Open university

In theory, an open university is any university with an open admissions policy - in other words, anyone can apply and get accepted for a degree course, irrespective of the qualifications they hold. However, a truly open admissions policy can lead to horrendous costs of teaching, very high levels of student drop-out and severe dissatisfaction from students, parents, employers and government - thus in practice some restrictions are imposed.

In practice, the term "open university" is applied mainly to those universities who teach mostly at a distance and have a more or less open admissions policy (some much more open than others).

In our wiki, the vast majority of institutions with "Open University" in their name are categorised by us as Open universities. For a list of these on the wiki, see http://www.virtualschoolsandcolleges.eu/index.php/Special:Search?search=Open+University&fulltext=Search

In addition, any institution (not a consortium) which is a university and a member of one of the international associations of open universities - such as EADTU or AAOU - is categorised by us as Open universities.

More or less the first open university was the Open University set up in Britain in 1999. In the UK this is called just the Open University. European analysts normally call it the UK Open University or UKOU for short.

Open universities

There is an automatically maintained list of these at Category:Open universities. This has currently (June 2009) over 80 entries and is still growing slowly - though there are some issues of categorisation which may imply removal of a few entries.

A manually updated template with the Open Universities' abbreviations is here:

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