The televised revolution

Adrian Dickerson is bucking the trend – he works in finance and he's just landed a new and better job, as market risk manager for a leading hedge fund. He puts his success down to the fact he's just graduated with a first class honours degree in maths at the age of 30 – he studied with The Open University.

When Malika Shahid came from Pakistan to England to join her husband, she was 16 and spoke barely any English. Now 34, she's about to fulfil a long-held ambition to train as a secondary school teacher. And that's thanks to the Open University degree she achieved while working full time and bringing up three children.

Adrian and Malika are among thousands who, over the last 40 years, have a reason to say: "The Open University changed my life." This year some 10,000 people, many of whom had thought a degree was out of their reach, have graduated from The Open University. Most studied while in employment, fitting their study around work and family commitments.

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While other utopian visions of the Sixties have faded, The Open University remains and has grown. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister who presided over its birth, called it his "greatest achievement". He first outlined the idea of a "university of the air" in a speech in Glasgow in September 1963, and went on to implement it following Labour's election victory.

The idea of a university that was open to everyone, that required no academic qualifications for entry, was too radical for many. Jennie Lee, the Government minister appointed by Wilson to take the project forward, later recalled "the press was against us, the Cabinet was indifferent or hostile, the Opposition totally hostile". Conservative MP Iain Macleod famously dismissed the venture as "blithering nonsense". Academics alike were sceptical – even Walter Perry, the Professor of Pharmacology at Edinburgh University who was to become The Open University's first Vice-Chancellor, initially dismissed the idea as a "political gimmick unlikely to be put into practice".

Jennie Lee was clear that she was not creating some kind of glorified adult education college. "I knew it had to be a university with no concessions, right from the very beginning. I knew the conservatism and vested interests of the academic world. I didn't believe we could get it through if we lowered our standards."

Granted its Royal Charter on 23 April 1969, by September of that year the fledgling university had recruited some 70 or so staff working out of Walton Hall, a Georgian manor in Milton Keynes. They had less than 18 months to create the university's first four foundation courses – in Science, Maths, Social Sciences and Arts – which were the first components of The Open University's modular degree. They would comprise not only extensive printed material but a series of television and radio programmes produced with the BBC. It was like nothing they had done before.

"A lot of academics used to quiz us: would they get any of their research done? Wouldn't they lose their reputations?" said Chris Christodoulou, the university's first Secretary. "We countered by saying that they'd be producing learning material that would be open to public scrutiny in a way teaching had never been before.

"We did everything to give credibility to the institution academically. One tactic was involving external people in scrutinising the first drafts of the learning material. The outside academic world was sceptical and antipathetic, but once it got around that we were producing reputable material, that began to give us credibility. A process that accelerated when we appointed this vast army of part-time tutors and counsellors, who were mostly from existing institutions."

One of the most controversial things about The Open University was its open entry policy. You could, and still can, study for a degree without a having single A-level. The economics of large-scale, distance teaching also meant it was considerably cheaper than a conventional degree at the time, with an entire BA costing only £200.

A Times leading article in June 1968 had asked, "Is there a demand for this service?" By 4 August 1970, the closing date for prospective students to apply, it had become clear there was. The new university had received some 42,000 applications for 25,000 places; the disappointed applicants were told they would have to wait until the following year to start studying. These "queues" for places were to become a feature of the OU for years to come.

Those students who secured a place were due to start in January 1971. Agreements were in place with the BBC, study centres were ready, and course materials were about to be sent out, recalled Milo Shott, a Science staff tutor at the time. "And what happened? The postal strike came. For three months we had to load our cars and deliver course units – travelling the width and breadth of the country – to students by hand."

Another early staff member, Lee Taylor, said those early days were "exciting, disorganised, funny and chaotic". "Because of the strike, we had to scour London trying to find cardboard boxes of a suitable size for sheep's brains. Eventually we found a place where I purchased something like 500 boxes, which said 'Chanel No 5' on them."

The sheep's brains were part of an item that has passed into Open University folklore, the Home Experiment Kit. Home Experiment Kits, which the university still mails to students on certain courses (although sheep's brains no longer figure) were one of its radical innovations to teach university-level Science to home-based students.

The commitment and enthusiasm of those pioneering staff paid off. Only two years later nearly 900 people became the first Open University graduates, in a ceremony at London's Alexandra Palace. By the end of 1970s, The Open University was producing 6,000 graduates a year. The number of courses it offered had expanded from the original four to 120.

And The Open University had become a household name, thanks largely to its BBC broadcasts which could be seen by millions of non-students. They have created a folk memory which persists – Adrian Dickerson, a Maths graduate who wasn't born when the first OU programmes hit the airwaves, said that until he actually started investigating Open University study for himself "a lot of my perception was based on those old Seventies TV programmes".

Today's Open University students have swapped TV for computer screens. All but a handful (those for whom internet access is impossible) are linked to the university via the internet, and many submit their assignments online. With interactive DVDs and tutorials in cyberspace, today's distance learners are less distant than ever before.

Forty years on much has changed at The Open University, but its core values remain. It is still open entry. It is still committed to exploiting the latest technology, and it still aspires to provide its students with the best. It consistently features in the top three in the National Students Survey of Student Satisfaction and had 18 of 25 subjects classed as "excellent" in the last UK Quality Assurance Agency subject review.

Author Philip Pullman, in an interview with The Open University's magazine Sesame, described the OU as "one of the last remnants of the impulse towards real social inclusion and betterment that underpinned the welfare state. Nothing like it could ever be created today, and so much the worse for today." But today The Open University is still here and doing what it intended to do – changing lives.