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A personal history: 32. Distance education in Germany – and the Volkswagen AutoUni
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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...
A review of higher education in 2025: a personal view
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...
A review of Higher Education in 2025: Chat-GPT’s response: Version 2
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...
A United Nations online university for the poorest countries in the world: dream or...
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...
Book Review: Mega-Universities and Opening Education by Design
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...
Book review: Handbook of Open Universities Around the World
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...
A personal history: 31 – Learning Catalan – and about Catalunya
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...
A personal history: 30. A (history) lesson on e-learning research from the Open University...
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...
Some thoughts on the implications of AI for teaching and learning in higher education
What a co-incidence!
A few months ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on the crisis in higher education, arguing that it had become too expensive. Universities in particular needed to find ways to reduce costs while still maintaining...
A Review of Contact North’s AI Trades Explorer Pro
AI Trades Explorer Pro
I am in the process of evaluating a suite of AI tools from Contact North, Ontario, for students, instructors and administrators.
Contact North offers a suite of eight AI tools for teachers/instructors/students. In six previous posts, I evaluated
...
About Tony Bates
Dr. Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.