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

January 28, 2026

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Carl von Ossietsky University of Oldenburg

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 historical accounts, but how I saw and encountered developments in my personal life. If you were around at the time of these developments and would like to offer comments or a different view, please use the comment box at the end of each post. (There is already a conversation track on my LinkedIn site).

FernUniversität

Germany has always had a strong presence in distance education.

The German FernUniversität was founded in 1974 by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and headquartered in Hagen, to provide flexible distance education, with teaching starting in 1975. It was Germany’s first distance-learning university, and was inspired by the UK’s Open University. Its founding Rector was Otto Peters, a leading scholar on distance education, who as early as 1967 published a book on the ‘industrial’ model of distance education that preceded the establishment of open universities. His book provided a conceptual description of the key attributes of distance education, although I doubt that either Harold Wilson or Jennie Lee or their advisers on the UK Open University ever read it.

In the 1970s shortly after it opened I visited the FernUniversität with Christodoulou, the UKOU’s chief administrator. I gave a presentation to approximately 20 FernUniversität’s mathematics professors about the pedagogical benefits of using television for teaching mathematics, which was received in stony silence, apart from one comment at the end: ‘It is impossible to teach mathematics with television.’ Christodoulou was desperately trying not to laugh and when we got out of the room, he whispered: ‘I look forward to you telling that to the BBC.’

University of Oldenburg

The Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, in the state of Lower Saxony, about 170 kilometres west of Hamburg in north-west Germany, has long been associated with distance education. (von Ossietsky was a famous German physicist who won a Nobel prize).

Ulli Bernath was the Director of the Centre for Distance Education for a number of years and was the driving force behind the University of Oldenburg’s Certificate in Distance Education. Also at the University of Oldenburg was Thomas Hülsmann, who was an expert on the costs of distance education. I visited Oldenburg several times between 2001 and 2013, usually travelling through Hamburg, which is a great city.

From 2001, Mark Bullen and I were working with Ulli on developing a joint program on distance education with UBC and Oldenburg, but this collapsed with the extinction of UBC’s Distance Education and Technology unit in 2003. Oldenburg went on to partner with the University of Maryland University College in the USA and between them they have delivered a Masters of Distance Education program very successfully. I was a guest instructor on this program between 2002 and 2013, along with many others, including Börje Holmberg, Otto Peters, Lisa Blaschke, Anne Forster and Jane Brindley.

Kaiserslautern

In 2001, I was invited by Burkhard Lehmann to give a keynote speech at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in south-west Germany. It turned out that like me, Burkhard was an avid football supporter, and in 2006 he invited me to Kaiserslautern to see a World Cup soccer match in Kaiserslautern between Australia and Japan – the start of a personal tour by me by train around Europe to watch the World Cup matches in bars in different European countries.

The Volkswagen AutoUni

My strangest work though in Germany was for the Volkswagen AutoUni. I was invited to join the Scientific Board of the AutoUni, on which I was a member for nearly four years between 2004 to 2007.

The goal of Volkswagen AutoUni was to offer academic degree programs and certificate courses tailor-made to the needs of Volkswagen’s management and workforce. In its first three years of operation, access to AutoUni’s degree programs was to be exclusively for employees of the Volkswagen Group. The opening of the degree program to the world would start in 2007.

In its attempt to build a sustainable bridge between academic and corporate education, Volkswagen AutoUni aimed to apply leading-edge science to actual cases taken from the company’s daily business. It proposed an innovative blended learning model emphasising collaborative learning and knowledge building in teams spanning across ‘disciplines, departments, brands, regions, and hierarchies.’ It would have a central campus in Wolfsburg, and learning centres at sites around the world where Volkswagen operated. This was to be achieved by an approach to learning that integrated highly-interactive classroom events, on- and offline self-paced and team-based learning, and all kinds of collaborative activities.

However, in 2007 the AutoUni underwent a significant structural transformation. The original concept of a stand-alone academic corporate university shifted toward a more integrated internal department as part of broader company realignments.

There were two reasons for this. The main one was economic. By 2007, Volkswagen had over-extended itself financially as a car manufacturing company and entered a period of widespread cost-cutting. The AutoUni as a separate academic organisation was seen as non-essential to the company’s survival. The second reason was internal politics. The HR department considered education and training to be its responsibility, and many of the teaching functions of the AutoUni were re-incorporated within the HR department so as to ‘align better with the company’s immediate labour and training needs.’

A Volkswagen Touareg towing a Boeing 747 Image: AutoBlog

Shortly before I was appointed to the Scientific Board of the AutoUni, Volkswagen and Porsche (which were then separate companies) jointly launched the new Touareg model, which the magazine Car and Driver rated the Best Luxury SUV for 2003. There is a famous TV commercial that shows a Touareg towing a Boeing 747 airliner.

However, when the Touareg was first tested in the USA, local sales managers complained to headquarters that there were no holders for coffee cups. When these complaints were passed to the Head of Interior Design, he was appalled. He was quoted as saying: ‘You DON”T drink coffee in a Touareg!’ Nevertheless, the sales team won, and the front passenger area was redesigned to accommodate cup holders.

A much more serious problem came later when in 2015 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to the Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbo-charged direct injection diesel engines (including those in Touaregs) to activate their emissions controls only during emissions testing, which enabled the vehicles’ nitrogen oxide output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. However, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide in real-world driving. The Volkswagen Group ended up paying more than US$18 billion in penalties for the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal.

It was interesting to see inside one of the world’s major auto companies, whose internal culture was very different from academia. The AutoUni was a brave experiment, but could not survive the fierce competition and cost-consciousness of the auto industry.