Do you have a story to tell about the Open University? Were you a student on the very early courses? Or has the OU changed your life?
Forty years after its first students began studying in 1971, the Open University has launched a project to bring together the entire history of the OU for the first time.
Central to project is the new History of the Open University website where former students, alumni and staff are invited to record their memories and leave comments.
These will build into the first complete, comprehensive account of the OU’s developmentp to the present day, including its impact on the world of education and on wider society.
“This is not going to be a conventional institutional history,” says Dr Dan Weinbren, who is heading the History of the OU project. “We can’t hope to have the full picture sitting here in an office in Walton Hall. The website will enable more voices to be heard.
“We particularly want to hear people’s stories about the OU’s impact on them. It might be personal, political, intellectual, ideological …there’s a whole set of ways in which this institution had had a significant impact.”
As well as the website, which will be a permanent resource for future researchers, Dr Weinbren is writing a History of the OU book which he says will be “interesting to an audience which wants to know where the OU is going, as well as where we came from”.
Dr Weinbren and project manager Rachel Garnham will also be mining the wealth of archive material about the OU, much of which has not been brought together before.
To share your views, memories or images, go to Tell us your OU story.
Image shows Professor Sir Edmund Leach addressing an early Open University residential school
