Customers who shop at Tesco supermarkets and petrol stations will soon be able to use loyalty card points to pay for distance-learning courses run by the Open University.
The deal will enable customers to pay for all or part of an OU course by exchanging Tesco clubcard vouchers, which are accumulated while shopping.
Tesco's clubcard holders will be able to trade their vouchers to receive four times their value in OU course fees. For every £10 of clubcard vouchers, shoppers will receive £40 towards paying for an OU course.
Currently a typical undergraduate OU course costs around £4000 - so shoppers would need to spend around £100,000 in Tesco stores and petrol stations in order to pay all fees.
Nick McCormack, head of partnerships at Tesco Freetime, says: "The programme provides a great opening for customers to achieve some valuable qualifications."
Brenda Gourley, the OU's vice-chancellor, says: "We aim to make access to the University’s programmes as flexible as possible. This extends to giving our students a number of options to meet course fees – and this new deal is now one of those options."