Professor Peter Taylor – Chair, Open Board of Studies

I’d like to start by echoing Josie’s welcome to everyone, thank you all for coming, some of you long distances, it really is good to celebrate 50 years of the Open Programme.

Because I’ve been here a long time, I’m often seen as a kind of ‘historian’ of the Open University and I believe that multidisciplinary study at the Open University had its foundations in this 1968 document. So, it’s the “Flow into employment of scientists, engineers and technologists” and it was the Committee on Manpower Resources for Science and Technology. Now, you have to remember that this was Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat of Technology’, so it was all about technology, but all about the Open Programme as well:

[Audio recording] “We have become accustomed to the idea that the career of an individual spans only one major technological phase. It is almost certain in the future that it will span two or even more phases. To meet current and future needs of employment and to give students of science, engineering and technology some understanding of the society in which they work, universities should consider making the first degree course in science, engineering and technology broad in character, through multidisciplinary approaches to these subjects and by introducing relevant study in other field such as economics, sociology, law etc.”.

Plus ça change [laughter]… that really could’ve been written last week, and is as relevant 50 years ago as it is today. The report was actually chaired by Michael Swan, who was Vice Chancellor of Edinburgh and went on to be Chairman of the Governors of the BBC, hence it was called the Swan Report. That was [19]68 and, at the same time, the Open University was being planned and I believe this document had a big influence on the planning of the Open University. So here we have the 1969 Report of the Planning Committee to the Secretary of State, Education on Science for the Open University:

[Audio recording] “Besides providing fresh and renewed opportunities for such students as we have been discussing, the University will have an important role arising from the changes in, and increasing rate of change, with a modern technological society. The degree of the Open University should, we consider, be a general degree, in the sense that it would embrace studies over a range of subjects, rather than be confined to a single narrow speciality. In our view the OU should not set out to compete with the established universities which can spend 3 years of full-time study in their laboratories and libraries and their specialised school. Rather should the Open University degree be complementary, providing the part time student a broadly-based higher education for which the teaching techniques available to the Open University are particularly suited. Furthermore, we are aware of the great need and demand in the country, emphasised in the Swan Report, for an extension of facilities, such as general degrees”.

So, the Open University had multidisciplinary study at its heart. The BA was introduced in 1970 and was pretty much the only degree until 1996 when the BSc was introduced. The nature of this multidisciplinary degree was nicely described by our first Vice-Chancellor Walter Perry in his book about the development of the Open University and you have probably heard me quote this many times: –

[Audio recording] “The usual criticism is that a student has a free choice of courses that he can take credit for is liable to end up with what is called a miscellaneous ragbag of credits, a second-rate degree with no internal coherence. Such people argue strongly that teachers must determine the pattern of studies that is most suited to the individual and that direction of this kind is the essence of education. Opponents of this view on the other hand argue equally strongly that a student is the best judge of what he wishes to learn and that he should be given the maximum freedom of choice, consistent with a coherent overall pattern. They hold that this is doubly true when one is dealing with adults who, after years of experience of life, ought to be in a better position to judge what precise studies they wish to undertake”.

So, in the early days, it was recognised that our students, particularly as adults, are not blank canvases on which we paint. They bring with them a multitude of skills and knowledge from their life, from their interests, from their work, and they want to do modules that reinforce and help develop those areas to help them meet their goals. These students are brave students, not for them the well-trodden path of a named degree, they plough their own furrow. When I first started as Director of the Open Programme, I was convinced that if I looked hard enough, I’d be able to find certain common pathways that Open Programme students took. I was quickly dissuaded of that fact in that every single student seemed to take a completely different set of modules; it was about what they needed, what were their hopes, and their intentions. Every student therefore is unique, and we should really celebrate that variety.

So much for the way the degree is set up, let’s look at the way the curriculum was developed in those early days and, for this, I have a report from 1974, which is the Joint Working Group on Course Provision, that was chaired by Professor Arnold Kettle [hereafter referred to as ‘the Kettle Report’].

One of the main recommendations was that, as well as having specialist modules, we ought to have interdisciplinary modules and he called those ‘intrinsic courses’ for specialist and ‘less intrinsic’ for multidisciplinary: –

[Audio recording] “Within a University there should be room for a diversity of approaches, nevertheless we believe that it is important that the University should face the need to produce a larger proportion of the more general, less intrinsic type of course. It is a key part of the Joint Working Group’s recommendation that the University should produce a larger number of more general broadly-based courses with minimal prerequisites”.

