Norman MacKenzie, who has died aged 91, was a pioneer of open learning and one of the foremost planners of the Open University (OU). He described the year that he and its first vice-chancellor, Walter Perry, spent looking for a name and a site in the late 1960s as the happiest of his life; it reminded him of 1940, when it seemed that "anything could be achieved with ideas and flair".
As a New Statesman journalist and occasional intelligence agent during and after the second world war, he was adept at harnessing ingenuity to leftwing idealism. The prospect of a more satisfying outlet for his talents came with the new Sussex University: its aim was innovation, its approach interdisciplinary, and its atmosphere worldly and dynamic.
Four years after its foundation in 1958, its pro vice-chancellor, Asa Briggs, recruited MacKenzie as a lecturer in sociology. Soon he formed a committee on new methods of teaching and learning, and out of this came his belief in the value of technology in education and the use of multimedia tools for expression and communication.
MacKenzie did not look back. His genius was to link ideas through imagination and technology, and drive them forward by networking, often with senior Labour politicians with whom he had strong contacts.
In 1966 the newly returned Labour government published a white paper, The University of the Air. MacKenzie had been active behind the scenes together with Richmond Postgate of the BBC and the education minister Jennie Lee. The following year MacKenzie joined the planning committee, and his quest with Perry resulted in the OU finding a home in the new city of Milton Keynes.
In fact the setting up of an OU base was not what he had intended. His concept was more of a publishing house without bricks-and-mortar headquarters or even a full-time staff. Even so, his estimate of an annual cost of £1m was far too optimistic. He served on the first council of the university in 1969 and continued until 1976.
MacKenzie was born in the Labour stronghold of Deptford, south-east London, where his father was a credit draper, selling clothes door to door. From Haberdashers' Aske's school in nearby New Cross, in 1939 he won a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where he came under the political and intellectual influence of Harold Laski. He graduated in 1943 with a first-class honours degree in government. He joined, first, the Independent Labour party and then, briefly, the Communist party.
In 1940 he enlisted at the guerrilla warfare training school at Osterley Park, west London, and from there went to Sussex to join an auxiliary unit known as the Last Ditch, a clandestine organisation preparing to go underground if the Germans invaded. Invalided out of the RAF, in 1943 he joined the New Statesman as assistant editor and remained on the staff for 19 years, becoming, in the words of its editor John Freeman, "the rock on which the best of the New Statesman has been founded". His special interests were sociology and communism.
At the same time he continued his clandestine work, joining the Political Warfare Executive, which broadcast radio propaganda to Germany. After 1945, under the guise of a "fellow travelling" journalist, he helped dissidents get out of eastern Europe. These were shadowy cold-war assignments that later led an old schoolfriend to remark at a reunion: "I thought I saw you in chains on Bucharest railway station, but I thought I'd better not say anything." MacKenzie had indeed been caught photographing a prison camp in Romania and was on his way forcibly out of the country. A Bulgarian tipoff in advance of Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation in 1956 of Stalin's purges came to nothing when no one in London would believe it.
Having joined the Labour party in 1943, MacKenzie stood as a Bevanite Labour parliamentary candidate for Hemel Hempstead in 1951 and again in 1955. In 1981 he was one of the signatories of the Limehouse declaration that began the SDP.
However, he was no more a politician than he was a trained academic. He was an instigator who passed on his ideas to others and then moved on. What linked his careers was a love of writing.
With his first wife, Jeanne Sampson, whom he married in 1945, he wrote The Time Traveller: The Life of HG Wells (1973) – the two men had much in common as socialist journalists fascinated by technology and sociology. Jeanne also collaborated with Norman on Dickens: A Life (1979) and The Diaries of Beatrice Webb (1982-85). His great labour of love on behalf of the Webbs was initiated with the three-volume Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published in 1978, the year that he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
As well as biographies he wrote other non-fiction such as Socialism: A Short History (1949) and Dreams and Dreaming (1965). Then, under the pseudonym of Anthony Forrest, he wrote novels about the Napoleonic wars with Antony Brown.
At Sussex, he founded the Centre for Educational Technology in 1967, and for some years in the 1970s was director of the School of Education. He had an international reputation for curriculum planning and was an adviser to Unesco. In 1977 he was appointed professor, and six years later retired as emeritus.
MacKenzie was generous and always encouraging, though his ebullient manner and rapidity of ideas could be daunting down the phone at nine in the morning. His second marriage, to Gillian Ford in 1988, two years after Jeanne died of cancer, provided many happy years in his beloved Lewes. He exhibited his watercolour landscapes; he was a devoted grandfather, particularly after the death of his first daughter; he made friends easily and his house was always open.
On three occasions he taught at colleges in the US. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things American and admired the openness and opportunity of that country.
In 1977 the OU awarded MacKenzie an honorary doctorate. The citation credited him with "the virtues of the 19th-century polymath and the visions fitted for the 21st century".
He is survived by Gillian, a daughter from his first marriage and two grandchildren.
• Norman Ian MacKenzie, educationist and writer, born 18 August 1921; died 18 June 2013
