"Good morning, everybody." As the young woman appears on the classroom screen, the children sit up, full of anticipation: they know that the lesson is going to be fun and inspiring.

Looking at them is the International Teacher of the Year, based 200 miles away, at a very expensive private academy - but, thanks to the Open School, she is giving this lesson to them too.

This is how some education experts see the future. The lockdown has triggered all kinds of ingenious new ways of teaching enabled by technological advances, such as Microsoft 365 and Zoom - and organisations like the Oak National Academy and the BBC.

Now, there are calls for some changes to be made permanent.

The idea of an Open School is based on the Open University (OU). This was launched in 1971 to provide further education for those who had missed out on going to it. Instead of going to a physical university, students watched lectures at home on the BBC; today, the teaching is mainly on the internet.

Based in Milton KeynesA town in Buckinghamshire, created in the 1960s to relieve pressure on housing in London. Its most famous work of art is a sculpture of concrete cows. The footballer Deli Alli grew up there., the OU is now one of the world's largest universities, with over 174,000 students.

Advocates of the Open School are not suggesting that schools as we know them should disappear altogether. What they envisageImagine. It comes from the French word for face, and also used to mean "face up to danger". is teachers and other resources being shared online between schools - and pupils in different parts of the country linking up to work on projects together. Children who are ill at home would also benefit.

"We believe it needs to be a free-standing, independent institution offering high-quality self-learning, tutored courses and resources in every subject," wrote education experts Sir Tim Brighouse and Bob Moon in the Guardian.

"Every student would have a much richer range of learning opportunities than those offered by their own school's timetable."

In some countries, remote teaching has been available for more than a century. The Canadian state of British Columbia started correspondence coursesThese relied on the postal service. Teachers would send assignments by letter, and pupils would send their work back to be marked. for children who had no school near them in 1919: 13 of the pupils were from lighthouse keepers' families.

Australia's Virtual School VictoriaA state in south-eastern Australia. It too experienced a gold rush in the 1850s, which increased its population from 77,000 to 540,000 in the space of 10 years, and established Melbourne as the country's second largest city. began in 1914, with just two pupils. In 1953, it started using two-way radio so that teachers and pupils could talk to each other.

Some say that the Open School is badly needed. Every school has some teachers who are more inspiring than others, and it is grossly unfair that pupils have to compete for exam grades and university places against others who have been better taught. Having great teachers available online would solve that problem, and reduce the workload for other teachers, enabling them to perform better.

Others argue that teaching is a two-way street. Teachers need to get to know their pupils, respond to their questions, and check that they understand what they are being taught. An online teacher with thousands of pupils would never be able to do that. The lessons would be like university lectures, and even 20-year-olds often find those hard to concentrate on.