The Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) is a public educational institution, funded by the 

government. It has   by law   a double function: 

developing and delivering adult distance education in 7 domains social, cultural, law, 

business, economics, natural and technical sciences 

innovation of higher education in general 

The main office is in Heerlen. 

Current Situation 

For the complete university and all courses, a complete web based architecture has been 

designed, comprising of four webs: InfoNet (general audience with official info), HouseNet 

(intranet web for staff), OpenNet (free net for students and staff) and StudyNet (official course 

supporting web). 

All students have authorized access to their study environment on the web. This study 

environment automatically gives access to all info in relation to courses they have subscribed 

to. This info could be: descriptive information, newsgroups, ftp, mail, groupware, real audio 

and video plug inns, recent developments in relation to the content of the course, etc. 

Newsgroup can be informal or formal. Formal newsgroup are only accessible for specific 

students to discuss assigned themes. 

The implementation of the StudyNet provision is growing and depends on the current 

developments of courses (revision, new courses, updating). Student access is growing too. Of 

24.000 students, about 4000 make now daily use of the facilities. As to the university staff, all 

of them use the HouseNet provision since it replaced the printed information and 

communication provisions. 

Future Situation 

At this moment OUNL is designing, developing, and implementing a completely new 

integrated system called ELO (Electronic Learning environment). The last paragraphs of this 

case study describe the main features of this ELO environment. The online environment at the 

same time introduces completely new educational approaches to learning and working online: 

competency based education. This means that while OUNL move from second generation to 

third generation distance education we also change the complete curriculum structure and 

educational modeling of the courses: task based education, groupware based activities. This 

ELO is being developed in line with OUNL s two missions: own distance education and 

innovation of higher education in general. That's why they will make ELO available for other 

institutions. 

OUNL use a broad mixture of media. The actual StudieNet environment can be viewed as:  

a static set of webs that build upon information that are stored and maintained in separate 

databases (student information, course database, ) with a base set of electronic provisions for 

all the 411 courses: mail, ftp (downloading software), discussion groups, descriptive 

information (comparable to course catalogue), news, etc. At the content level there still a lot 

of referring to the still predominant set of printed materials, videos, tapes, CD ROM and CD 

audio. Depending on specific course requirements, they add groupware (BCWS, real 

audio/video, audio graphics, etc. 

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