Sesame - May 2000
VC’s Column
A Proud Achievement
Sometimes I worry that the OU community is too busy doing new things to pause and celebrate its ongoing achievements. So I was pleased when we organised a conference at Walton Hall in May to celebrate ten years of OU activity in Russia and Central Europe. When the transformation of the Soviet bloc began after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 some farsighted people in those countries realised that there would be a massive need for education and training which the existing institutions were ill-equipped to provide.
Hungary was the first to look in the rest of Europe for approaches that might be helpful in addressing the challenge. Its study group reported back that the most promising model was to be found at the Open University and a first contact was made. Very quickly a partnership was established between the OU and Eurocontact, a new body set up in Hungary to support the offering of OU management courses across the country.
Faithful to the OU mission of being open as to people we decided to try to reach a wide audience. This had two consequences: first, the decision to translate OU courses into Hungarian and to train Hungarian tutors; second, the offering of our certificate and diploma programmes for junior and middle managers, rather than the MBA. The British Council and the UK government’s Know-How fund were very helpful in getting us started.
Word of the programme spread rapidly and before long we had similar OU schemes under way in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. This meant teaching our business programmes in six languages – which grew to seven when Czech was added following the break-up of Czechoslovakia.
Ten years later everyone in the OU can be very proud of what has been achieved. First, we have indeed extended our openness to people. 70,000 people studied with us in Russia and Central Europe during the 1990s and 12,000 are enrolled this year. Second, we have extended our openness to places. Because they have adopted the OU’s methods our partners have made the programmes available throughout their countries. There are, for example, OU groups right across the vast landmass of Russia.
People in Russia and Central Europe have been extraordinarily open to OU methods. Indeed, many of them see our methods as a powerful expression of the liberal values of the civil society that they would like to see in their countries. Some of the tutors in the region are second to none in the whole OU system in their dedication to their students and to the OU style of learning. People raised in authoritarian regimes have shown themselves wonderfully open to ideas.
I doubt that any other western educational project in the former Soviet bloc has come close to achieving the mass impact of these OU programmes. Through thousands of proud members of the OU community we have helped to advance the ideal of the civil society in an important part of the world.