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I am grateful for the opportunity to add a commentary to Anne Gaskell’s very effective summary account of open, distance and e-learning in the UK. First of all, looking backwards so to speak, it is remarkable what a significant contribution major UK theorists have made to this field. The UK can claim Michael Moore, who was born and educated in the UK, and who worked at the Open University until his departure for Pennsylvania State University, whose seminal theory of transactional distance from 1971 is still cited. Similarly, the then Brit Tony Bates spent the first half of his career at the Open University where he invented the field of media and distance education, before leaving for British Columbia. We can also add Greville Rumble, who was the first scholar to examine the economics of distance education, and John Daniel, who like Moore and Bates was born and educated in the UK and spent more than a decade in leadership of the Open University. Daniel was the first to identify the crucial poles of interaction and independence in student behaviours, and went on to name and examine the phenomenon of the mega-universities. And no picture of distance education in the UK would be complete without recognition of the activist Michael Young, who invented the term ‘open university’ in 1962, and who set up the National Extension College which pioneered innovative practices that were influential on Open Universities everywhere. And still today the UK is producing major theorists in open education such as Martin Weller, and in learning analytics Bart Rientjes, both based at the Open University (the latter Dutch by nationality, it must be conceded). So the UK has made and continues to make a significant contribution to foundational thinking and practice, far above its size and significance in the world.

Nearly 50 years ago, Schon () urged universities to become aware of life ‘beyond the stable state’ and Toffler () predicted that the information age would force academia to accommodate an ‘accelerating pace of change.’ Their prescient observations about the future have characterized American higher education for nearly 50 years, perhaps best exemplified by the role distance education (DE) has played in this process. DE’s remarkable progression in the US arena began well before the electronic era, extending over a 225-year period. It is a phenomenon that perhaps represents the most significant transformation within academe in a millennium, presenting exciting opportunities and formidable challenges. This chapter offers a descriptive analysis and commentary of key aspects of DE at the post-secondary level in the US, with perspectives gained from the author’s 35 years of scholarship and practice in the field.

There are more than 4700 institutions of higher education in the United States. These include technical institutes, community colleges, state colleges and universities, a landgrant university in each state, private liberal arts colleges, private research universities, and, more recently, for-profit degree-granting companies. While distance education was once primarily the purview of land grant universities and, later, community colleges, online learning has greatly broadened the diversity of institutions that provide programs to students away from campus. One factor that makes it difficult to discuss a “national system” of distance education in the United States is that higher education tends to be organized at the state level rather than nationally. At the national level, distance education innovations tend to be shared within families of institutions through their own professional associations (American Association of Community Colleges, University Professional and Continuing Education Association, etc.). One major exception is the Online Learning Consortium, which was formed when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation brought together institutions that it had funded through its “asynchronous learning networks” grants program in the 1990s. That said, there is a long tradition of institutional collaboration that cuts across many distance education technologies and governance boundaries.

Most countries discussed in this book are not new to open and distance education, but there are many new developments in open and distance education in most countries. This chapter provides an analysis of ODE in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and United States, according to what the authors have written about the status and trends in ODE in their countries. In the previous chapters, many notable issues and trends emerge about changes to ODE. These include: the size of ODE enrollments; the amount that ODE enrollments constitute HE enrollments as a whole; the rate of growth in ODE enrollments; the role of the private sector in providing ODE programs; the varied use of ICTs for ODE provision; the role and influence of government policy; the opportunities and challenges for ODE providers; the digital transformation of higher education more generally; and the role of ODE in growing the acceptance of education as a private good. These are the topics of this chapter.