The student newspaper at that time was something called Sesame and [Professor Kettle] went on to say in Sesame a little bit more, not only about the need for general modules, but some of the challenges in implementing them: –

“Between the relative educational merits of the latter two types of course, there is, as in all universities, a great deal of disagreement within the OU. Some people, students and academics, are suspicious of the broader courses, fearing that they can turn out to be superficial. Others are equally convinced that most conventional university degree patterns are greatly overspecialised and that the OU neither can, nor should, compete in attempting to provide the more specialist type of degree”.

These courses became known as University courses, or U courses, so things like U201 (risk), U202 (enquiry), U203 (popular culture) and the Kettle Report suggested that as much as 25% of our modules should be interdisciplinary. As predicted, there was a lot of discussion about whether we should have more specialist or more interdisciplinary courses, as this particular article in Sesame suggests: –

“We believe that the proposed U courses are bound to reduce the standard of the OU degree. If the OU really means to cheapen it’s degrees to this extent, it might as well go the whole hog and sell them for £12 each, like the Oxford and Cambridge MA”.

But luckily there are other people who thought differently about the value of multidisciplinarity and, maybe, that named degrees were something of the past: –

“It is true that our society needs specialists, the problem is that we cannot predict which types of specialists will be needed in 10- or 20-years’ time. I believe our aim as an Open University is to provide each graduate with the basis of a continuing education in the future, so that our graduates will be able to adapt to this rapidly changing society. Already our graduates are making their mark because our degrees are different”.

As in many universities that have strong disciplinary silos, the ability to sustain interdisciplinarity is often a challenge. In particular, I think the way that we do our costing and income models for the Open University has led to a decline of this interdisciplinarity. Certainly, the U courses slowly disappeared and I’m not sure there are very many left at the moment.

But one last slide to talk about how we got to where we are today. Here we have our timeline – in 1970, the introduction of the BA, and in 1996, the introduction of the BSc. And somewhere between the two, there’s this fresh-faced lad who started in 1978, full of hopes and ambitions, and look where it got him! [laughter]

In the year 2000, we introduced named degrees, but even though students often wanted to do named degrees, still 25% of our students wanted to study in a multidisciplinary fashion. Since then, we’ve had things like certificates and diplomas, we’ve had the whole move from the old framework to the new framework, but more recently we’ve introduced things like the Open Masters, the STEM version of the Open Programme and our first module on ‘Making your learning count’.

So, we’ve come a long way in 50 years. I’m hoping we’re still flying that flag of multidisciplinarity. As Helen said, I will be giving up the flag and passing it on to others at the end of July, but I’m sure the university will continue in that interdisciplinary fashion and value it.

An Open degree “generator”

Martin Weller is a Professor of Educational Technology and the Chair of the Open Board of Studies. Here, Martin takes a playful approach to demonstrating the flexibility and scale of choice available in the BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree.

One of the exciting aspects of the Open degree is that, apart from a few excluded combinations, students can combine modules from across the range of OU offerings. This creates some interesting combinations, and it turns out that students really take advantage of the flexibility, with many different, often unique, pathways.

Over on my blog I had some fun with the metaphor generator, which randomly selected a metaphor topic from one list and applied it to a randomly selected educational technology in another list to give metaphor prompts such as: “How is your favourite film an analogy for academics use of Twitter?”. I thought I could do a similar thing with module combinations for Open degrees. So, using the list of modules currently eligible for inclusion, I created three lists, covering OU level 1, 2 and 3 modules to create an Open degree Generator. I generalised a lot of the module titles to make sense to a broader audience (we like a cryptic, clever module title at the OU), and combined a few, so it’s not an exact listing of modules. Nevertheless, all of the suggested combinations of topics can (I think!) be studied in the Open degree.

I’ve used three different sentence structures: “Your degree could be a combination of …”; “Would a degree containing … be interesting?”; and “In order to solve complex problems we need degrees that combine subjects like…”. The last is my favourite as it makes you consider how novel combinations can be used to address complex, or wicked problems.

It’s fun to see the different combinations that it generates. Sometimes the suggested mixture looks a bit random, but usually after some consideration you think “there would be some interesting connections between those subjects”. Have a play with it and see if it inspires any module combinations. And if you don’t like the mix you get, just click the Gimme Another button to get a different set. This is just for fun of course, you should explore any module in more depth before signing up for it, but the generator might act as an inspirational prompt.

[The code for the metaphor generator which I used for this is available here, and Alan Levine’s write-up on how he developed it here.]

Opening the ’empty box’

Dr John Butcher is Director, Access and Open, in the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Students) office, and Deputy Chair of the Open Board of Studies.

In the 50^th year of ‘Open’ curriculum at the Open University, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that the innovations continue, and that our ideas around openness resonate with colleagues at distance universities across Europe.

