Editorial: Massive Open Online Courses, a perspective paper by Sir John Daniel

Abstract

This issue focusses on a perspective article by Sir John Daniel.  Sir John has a long history of involvement with the Open University, the UK home of JIME.  Indeed as he points out in his biography (Daniel, 2012), he first visited the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University back in 1972. The visit was as part of his work for a Master’s degree in Educational Technology at Concordia University and he describes this as a life-changing experience. He returned to The Open University in 1990 and stayed this time for eleven years in a rather different role as the OU’s Vice Chancellor.  Open Higher Education has been a consistent theme in his career that has included the presidencies of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, the Canadian Association for Distance Education and the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education before “retiring” from President of the Commonwealth of Learning in 2012.  His publications have also anticipated the idea of education at very large scale with the inclusion of works such as Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Daniel, 1996) and Mega-Schools, Technology and Teachers: Achieving Education for All (Daniel, 2010).