Throughout human history, literature has offered recurring images of individuals or communities waiting for a leader or hero, whether male or female, to deliver them from their circumstances or to provide direction, clarity, or hope. We might think of Draupadi in the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (c. 400 CE), Cassandra in Homer’s Iliad (late 8th or early 7th century BC), or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), in which Vladimir and Estragon wait for the promised arrival of Godot, who never comes.
Open, distance and digital education (ODDE), as phenomenon, research focus, and praxis, is no different. The field has long depended on scholars who have offered critical insights and developed conceptual and theoretical frameworks to help us understand particular phases, practices, and transformations within ODDE.
In light of the unprecedented impact of artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically generative AI (GenAI), on education in general and ODDE in particular, there is an urgent need for critical scholarship capable of mapping the contours, tensions, and possibilities of AI-enabled ODDE.
With the retirement or passing of some of the field’s most prominent theoretical and conceptual thinkers, we are now compelled to ask who will take up this work. We are looking for individuals and communities able to grapple with key questions in AI-enabled ODDE, among them:
To what extent does ODDE remain distinctive, in practice or in theory, in an AI-enabled landscape? Has AI levelled or erased the distinctions that once structured our understanding of different modes of educational provision
What aspects of AI-enabled ODDE remain poorly understood, particularly regarding the “open” and “distance” dimensions of the field?
Long before Covid-19 and the rapid expansion of online educational delivery, scholars were already grappling with the impact of institutional distance, the asynchronous nature of the educational relationship between students and teachers, and the technologies that mediated this relationship.
Scholars, researchers, and practitioners such as Börje Holmberg, Otto Peters, Greville Rumble, Terry Anderson, Tony Bates, Asha Kanwar, Stephen Downes, Martha Cleveland-Innes, Insung Jung, Alan Tait, Melinda Bandalaria, Xiao Junhong, Chandra Gunawardena, Jenny Glennie, and Olaf Zawacki-Richter, to mention but a few, have been crucial in helping us understand open and distance education as both phenomenon and praxis.
Some of the conceptual work that shaped our understanding of the field includes Otto Peters’ framing of distance learning as a revolutionary “industrialised system,” in which the design, development, and delivery of learning resemble an assembly line organised around specialised expertise. This model was central to enabling learning at scale and continues to inform large open and distance education institutions.
Börje Holmberg conceptualised distance education as a “guided didactic conversation,” foregrounding the relational dimension of learning materials and support. Martha Cleveland-Innes later extended this work into online contexts through the “community of inquiry” framework, emphasising social, cognitive, and teaching presence in the design of quality online learning.
These are only a few among many foundational contributions that have shaped open and distance education as both field and practice. Yet the formation of this canon has not been neutral.
While The Encyclopedia of Female Pioneers in Online Learning (2023) by Susan Bainbridge and Norine Wark addresses the dominance of men in published research in the field, much of the theorisation and conceptualisation still originates in the Global North or Minority World. Research from scholars in the Majority World or Global South remains either absent, marginalised, or dismissed as derivative or of lesser quality.
If looking back reminds us of the intellectual depth of ODDE and the contested formation of its canon, looking at the present reveals a related but more immediate concern: the erosion of historical memory and theoretical grounding in contemporary practice.
It would be disingenuous, in any serious engagement with ODDE to ignore the work of the early pioneers. Yet it remains unclear to what extent managerial teams in ODDE institutions, as well as regulators and policymakers, are acquainted with and meaningfully engage the field’s historical and contemporary scholarship.
There is evidence that institutional leaders often seek to replicate so-called “best practices” without sufficient attention to context, despite longstanding warnings from scholars such as Greville Rumble that what works in one setting may not translate easily to another.
Rumble’s work on the cost structures of online distance education remains particularly salient, especially his demonstration that online provision is not necessarily cheaper than residential or more traditional forms of educational delivery.
Alongside this institutional amnesia, questions about the depth and rigour of some contemporary ODDE research further complicate the picture.
Much recent work appears insufficiently anchored in the field’s empirical, conceptual, and theoretical foundations. Early career researchers, in particular, may engage ODDE without a grounded understanding of its historical debates and theoretical traditions, producing studies that lack analytical depth and contextual sensitivity.
This lack of a rooted and critical understanding of the history and theories informing ODDE may help explain why educators, managers, regulators, and policymakers are so easily swayed by commercial educational technology (EdTech) companies.
Many of these companies promise quick solutions while their primary interest lies not in improving education, but in capitalising, both literally and figuratively, on individuals, procurement departments, committees, and governments seeking rapid transformation.
In such contexts, polished PowerPoint presentations and persuasive sales narratives can easily eclipse more cautious, research-informed judgement.
While technology has always been part and parcel of ODDE’s journey, the real and commercially orchestrated urgency with which AI and GenAI arrived, hammering at the doors of educational institutions, created panic, if not havoc.
There was little time to pause and reflect on deeper questions left unattended while institutions rushed to identify the best proctoring and AI-detection tools, of course at a price.
