Euro OU moves a step closer

Twenty-five senior educationists representing 16 countries met in London last Friday to begin work on the European Open University.

The meeting, organised by the Open Learning Foundation and hosted by Thames Valley University, discussed in detail ways of constructing a continent-wide OU along the lines of the proposal by Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission.

Representatives of Europe's distance teaching universities had as a central concern the aim of pushing forward the development of Eurostudy Centres (ESC).

The ESC development meeting followed a seminar on "Networking Europe: Telematics and Education" at University College London the previous day. The seminar used video-conferencing to demonstrate the benefits of new telematics with live links to education institutions via satellite and cable. Professor Stephen Heppell of Anglia Polytechnic University spoke to the conference from Orlando, California. Problems with the video-conferencing link on the day, he said, threw into sharp relief the need for a fibre-optic infrastructure.

The two strand copper telephone wire carried up to seven calls and the fibre optic cable up to 37,000 with research by BT at Martlesham showing traffic of up to a million calls. "One shoe box full of sand is enough raw material to build the entire fibre optic cabling needed to support all phone calls throughout the United Kingdom," Professor Heppell said.

He also of fears generated by the new technologies. "All the small-town schools and scattered learning centres across rural America are nervous that the digital superhighways will pass them by in the same way the freeways did in the 1950s."

The ESC concept is one of the major planks of the foundation which has more than two dozen universities as members in the United Kingdom. New ESCs are operating from six UK universities: Anglia, DeMontfort, East London, Plymouth, Thames Valley and Sunderland. David Hardy, the foundation's chief executive said: "This network will allow students to tap into a European telematic superhighway."

Thirty-six ESCs were launched last November and linked by satellite broadcast across Europe via desktop and video-conferencing. There should be more than 500 ESCS operating within five years.