History of the OU

Today, 5 June 201o, the NHS is 62 years old and, I trust, not yet ready to be retired. This posting is about how it was an inspiration for the OU. The NHS was a policy which owed much to the 1942 Beveridge Report, a report of such significance that Jennie Lee made it the central plank of her by-election campaign of that year. She didn’t win that seat but she did win another and was returned to the Commons in 1945, along with her spouse, Nye Bevan. He was the Minister who introduced the NHS. In 1964 Jennie Lee, by then widowed, was given the task of ensuring that an idea for a university of the air became reality and she made a connection to her late husband. The PM, Harold Wilson recalled her contribution when the Cabinet and Labour Party National Executive Committee met at Chequers prior to the 1966 General Election:

At the end of the afternoon anybody was free to speak on anything. Jennie got up and made a passionate speech about the University of the Air. She said the greatest creation of the previous Labour government was Nye’s National Health Service but that now we were engaged on an operation which would make just as much difference to the country. We were all impressed. She was a tigress.

During the first few years after the OU campus in Milton Keynes was opened much of the new town was a series of rather desolate muddy building sites. Jennie arranged for the Bevan Fund to pay for a bar to be installed in Walton Hall and she hung Nye’s cap and a photo of him there. The first Vice Chancellor of the OU, Walter Perry, called this new meeting place ‘a godsend’ and said that it was the ‘focal point for much of the early discussion and planning’.

April 4, 2000. Open Eye: Celebrating the hundredth-birthday Party Touring exhibition is based on social scientist’s labour of love, collecting voices of the founding fathers of a people’s party

The work of OU Social Science research fellow Dan Weinbren forms the basis of a major new exhibition which will tour the country to celebrate the Labour Party’s hundredth birthday.

The journal ‘Open Learning’ celebrates 25 years under its current title this year. it can be accessed here. The current editor Anne Gaskell, former editors Graham Gibbs and Greville Rumble and Chair of the Editorial Board David Sewart have recorded podcasts highlighting important articles and issues over the last 25 years.  These can be heard here.

There were echoes of some of the debates about the OU which have occurred over the last half-century in a meeting in Brighton on 29th April 2010.  Debate about where HE is going based on an understanding of where it has been is welcome. To judge from the report it looks as if an understanding of the development of the OU could be of value to those debating the future of HE elsewhere.

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Yesterday’s degree ceremony at Milton Keynes Theatre marked the end of the summer season of cermonies across Britain and Ireland which saw 6,000 or so graduates celebrating their success. Meanwhile, today marks the anniversary of the very first degree ceremony. (more…)

Iain Stewart MP

Iain Stewart MP for Milton Keynes South since May 6th 2010 gave his first speech in the Commons on 17th June. (more…)

‘How about taking exams in the comfort of your own room?’ Asked BBC reporter Katherine Sellgren before going on to suggest that ‘New technology, boasting anti-cheating software, could soon make this a possibility’. (more…)

‘When the UK Open University was established its creators, in the free-wheeling and informal spirit of the 1960s, proposed that it dispense with the academic traditions of gowns and convocation ceremonies. The first students, however, quickly disabused the OU of that idea, arguing that since they had studied long and hard they wanted to be recognised as graduates with “the Full Monty” of gowns and regalia. The only concession to modernity – for which I was grateful when I officiated at over a hundred degree ceremonies as vice-chancellor – was that they would not wear hats.’ This from here

Professor Gráinne Conole

Gráinne Conole, Professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University wrote: I argue in this paper that we need to expand the notion of openness, to take account of the affordances of new technologies and the new patterns of user behaviour we are seeing emerge. There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). Read more here