Open University

A University in UnitedKingdom, with offices in many other Western European countries and students in even more. Open to anyone who wants to take up their studies. It has over 100,000 students and over 7,500 academic staff.

• http://www.open.ac.uk
• http://www.open2.net/ou-listings/ (listings of TV programmes)

Open to students in the UK, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Eire, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, TheNetherlands, Portugal, Scandinavia (no I don't know why the OU refers to Scandinavia rather than Denmark, Norway & Sweden) Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland. (current as at 2003).

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I suppose that in the context of patterns one would want to see if this pattern is recurring or not. There is also the Open University of Catalonia at http://www.uoc.es. Note that the web page is in Catalan but there are links to Spanish(Castellano) and English versions. If you know some Spanish or Italian you might want to see how much of the Catalan page you can understand. Consider it an experience of the patterns of southern Romance languages.

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The OU is coolest if you live in the UK. They do much of their teaching through TV programmes that are broadcast late at night. You don't have to enroll or anything to watch these lectures, you just stay up until 4am (or own a video recorder). -- DaveHarris

I agree that the OU is pure class on a glass tty. You can go out boozing, stumble home at some ungodly hour, and get some education: it could be the physics of gliders, some guy chipping bits off a mountain in Wales, lasers, macroeconomics, Victorian novelists, anything. -- TomAnderson

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There's also a clone of the OU, also called the OpenUniversity in Israel, http://www-e.openu.ac.il - (from the website) "[In] 197l The Committee on Higher Education, ... recommended the establishment of an Open University in Israel along the lines of the Open University in the United Kingdom."

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