Among the questions that most ODDE institutions have not adequately reflected upon is how Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and its ilk, are changing the very definition of being human, the production and verification of knowledge, and the processes of coming-to-know.
Supported and encouraged by regimes of publish-or-perish and research rankings, much of the ODDE research produced in response to GenAI has focused, inter alia, on student and staff perceptions of GenAI, documenting their use of LLMs, examining the impact of LLMs on assessment, both formative and summative, and exploring the adoption of tools such as ChatGPT in creating curricula, teaching materials, and student support.
Without negating the possible value of this research, we must ask where deeper inquiry is taking place into how our definitions of knowledge, as produced by research, subjected to criteria of rigour and trustworthiness, and validated through peer review, have changed and are changing as we speak.
How is the mechanisation and automation of knowledge production reshaping our roles and our raison d’être? To what extent is ODDE in AI-enabled ODDE still unique, whether in practice or in theory, or has AI levelled or erased the distinctions that structured our understanding of different modes of educational delivery?
And finally, what aspects of AI-enabled ODDE remain poorly understood, especially the “open” and “distance” elements of ODDE?
Without technology, ODDE-at-scale is unthinkable. That same dependence on technological infrastructure is now being extended, as higher education institutions, including those offering ODDE, enter into agreements with companies behind LLMs, such as OpenAI and Microsoft, and integrate AI into their core processes, whether administrative, research or academic.
In 2025 alone, several high-profile agreements signalled this shift. The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, announced that it had purchased 10,000 licences, making OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu available to all fixed-term and permanent staff.
During the same year, OpenAI entered into agreements with a number of American universities, including Harvard University, aimed at discovering and developing new applications for AI in higher education.
La Trobe University in Australia entered into a partnership with OpenAI to provide 40,000 licences by 2027, while Oxford University secured agreements providing access to research grant funding, enterprise-level security, and advanced AI tools to enhance teaching, learning and research.
Within ODDE specifically, the newly established Open University of Kenya signed a memorandum of understanding with MindHYVE.ai, Inc., a U.S.-based AI company, in what was described as a strategic collaboration focused on advancing AI-powered learning enablement and academic innovation.
These developments are not merely institutional transactions. OpenAI has articulated ambitions to develop what it terms AI-native universities, personalising learning, automating administrative functions, and preparing graduates for an AI-driven job market.
What we are witnessing, therefore, is not simply the adoption of new tools, but the gradual reconfiguration of higher education, including ODDE, around AI as platform.
These developments suggest that the core of higher education is increasingly being designed around AI as platform, shaping curriculum development, teaching, learning and assessment. Soon, higher education, including ODDE, may risk becoming obsolete in its current form.
The deeper issue, however, is this: Who will provide the theoretical, conceptual and empirical grounding for ODDE in an AI-enabled world? If ODDE researchers do not rise to the occasion, who will?
There is ample evidence of managerial teams assuming that practices can simply be copied and transplanted from other institutions or contexts, despite repeated demonstrations that this rarely works. The danger is that managerial teams, regulators and policymakers may be held captive by the gaze of commercial EdTech, relinquishing core capabilities in pursuit of what is presented as innovation.
The real challenge, though, is not managerial but intellectual. It concerns, above all, the kind of scholarship we produce, the questions we choose to ask, and the silences we allow to persist. For it is scholars who should set the agenda, not administrators.
Where, then, are the Draupadis and the Cassandras? Are we waiting in vain for Godot?
If we are waiting, perhaps we should first examine our own scholarship.
Too much of the current research on AI in ODDE lacks originality and scientific rigour. As the pressure to publish or perish intensifies, we must resist the temptation to pursue “easy” studies on perceptions of GenAI, adoption of tools, or questions of assessment integrity. These issues matter, but they do not exhaust what is at stake as AI becomes the platform in ODDE.
The early history of open and distance education showed how revolutionary it was, offering access, flexibility and guided support to excluded students. Against this history, we must now ask whether open and distance education is in danger of becoming simply another form of digital education on the same platforms, offering the same qualifications and pedagogical strategies, including an obsession with synchronous teaching that replicates residential education while marginalising asynchronous options.
If the revolutionary promise risks dilution, the task is to rethink it under radically altered conditions.
How does ODDE-at-scale respond to a radically reconfigured landscape of knowing and coming to know? How does AI allow it to humanise flexible and responsive education for those still excluded from traditional provision and credentialing?
There are also difficult and potentially dangerous issues we should not avoid, such as agreements between institutions and commercial LLM providers. What does ODDE gain, and what do we give away in return? Claims that AI democratises access to knowledge must be interrogated: whose knowledge, under what conditions, and at what premium?
There is urgency in the air. We cannot keep waiting for Godot, Draupadi or Cassandra.
If not us, then who?
inspired is OUM’s not-for-profit popular journal on the 3Ps – practice, policy and philosophy – of open, distance, and digital higher education (ODDE). Published three times a year, it engages global scholars, policymakers, practitioners, learners, and other stakeholders, as well as a general readership seeking the latest insights and perspectives on ODDHE.
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