Running Distance Education at Scale

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Abstract Distance learning accelerated and diversified during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the result that individual teachers working with their normal classroom groups now account for most of the courses offered online. However, this provision of “closed distance learning” will not suffice for the needs of the hundreds of millions of people who will seek secondary schooling, degree studies, and continuing education in the next 20 years. We describe howopen distance learningcan be conducted at scale through open universities, open schools, and MOOCs, which are all designed to cope with mass demand. Our focus is on how these organizations are run. This embraces institutional design and organization, governance, management and administration, and leadership. The three types of providers have various corporate and governance structures: public open universities, open schools under the aegis of government, and commercial MOOCs companies. However, the challenges of management and administration, which are to sustain operations at scale around the clock worldwide, are rather similar. Their leadership requires a genuine commitment to serving the disadvantaged, an ability to secure the trust of governments, understanding of the opportunities that emerging technology offers for distance education, and thorough familiarity with the institutional dynamics of open and distance teaching and learning systems.