The OU is announcing OUAnywhere, a new initiative that will allow students to access and download texts and audio visual materials for all its undergraduate degrees via apps for their smartphones and tablets.
Due for release in the first quarter of 2013, OUAnywhere puts all a student needs to study their degree in their hands. Undergraduates will be able to access all Level 1 and 2 (30 and 60 points) main course materials through their handheld devices. In addition, students will be able to access a diverse range of the OU’s audio and visual content to support their studies.
The app was created in response to a rising number of students who are using tablets and smartphones as part of their approach to studying.
OUAnywhere will be available across a plethora of platforms, including:
• Android devices
• iPads (iPad 1 and above)
• iPhones (iPhone 3GS and above)
• Kindle Fire
• Microsoft Surface
OUAnywhere represents the natural evolution of open education. Retaining the accessibility of online courses, OUAnywhere also allows OU students to attain a formally recognised qualification through their studies while delivering the trademark flexibility, support, and innovation upon which The Open University was built.
“OUAnywhere will allow students to hold the university in their hands,” said the OU’s Learning and Teaching Solutions Director Anne Howells, who is heading up the programme. “More and more students are using tablets and smartphone technology, and higher education needs to keep up to fulfil their evolving demands. Through OUAnywhere, the university is delivering innovation that meets those needs, and puts the OU ahead of the HE pack.”
The apps are currently in development, but more updates on its progress and the impending launch will be released in the coming months.
Comments
Fantastic news! Here's hoping we can use the app to take notes.
2 steps back and 1 forward, and this is heralded as progress. In 2005, the OU sent me books and tapes, and I could study anywhere. The local OU staff took pride in the fact that even a nuclear submariner, isolated for months at a time, could study with them. If you had visual problems and couldn't read the books, you could get materials on CDRom for use with screenreaders or magnification software.
By 2011, my OU materials were trapped on the internet. You couldn't install anything to your PC or download any audio or video without hacking around in the webpage source code. People with poor connections suffered and people with no connections were excluded -- including the hypothetical submariner.
Now they're talking about reinstating the ability to take the material anywhere, but in typical media-zeitgeist style they're talking about tablets and phones. What about my laptop? Why are users of Windows 7, Mac OS X and Linux excluded from this? Why do I need to buy another device just to get a level of service from the OU that matches my experience in 2005?
This is what the OU should have offered as soon as it started axing the books.
So big whoop -- it's too little, too late.
@Niall Tracey. With all due respect, the OU courses I have done in the past have always had all online content downloadable on PDF/ multimedia files for offline viewing. I have made good use of this to study offline with my laptop/ ipad while travelling in the past.
Having this available on mobile devices as an app now is fantastic news! If you were able to access student home even better.
I welcome the OU entering the digital age in full swing.
Reading paper books is very nice (don't you love the feel of paper :) , the colourful pictures, being able to annotate by hand) and good for my eyes, but the truth is that an e-reader is very light and I have a shelf full of books all stored in my small Kobo that I can carry around in my handbag on my bus journeys.
If I'm not mistaken all the readers have their PC compatible e-readers. I have a Kobo reader and a small laptop running Windows 7 and I can read ePubs, as well as Kindle books, also on my laptop after installing their relative software downloaded from Kobobooks' and Amazon's website. I don't know about the Android e-reader application for the PC.
Hi Niall,
I'm struggling to see what the problem is with an app which will support (not replace) your existing study materials.
All the courses I have sat with the OU have included all the materials in print and on CD but were also available online, personally I always find it much more convenient to access them via the web rather than messing about with a CD. Obviously other people have different situations such as your submariner example but a CD would work for anyone with a regular PC/laptop. I found the pdf versions which I could load on my tablet particularly helpful when on the move.
I've only seen one course which axed the books and the reviews have been pretty awful, hopefully this will tell the OU all it needs about going down such a route.
If your courses still have print material, you're lucky. The OU stopped producing print material and CDs for the courses I was studying partway through my degree. They didn't offer print or download versions, and although there was a "printable" version of the webpage, it was peppered with little boxes that indicated "interactive content" and the instruction to go to the website to do the task.
A lot of these interactive exercises were textboxes with no automated marking. Some others were simple multiple-choice questions. All of them would have been available in the book before it was discontinued, and therefore perfectly suitable for inclusion in the printable webpage... but the option simply wasn't there.
I offered to compile an offline version by hand, but the course organisers refused the offer citing two reasons. The first, understandably, was copyright concerns, even though I was only intending to upload it to the closed student forum. The second reason was that they wanted to be able to change the material during the year if errors were found. Well, errors were found, but nothing was done about it as the system was set up to be updated once a year only and IT would have charged the course more money to change it mid-year.
Personally, I find it unacceptable that the course team wasn't given adequate training to update their own materials themselves.
The end result was that none of the promised benefits of technology materials, and all of the promised benefits of the old paper-based courses vanished.
It was for these online courses that I got my worst marks, because my old habits of studying on trains, in the park at lunchtime, or halfway up a hillside on a sunny day were taken away from me.
And speaking of outside on a sunny day, I notice that there's no mention of ebook readers with sunlight readable screens in the article....
This is brilliant especially for me as I have Ipads smart phones etc I will now have no excuse not to be studying!
Really happy to see this. Can we get a press release as soon as the applications are available on the relevant stores?
Thanks.
I can't wait to try it out! Very excited about this.
Great news
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