Guest Editorial - Reflections on Student Support in Open and Distance Learning

This is a very interesting moment to reflect on Student Support in Open and Distance Learning (ODL). After some 10 years of the radical intrusion of a range of technologies, principally those grouped around what has been broadly termed ICT, we have the chance to see if and how the world of ODL has qualitatively changed. I suggest that those of us who began our careers more than a decade ago are like those survivors in a landscape painting of a battle, peering about the field while some wisps of smoke still hang in the air from earlier cannon barrage. But the battle that the picture represents is over. There are new authorities in place, and of course there are losers: those who have lost power if not their lives. We look to see who has died, which amongst the wounded can be given help, while those who walk away wonder if the world has really changed. Have we just substituted one set of powerful rulers for another? Or has the way we live our lives been altered forever?