Gráinne McGowan and OUVP's contribution to enhancing future growth and sustainability at the OU

Gráinne McGowan joined the OU in October 2019 as a Senior Quality and Partnerships Manager (Ireland) with the remit of creating and maintaining validation partnerships with FE colleges in Northern Ireland.

Having previously written a degree programme for a local FE college, Grainne had the expertise and local knowledge needed to spearhead this work. Since joining, she has continued to develop the validation partnerships with three of the sixth FE colleges in Northern Ireland.

Grainne is the only regionally based member of a 42 strong validation team; the rest are in Milton Keynes. There are 42 validation partnerships in the UK along with international partnerships in places like the Middle East, India, China and Greece.

So why do FE colleges need the OU to validate their courses?

Grainne explains: "FE colleges in Northern Ireland do not have awarding body status, so we need to validate, and quality assure, the HE courses they want to run.

"When a college wants to start a new HE programme, they discuss the outline of the programme with me. We then pull together a panel of OU representatives, such as academic reviewers, and others, such as external academics. All the documentation is reviewed and revised accordingly by the panel."

College students on the OU programme will exit with an OU validated award.

Grainne said: "Many students attend FE colleges as they are more affordable. Having the OU validation enhances the reputation of the courses and has a strong brand image.

"Although I work closely with the colleges, they enjoy the level of autonomy we allow them, and this has helped us to establish a strong reputation in the region."

When lockdown hit in March, Grainne was about to embark on a major validation process with South West College, the largest rural college in Northern Ireland.

Grainne said: "The college had five new programmes they wanted us to validate. This was going to be a huge process involving many meetings and flying panel members over to Northern Ireland. We had to adapt our normal face to face validation process to enable us to hold five virtual validation events, so that the new courses could start in September 2020.

"As well as validating the courses, we also helped the colleges move to online learning and assessment with our academic reviewers working alongside college staff providing advice on how to deliver courses remotely during the pandemic."

For Grainne, making a direct contribution to the OU's strategic objective is very satisfying and she encourages others to play their role in developing the new strategy.

Grainne said: "OU staff should input into the strategy to provide a variety of perspectives. That will make the strategy more representative and sustainable as well as helping staff feel that their opinion counts. By contributing we take ownership and through this we are better able to do our jobs well while representing our students and other stakeholders."