Open University

The Open University is a public research university headquartered at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes, England, and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. Established in 1969 and initially based at Alexandra Palace using television studios vacated by the BBC, it enrolled its first students in January 1971 and now teaches around 200,000 students, most of them off-campus in the United Kingdom though its courses can be studied anywhere in the world; more than 2.3 million students have studied with it since its founding. It is one of only two United Kingdom higher education institutions accredited in the United States by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, and figures who have tutored for it include former prime minister Gordon Brown and astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell.