The OU is enjoying a boom, according to the Telegraph. At the same time the Vice Chancellor of Manchester University is on radio 4 saying that teaching standards in traditional universities can't keep up with the rise in student numbers that has been forced on them, and 12000 straight A candidates have been rejected from Oxbridge. A vice-chancellor telling the truth rather than fighting his corner. There is a novelty - or perhaps a coincidence.
Update - Jack Grimston of the Sunday Times has this on the increasing use of postgraduates instead of academic staff to teach undergraduates. This has been an American practice for years, and not a good one. The issue is the intangible one of depth of knowledge and understanding, and the need for the brightest minds to come into contact with mature top talent - even if, as David Attenborough pointed out in a recent broadcast, the top talent can be wrong (a Professor of Geology had described the idea of continental drift to him as "pure moonshine").
Times change. I took A level in 1968 and an A was hard to get. Thanks to excellent teaching, and working as hard as an eighteen year old knew how, I managed 2. In the third subject, where the teaching was not so good and I didn't really know what I was trying to do, I got a D. Getting 3 As was a rarity, and the one person I knew at my university who did, received a phone call from an Oxbridge college asking if she wouldn't rather go there instead. If they wanted someone at interview, colleges in those days would usually offer 2 Es, in order to take the pressure off. Long afterwards, I discovered the iniquity of the system - the marks were fiddled in those days too, so that the top grades were awarded on a percentage basis. If everybody did very well, the grade was moved up, so that the difference between an A and a C could be two or three per cent. The harder everyone worked, the more people were pushed in to the funnel. That wasn't fair either.