This document discusses the development of student support in distance education over the last 40 years at The Open University UK and ideas for its future direction. It traces how student support has become disembedded from local contexts as social relations are restructured across indefinite time and space due to technological changes. While layers of student support have built up over time, the document argues support should continue focusing on cognitive, affective and systemic dimensions to help students achieve their goals, with students seen as subjects rather than objects.

1. From Place to Virtual Space:
Reconfiguring Student
Support in Distance Education
Alan Tait
Pro Vice-Chancellor
Professor of Distance Education and Development
The Open University

2. Twin themes
• The development of student support at OU UK over last
40 years
• The development of ideas that are implicitly contained in
this broad historical sweep
• Guidelines for the direction of student support for the
future
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3. What is happening underneath
the surface?
• Disembedding
• Die Entbettung?
• ‘Lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans
of time-space’
Giddens (1991) The Consequences of Modernity
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4. Characteristics of Late Modernity
• Disembedding from local
• Historical sweep from oral to written cultures
• Role of mass communication
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6. Regions and Nations
England
1 London
13 OU Regions/Nations 2 South (Oxford)
3 South West (Bristol)
4 West Midlands (Birmingham)
5 East Midlands (Nottingham)
6 East (Cambridge)
7 Yorkshire (Leeds)
8 North West (Manchester)
9 North (Newcastle)
13 South East (East Grinstead)
10 Wales (Cardiff)
11 Scotland (Edinburgh)
Milton Keynes (HQ) 12 Ireland (Belfast and Dublin) ADB Hamburg 2012

7. Locations
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* Please note that these are part of the same CST

8. An ancient Egyptian table calculating
the number of sacrifices made of a
particular type over the course of a
specified period.
?date
Ration record from Babylon
dating to the years 594–569 BC
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14. 1955
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17. What else is new?
• Ability to make learners responsible for sourcing (some)
material
• Capacity for peer and collaborative work
• Richness of learning with multi-media
• In industrial centre-periphery open universities, ability of
central staff to engage continuously with students
• Ability to deliver near-constant updating of learning
materials
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18. Geological sense of development
• Layers added to layers
• Still visible
• Some fossils!
• What do we take out?
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19. Disembedding: a characteristic of
late modernity
• ‘Lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans
of time-space’
Giddens (1991) The Consequences of Modernity
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20. Disembedding
• Distancing from location and physical presence
• Escape from context
• Key to social mobility
• From or with community?
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21. Continuities
• Cognitive/affective/systemic dimensions to student
support (Tait 199?)
• Support to students to achieve their goals
Overall
• Student as subject not object
• Values which drive
• and politics which negotiate choices for policy
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22. Vielen Dank!
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