Joaquim Moreno is an architect, academic and professor in the Architecture Department of the Autonomous University of Lisbon and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. He was co-curator, with José Gil, of the Portuguese representation at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
What does it mean for education to be ‘open to people, places, methods and ideas’? Architect and academic Joaquim Moreno recalls the well-known charter of the Open University, a pioneering initiative established in Milton Keynes in the late 1960s, to reveal potential shortcomings in today’s remote learning initiatives. By outlining its experiments with new modes of disseminating knowledge at a distance through a ‘blended system’ of resources, methods and channels, Moreno traces how it inventively fulfilled its pedagogical commitment to openness.