Open House - March 2001
VC's Column
Hanging in there!
The Retention Fair held at Walton Hall in early March was an inspiring event. It confirmed the impressive progress of the Retention Project. There are a number of reasons for its success. First, retention is central to our mission of openness to people. The OU’s aim is to open up university study so that people can achieve success and change their lives for the better. Our open door is not meant to be a revolving door. Not for us the ‘Paschendaele’ approach of some continental universities, where it is an institutional aim to whittle away the huge first year enrolment so that only more manageable numbers proceed to second year. The OU is different, not just through its core values but also because government sets us ever higher enrolment targets knowing that we can cope with large numbers of students. Every current student that we lose means another new student to recruit.
The congruence of interest between the student’s aspirations and the University’s mission, combined with the excellent leadership of the Retention Project by Susan Tresman, explains why so many individuals and units are contributing to the project. Another contributing factor is the scientific rigour that the organisers have brought to the enterprise. Instead of the ad hoc tinkering that is so often the institutional response to concerns about drop out, the Retention Project is taking an integrated and holistic approach. This will produce evidence-based recommendations for action and also yield research reports and publications for the scholarly literature.
Ever since the beginnings of correspondence education in the nineteenth century those engaged in distance teaching have made the investigation of the phenomenon of drop out their most common research theme. The OU’s Retention Project may well be the most concentrated and concerted attempt to address this key issue.
I shall look forward to using the results of the project in my new role, because UNESCO is now promoting distance learning as a way of increasing access to education at all levels. The papers presented at the Retention Fair also had personal implications. This year I am taking the OU course U208 Third World Development to prepare me for my job in Paris. In that respect there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that I shall be living through two of the key events that make students drop out, namely moving house (and country) and changing job. The good news I discovered is that if you submit a reasonable first TMA and then keep going you have a good chance of passing the course.
This useful knowledge came from an interesting analogy that Ormond Simpson made between an OU student going through a course and a salmon trying to leap a salmon weir. His figures showed that 38% do not leap the first step of the weir by submitting the first TMA. Drop out at all subsequent milestones in the course is much less. That’s an incentive to hang in.