My mother, Pat Coombes, who has died aged 89, was a course coordinator at the Open University (OU), where in the late 1970s she helped to create a groundbreaking social sciences foundation course known as D102. When, in the early 80s, the Conservative government’s secretary of state for education, Keith Joseph, attacked the OU for having a Marxist bias, D102 was one of the courses in the firing line, and Pat supported colleagues and students through the resultant turmoil.
She later went on to help set up a distance learning MSc programme at Soas University of London, a module that aimed to support employees of newly formed governments in developing countries.
Pat was born in Detroit in the US, where she had a difficult childhood. Her father, Warner Secord, a clerical worker at Ford Motors, died from the effects of the early use of radiotherapy treatment when Pat was eight years old. For a time afterwards her mother, Claire (nee Gladden), a telephone operator, found life difficult, and Pat spent some time in foster care.
At Cooley high school in Detroit she was introduced to Marxism by a teacher who was clearly not deterred by 50s McCarthyism, and she remained a Marxist for the rest of her life. Later she went on to study English literature at Columbia University in New York, although she dropped out in 1958 in protest against racial discrimination there. Afterwards she began working as an assistant editor at Oxford University Press (OUP) in New York.
Pat spent two years at OUP before moving on to the Henry Z Walck publishing company, and it was while in that job that she met Jim Coombes, an English research scientist who was studying in the city. They were married in 1959 and travelled that year to the UK on the RMS Queen Elizabeth.
Settling first in London, after two years they moved to Canterbury in Kent, where Jim had secured a job with Pfizer. They had four daughters in quick succession and Pat spent a number of years raising their young family – until in 1970 she began working at the University of Kent, producing a magazine for staff and students.
In 1973 the family moved to Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, where Pat joined the OU, initially as a student and then, having obtained a first in social sciences, as a course coordinator in the social sciences faculty. It was in that post that she helped to develop the controversial D102 course.
While at the OU Pat also took an MA in history at Birkbeck, University of London, and in 1990 she moved to Soas to set up a distance learning MSc programme in financial economics with a colleague from the OU.
She retired in 2000, but continued working for Soas as an academic editor well into her 80s.
Her marriage to Jim ended in divorce in the late 1980s. She is survived by their four daughters, Karen, Anne, Jennie and me, and eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