I was fortunate to spend three days in Madrid at the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) conference. There was much talk of micro-credentials and Open Educational Resources (OERs), and the recognition of prior learning. There was also genuine interest in the way our Access Programme could help colleagues in distance universities improve retention in their undergraduate courses.

I presented a paper ‘Using an ‘empty box’ module to widen access in a distance learning Open degree’ based on Making your learning count (YXM130). Feedback from the audience was positive, with particular interest in the potential to stimulate cross-disciplinary learning and to transform previous non-credit-bearing and open learning into HE credit. European colleagues saw real benefit in a student-led/tutor-negotiated learning experience, and were impressed at the rapid production timescale. Questions included: how to select tutors with the appropriate skill set; the challenge to tutors of which OERs to ‘accept’; and the obstacles in producing such a flexible module if the institution was inflexible in its systems.

My conclusion, based on feedback from academics based in other open universities, was that there remained a genuine appetite for innovations which allow the learner a personalised experience, and that the empty box concept is one of the few areas in which ‘conventional’ universities have not stolen our clothes.

Take a tour through our “Gallery of Multipotentialites”…

Throughout history, there have been a number of well-known individuals who have applied a multi-subject, and/or interdisciplinary approach to their work. Our ‘Gallery of Multipotentialites’ showcases a range of people throughout history who have been involved with interdisciplinary study.

Click on each of the pictures below to find out more about these incredible individuals, or you can download a copy of our Gallery Guide which was produced for our OU50 celebration event in May 2019.

What is a “multipotentialite”?

The term ‘multipotentialite’, coined by Emilie Wapnick, the founder and Creative Director of Puttylike, is one way to describe someone with many interests and creative pursuits. Multipotentialites tend to need variety in their lives, but how much variety depends on the individual. Multi-subject study can therefore help satisfy the need for variety which multipotentialites tend to have, and is something that we have encouraged students to consider through our free, badged open course, Multidisciplinary study: the value and benefits, available on the OU’s free learning platform, OpenLearn.

The original artwork displayed in the gallery was designed and produced by Claire Stringer and Holly Langley from More than Minutes for an animation that is included in the badged open course, with direction and guidance from the Open Programme Student and Engagement Manager, Rehana Awan.

Student guest blog: My student journey

Sarah Andrews is a student on the BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree focusing on mathematics and education related modules . She currently works as a Project Coordinator at the University of Brighton and her interests lie in Widening Participation and Outreach. Sarah was part of the Open Programme’s Student Shadowing Scheme after a successful submission detailing her interest in collaborating with Rehana Awan (Student Communications and Engagement Manager) to co-deliver a workshop at the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference at Keele University in April 2019.

I am what is known today as a ‘First in Family’ or ‘low income background’ student, who grew up in an area with low progression to Higher Education. Back in 2002 (with little guidance as to ‘why’; only that I ‘should’) I applied to university through Clearing and was offered a place studying History of Art at the University of Sussex. I had little guidance or aspiration about careers, and like many selected the subject based on what I had most enjoyed at college. As a fairly academically able student, I had enjoyed and engaged with most of my subjects through my time at school, but there was no one clear pathway ahead of me, and after about a year a combination of dwindling interest in my modules, mounting debt and lack of vision about where my degree might take me led me to drop out. It wasn’t that I wasn’t academically capable, but that I couldn’t engage with the content, and, rather crucially, couldn’t picture myself as someone working in the few careers I’d heard it might lead to.

Over the next ten years or so I worked in a variety of unskilled roles, eventually working for North Lincolnshire Council’s education team, and then STEM Sussex at the University of Brighton, who run several different outreach projects to engage young people with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It was at STEM Sussex that I started working on a number of projects with students less likely to progress to higher education and skilled careers, and discovered that this was something that really gave me purpose and meaning; despite (or perhaps, because) of the ‘glass ceiling’ I was starting to encounter due to my lack of degree level qualification. Around the same time, my line manager asked me, fatefully, ‘have you ever thought about doing a degree?’.

I began to investigate the options open to me, but going to a ‘brick’ university didn’t seem quite right. I couldn’t find just the right course, and I didn’t want to be tied down to attending lectures on particular days when my employment could potentially change. Thankfully I stumbled across an advert for the Open University and had a ‘lightbulb moment’ in realising I could get a student loan and study in my own time, and began to explore the course options open to me. Initially I knew I wanted to do something around young people, but wasn’t quite sure what, and none of the named degree options seemed quite right to me; the focus was either on teaching, social care or early years, none of which fit with my experience of the diverse roles available in extra-curricular and support services for education and schools. Luckily for me, the Open University also offer their Open Degree, and it’s this that I started to explore in greater depth.

The Open Degree is a named degree in its own right; it is well established[1] and carefully structured[2]. I was reassured and encouraged by the course outcomes which focus on development of a qualification that suits the student’s personal and professional needs and aspirations, and realised that with careful thought I could come up with a degree pathway that would be both personally engaging and relevant, and started to build my own bespoke course.

Throughout my life, I have been described by teachers and managers as organised and conscientious, so it’s no surprise that I approached the planning of my degree in a methodical way; there is nothing accidental or coincidental about my plan. I considered several factors including my goals in studying, the skills needed for potential future jobs (none of which included a specific named degree), my personal strengths, and of course my interests. Starting with four main subject areas (education, science, social science and statistics) I looked at all the modules that interested me and seemed relevant and pulled together several possible pathways in each; then over the course of a couple of weeks gradually whittled it down to a pathway that I could see myself completing. This turned out to be the social and policy aspects of education and youth, combined with statistics, which is highly relevant to work in the higher education sector and a transferable skill which will add a great deal to my employability[3].

I’m now half way through my degree, and it has flown past! I have completed modules which have been varied, fascinating and challenging in equal measure. My learning has directly linked to my career path; supporting a secondment within the Widening Participation team at the University of Brighton. I am now working part time in the two teams, on projects which are meaningful and rewarding to me and directly relevant to my studies, for example in development of additional support for less confident students participating in a social mobility driven STEM summer placement programme, and a transitional summer school for mature students starting at the University; both of which are driven by data and evaluation.

Looking forward to the future, I am looking forward to completing challenging, but rewarding modules in statistics, before progressing to my final module, Issues in research with children and young people. I intend to graduate with a 2:1 or above in a degree that is both highly specialised to my current career path and highly flexible to suit many other areas (should I need to change in the future), having developed both in-depth academic knowledge in my chosen area and core aptitudes valued by employers[4]. As with many OU students, the study bug has well and truly bitten; I’m already researching Masters courses I might be able to progress to.

In summary; the Open Degree programme at the Open University has enabled me to build a bespoke degree that interests me and makes sense to my career path, as well as being highly transferable. This has encouraged my full engagement with the course, my satisfaction with the University and degree programme, and my employability once I graduate.

Footnotes:

[1] The “Open degree” was the first qualification to be offered by the OU when the University was first established and is the most commonly awarded undergraduate degree in the OU, with 18.5% of undergraduate honours degrees awarded in 2016/17 and nearly a quarter of a million alumni having graduated with an Open degree since it was first introduced. It is a mature and popular degree that is recognised to be of value by both students and employers.

[2] Students are asked to study one of a number of specified key introductory modules designed to develop base subject knowledge and study skills, and 120 credits in each of stages 1, 2 and 3. A number of suggested pathways are given, or support is available to structure a degree according to your interests. While the Open University does not have initial entry requirements, each module gives clear guidance in regards to entry or prior knowledge needed for successful study.

[3] The UK Employer Skills Survey 2017 highlighted complex analytical skills, including problem solving and numerical/statistical analysis, as one of the most prevalent skills shortages in the labour market. See Department for Education (2018) Employer Skills Survey 2017 [online]. (Accessed 22 March 2019).

[4] The Pearson and CBI Skills Survey 2015 shows that having the right attitudes and aptitudes is by far the most important consideration when businesses are recruiting graduates – nearly nine in ten employers (89%) value these above other factors such as degree subject (62%).

Student guest blog: If I CAN, you can…

On 28 May 2019, BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree student, OU Ambassador and YouTube vlogger, Finlay Games, attend the Jisc Change Agents Network Conference (CAN), hosted by the OU as part of his Student Shadowing experience with the Open Programme. CAN is a network for staff and students working in partnership to support curriculum enhancement and innovation. Finn expressed an interest in exploring the use of social media on the Open Programme in his student shadowing application and was keen to build on his existing skills in this area.

In the first of our student-focused blog posts as part of our OU50 Open Programme celebrations, we follow Finn on his journey throughout a very fun-packed and inspirational day (for everyone involved!). Read on to find out more…

Finn started the day with interviewing Dr Liz Marr (Acting PVC Students) who shared her experience of grief and mental wellbeing in an open and candid interview. He also caught up with keynote speakers Ruby Granger (Studytuber), writer Julian Stodd and Cath Brown (OU Students Association President). He used the interviews and pieces to camera to create the following three vlogs, which were then uploaded to his YouTube channel, FinnTheInvincible, and shared across the Open University social media channels, including the Open Programme’s Twitter account (@OU_OpenDegree).

The videos give a great behind-the-scenes view of the CAN conference, an insight into the Open University campus at Walton Hall and access to some of the team who support the Open Programme.

Have your tissues ready, it gets a little emotional! 🙂

Celebrating "Open" curriculum at The Open University