sharing and using of resources. The idea here is that people download the material and then after modifying it in some way, they upload it. We provide several collaboration tools to facilitate peer-to-peer interaction and support.

I think the overall message, really, is that OpenLearn is a research project. I believe it can be seen as the next generation of open access learning. The mission of the Open University is often referred to as the "four opens", that is we're open to people, places, methods, and ideas. OpenLearn is a natural fit with that mission, which encourages wider participation in higher education. And I should mention that this initiative was funded with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

IMS Global: How did the Open University come about?

JG: It started in the 1960s during a period known as the "White Heat of Technology" era. There was a guy named Michael Young who wrote a paper and proposed an open university. The idea originally was to prepare people for external degrees at London University. Then government got involved and came up with the idea for an adult education radio/television-based initiative called the University of the Air. The newly elected Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, handed the project to one of his ministers named Jennie Lee and she was really the inspiration behind it. With her support, it became part of the Labour Party manifesto, and in January 1971, the first students began their work. It has gone on from there.

IMS Global: Is OpenLearn the most recent initiative of Open University?

JG: It's really a parallel initiative, but it may point to the way OU will eventually go. We launched the initial phase on 25 October with 10 subject areas, some 80 units of learning and about 900 learning hours. By the time we finish the initial phase of this two-year project, the target is to make available 5,400 learning hours, which also will be available in the Lab Space. This represents about five percent of all OU materials. On top of that, we're adding another 2,700 learning hours of older, discontinued material that still offers some relevance. In the end, the Lab Space will end up with 8,000 to 9,000 hours of learning material.

I think the 25 October launch was a phenomenal achievement. I'm responsible for the production of all the sites and this initiative has been created alongside a lot of other projects we've undertaken. We started production last June with just a handful of staff. Once we had identified all of the existing material across the eight faculties of the university and the range of disciplines, we then deployed our new eProduction system, which we're planning to roll out to academic staff in early 2007. Doing so was slightly risky since it's a whole new approach to authoring course material, particularly narrative-based text material. This has served as a good test of the system. For those faculty and staff who may be worried about using it, we can demonstrate that we've already put 900 hours of material through it and the system works fine.

One of the challenges is that print is still the favored teaching medium for students. We still print some 70,000 pages of material per year. One of the challenges we've had, is to take a good portion of the material which was originally written for print, and academically transform it, to make it more suitable for online presentation.