History of the OU

BBC Parliament presents a night of programming to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Harold Wilson’s 1963 election to Labour Party leader. Peter Snow will present a studio discussion talking to contemporaries of the former Prime Minister as they assess his reputation and political legacy.A few months after Harold Wilson became leader of the Labour Party., at Easter 1963, he jotted down an outline of his ideas about a University of the Air and soon afterwards he contributed to a report on Labour’s Higher Education policy. By the autumn, without consultation with his Cabinet colleagues, he launched the idea in speeches. Even though it was not Party policy he pushed and organised and, despite the opposition from within the civil service, the BBC and his own Shadow Cabinet and later Cabinet, he persevered. Moreover, he knew when to let others develop the idea. The OU which opened in 1969 did not look exactly like his original plans, but it owned a great deal to him. The programming is broadcast Thursday 14 February  6.00-11.00pm BBC PARLIAMENT. One of the elements of it is Harold saying that he felt one of his greatest achievements was the OU.

To mark the Diamond Jubilee Her Majesty the Queen has bestowed upon the Open University a Regius Professorship in Open Education.  See here: It is one of  twelve prestigious new posts. These accolades have been awarded since 1540. Previously the professorships were concentrated in seven universities, those of Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, St Andrews and Trinity College Dublin. The University of Glasgow has 13, Oxford 8 and Cambridge has 7. Two such Regius chairs were created to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and before that Queen Victoria created one.  There are only 44 Regius professorships in the UK and Ireland. 

In this case universities applied for the Jubilee professorships before a panel of academics led by Graeme Davies, chairman of the Higher Education Policy Institute. The panel will advise ministers who then made recommendations to the Queen.

The first Regius  Professor  in Open Education at the OU will be Professor Eileen Scanlon, who has worked for the OU for over 37 years. Providing a chair which recognises the importance of educational tchnology is a particularly fitting way of marking the 50th anniversary of the announcement of a ‘University of the Air’.

Towards the end of 1973, immediately following the completion of his degree at Cambridge –where he was awarded a Blue for Cross Country, Les Irvine started work within the OU Student Computing Service at Walton Hall.  A keen runner he had competed for Scotland as a Junior in the ‘International’, the predecessor of the World Cross Country Championships, and he started to arrange runs from the Walton Hall campus.  He also ran between his workplace and his home 6.5 miles away in Wolverton. He only came to work on the bus on Mondays, when he brought in clean clothes and on he returned home by bus with the dirty ones each Friday. A couple of years later in 1975 Mick Bromilow joined the OU as a Course Assistant  in Mathematics. Initially he lodged with Les. He started to run to and from work with Les. They also did a 10 mile run on Monday lunchtimes. By 1976 Mick had moved to his own home and no longer ran to work from Wolverton. However, he kept running and later went on to chair the Marshall Milton Keynes Athletics Club. In 1977 Les emigrated to Australia. By the 1980s Les found that, following surgery for a congenital heart problem, he was unable to run. He died of a heart attack in the early 1990s. Inspired by his example and his pioneering of new routes around the Walton Hall campus, a group of his friends donated to found the Les Irvine Memorial Trophy for the OU Relay. This annual race is still run, generally in March , to this day.

Jan Hyde has a job (as a Careers Employability Officer, Adviser and Coach) a spouse and five children plus one foster daughter. She has completed 14 OU modules and is, she says, ‘a little addicted to study’. When writing about her experience of the OU she started not with her first engagement with it in the 1990s but with the institution itself and its support for a wide range of learners.  Read her account here.

There has been a lot of coverage of Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs, of late. Stories have been run about the millions invested and the numbers interested in these free online courses open to all with electronic access.

MOOCs have also gained attention because the OU has joined with 11 other UK HE institutions to form a company, FutureLearn, which will offer a range of free, open and online courses on one learning platform. The OU’s Vice-Chancellor has declared that FutureLearn’s aim is to provide the “best quality student experience of any of the MOOCs on the planet’. Read the rest of this entry »

 There has been widespread coverage of the OU’s MOOC initiative and support from some of those associated wioth the OU’s roots in the WEA and Labour Party. Details have been collated here.

On 14th December OU Vice Chancellor Martin Bean announced on Radio 4 and also on television that FutureLearn Ltd (majority-owned by the OU) is to provide free open, online courses from the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick. The aim is to build on the OU’s expertise in delivering distance learning and pioneering open education resources and to increase accessibility to higher education. It will be headed by former BBC staffer Simon Nelson. He said that he looks forward ‘to using the OU’s proud history’. 

Thinking the present with Max Weber

A series of seminar-workshops to be organised by the Max Weber Study Group of the British Sociological Association  

Seminar-workshop 1: Co-organised with the University of Salford and UCU Salford 

The University, the Scholar and the Student 

7 December 2012 – University of Salford (Manchester) 

Read the rest of this entry »

Submission deadline: Thursday, January 31 2013

Conference date: Thursday, July 18 2013

Conference Venue: School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth, United Kingdom Read the rest of this entry »

The world of online free teaching materials, Massive Open Online Courses and Udacity has been much discussed over recent months. The OU is rarely seen as a precusor to these attempts to democratise education and other developments in this field. There is a history of MOOCs and the OU yet to be written. However, here Shirky  (who popularised the term ‘cognitive surplus’ when describing the potential uses of the web) calls makes a connection and calls the OU ‘remarkable and interesting’. See Clay Shirky, Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age, Penguin, New York, 2010. According to this report Udacity appears to aim to upload lecture theatre talks. This is not the technique favoured by the OU which has developed ideas about online collaborative learning and has popularised student engagement. One of the OU’s lecturers in educaitonal technology discusses the implications here.