Open university - American Education

A concept of nontraditional higher education that combines a variety of pedagogical approaches, including educational radio and television, correspondence courses and traditional pedagogy to provide education to adults unable to attend traditional institutions of higher education. Developed in Britain after World War II, the first formal Open University of the United Kingdom enrolled its first students in 1971. The concept subsequently spread to more than 30 other countries, including the United States, where in the late 1990s the expansion of the Internet permitted more than 2,000 institutions of higher learning to establish DISTANCE-LEARNING programs, which, in effect, transformed them into open universities.

(See also PHOENIX UNIVERSITY.)