History of the OU

During a Lords debate of 24 July 2013 the contributors mentioned the OU’s experience and dynamism in regard to part-time education. Lord Rees of Ludlow noted that while across the nation numbers applying to be part-time students had fallen by 40% over the previous year, ‘the OU has to some extent bucked the trend’. He also called it ‘excellent news’ that the Open University had established FutureLearn. Baroness Garden of Frognal called FutureLearn ‘an exciting development’. Baroness Brinton commended the OU’s recruitment campaign and called FutureLearn ‘groundbreaking’, adding that ‘the key is the OU’s expertise in distance learning, which has been critical to getting this off the ground. These courses, and the way in which students interact with each other as well as with staff across the various institutions, is the learning environment of the 21st century’.

To mark the Diamond Jubilee Her Majesty the Queen has bestowed upon the Open University a Regius Professorship in Open Education.  See here: It is one of  twelve prestigious new posts. These accolades have been awarded since 1540. Previously the professorships were concentrated in seven universities, those of Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, St Andrews and Trinity College Dublin. The University of Glasgow has 13, Oxford 8 and Cambridge has 7. Two such Regius chairs were created to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and before that Queen Victoria created one.  There are only 44 Regius professorships in the UK and Ireland. 

In this case universities applied for the Jubilee professorships before a panel of academics led by Graeme Davies, chairman of the Higher Education Policy Institute. The panel will advise ministers who then made recommendations to the Queen.

The first Regius  Professor  in Open Education at the OU will be Professor Eileen Scanlon, who has worked for the OU for over 37 years. Providing a chair which recognises the importance of educational tchnology is a particularly fitting way of marking the 50th anniversary of the announcement of a ‘University of the Air’.

Thinking the present with Max Weber

A series of seminar-workshops to be organised by the Max Weber Study Group of the British Sociological Association  

Seminar-workshop 1: Co-organised with the University of Salford and UCU Salford 

The University, the Scholar and the Student 

7 December 2012 – University of Salford (Manchester) 

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Submission deadline: Thursday, January 31 2013

Conference date: Thursday, July 18 2013

Conference Venue: School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth, United Kingdom (more…)

One of the benefits of exploring the history of the OU is that it opportunities arise to meet colleagues from overseas. When Katja Varjos, from Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Finland, visited the OU she said something about her teaching experiences.

Her university is a little younger than the OU and, in common with the OU, Lahti prides itself on its range of partnerships and company projects and its versatile and practical teaching methods. The institution accepts students of all ages and they are all funded by the state with grants. While much of the contact is face-to-face, Katja Varjos intends to develop the university’s engagement with elearning. (more…)

Photographer: FourNinety Copyright (C) The Open University

For a report on how ‘massive open online courses’ provided by Coursera, edX and Udacity appear to be ‘another tectonic shift in the evolution of higher education and HE internationalisation’, see a report from the Observatory on borderless higher education.

The OU’s eLearning Community newsletter recently noted the interest in massive open online courses (MOOCs) and also noted that it appears to have come as a surprise to ‘Wired Campus’ that many MOOC students form groups to study and socialize. (more…)

Photographer: Richard Learoyd Copyright (C) The Open University

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently asked ‘How can universities support disadvantaged communities?’ It concluded that ‘Most universities thought community engagement was important’ and that ‘Some universities were much more active than others in supporting disadvantaged communities. Institutional commitment to this is a key factor’. The OU had such engagement written into its founding Charter which specifies the importance of the ‘educational well-being of the community’. Many OU students have long been involved in their local communities because they did not leave their homes in order to study. It seems as if the OU led theway towards such engagement by other universities.

Pearson, which owns the Edexcel exam board, Penguin, the Financial Times and other educational publishing and digital education businesses and is an FTSE 100 company, is to become a for-profit private higher education provider by opening Pearson College. This will be based in London and Manchester and will teach a business and enterprise BSc degree course validated by Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. Tuition fees will be £6,500 per year and there will be an option of an accelerated two-year course. (more…)

Should a public figure or institution be brave enough to wish, with the poet Robert Burns, ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’, the cartoonist’s art is likely to remind them of another adage: be careful what you wish for. 

The British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent provides a window onto the ways in which people and organisations have been portrayed through the ages.  As a national institution, The Open University hasn’t evaded capture by the caricaturist’s ink.  This group of cartoons evokes an evolving pen portrait in which the ‘University of the Air’ lived up to its name in at least one respect: it was difficult to pin down in a visual medium.  With no substantial image of its own, the OU was not so much used as a target for satire in its own right, as a means for cartoonists to satirise some of their more ’usual suspects’.  Groups of people and themes caricatured via their association with the OU included politicians, television, students, changing social mores and class aspiration.

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Coursera  calls itself a ‘social entrepreneurship company’ which aims to deliver online courses. Founded by two academics from Stanford University and funded to the tune of $22m by the computer industries, it claims to offer ‘education for everyone’ by providing courses from its partner universities. These include  the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Virginia, Rice University, UC San Francisco, University of Illinois and University of Washington and also Toronto in Canada and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Coursera does not offer degrees, but students can be awarded certificates. (more…)