Tony Bates

A personal history. 34: Mongolia, 2004

Tony Bates — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:16:02 +0000

Listen to Post Low-cost appropriate distributed learning for isolated, nomadic, rural communities In 2004, I worked on a major project, mainly in Mongolia, for the World Bank. I had previously some strong connections with the World Bank. Debra Beattie was a leader of the World Bank Institute, an in-house training group. Under Debra’s leadership, several […]

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A personal history: 33 ETH Zurich and the challenge of new digital technologies in 2003

Tony Bates — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:39:02 +0000

Listen to Post I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant to […]

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A personal history: 32. Distance education in Germany – and the Volkswagen AutoUni

Tony Bates — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:30:42 +0000

🔊 Listen to Post I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant […]

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A review of higher education in 2025: a personal view

Tony Bates — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:47:07 +0000

I thought I would try to capture what I see as the three major developments in higher education during 2025, at least from a North American perspective. I then thought I would ask Chat-GPT the same question, and compare answers. I’ll start with my answer (which I wrote before consulting Chat-GPT). 1.The erosion of trust […]

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A review of Higher Education in 2025: Chat-GPT’s response: Version 2

Tony Bates — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:34:14 +0000

I published my own review of higher education here: https://www.tonybates.ca/2025/12/27/a-review-of-higher-education-in-2025/. I messed up my initial Chat-GPT response, running it on the Chat-GPT tool on my web site. However, this only trawls my own web site. When I ran the same question on the general Chat-GPT tool today, I got the following response (you will see […]

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A United Nations online university for the poorest countries in the world: dream or reality?

Tony Bates — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:14:39 +0000

Reference: United Nations (2025): ‘Online university or other equivalent platform to support university-level science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in the least developed countries‘ New York: Secretary-General A/80/426 Report of the Secretary-General The United Nation’s Secretary-General has recommended that the UN should take the necessary steps to ‘launch an Online University for the Least Developed […]

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Book Review: Mega-Universities and Opening Education by Design

Tony Bates — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:43:30 +0000

Nichols, M. (ed.) 2025 Mega-Universities and Opening Education by Design ICDE, Oslo, Norway Preliminaries I haven’t been posting much recently, reflecting my fully retired status. However, this book is definitely worth reviewing, so here goes. Open and distance learning, 30 years on Mark Nichols, the current President of the International Council for Open and Distance […]

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Book review: Handbook of Open Universities Around the World

Tony Bates — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 20:10:28 +0000

Mishra, S. and Panda, S. (eds.) (2025) Handbook of Open Universities Around the World New York: Routledge, 692 pp. Who are the authors? Sanjaya Mishra is a specialist in technology-enabled learning at the Commonwealth of Learning and a leading scholar in open, distance and online learning. Prof Santosh Panda is the former Director of the […]

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A personal history: 31 – Learning Catalan – and about Catalunya

Tony Bates — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 23:21:48 +0000

I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology. Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched […]

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A personal history: 30. A (history) lesson on e-learning research from the Open University of Catalonia

Tony Bates — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:10:51 +0000

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