Exhibition: OU Research at 50

Recent Research

Acclaimed research continues to take place at The Open University, and as the institution moves towards its sixth decade it is as pioneering as ever.

In December 2013, the Listening Experience Database went live. This project – a collaboration between the OU’s Music Department, KMi and the Royal College of Music – explores and collates people’s experiences of listening to music across genres, cultures and history.

In the first video clip on this page, Professors Teresa Cremin and Peter Twining discuss their research into current teaching practice and the use of digital technologies.

The University’s involvement in ground-breaking space exploration research continued with the development of Ptolemy: a gas chromatography–mass spectrometer instrument designed to measure chemical aspects on comets. Ptolemy was housed on the Philae Lander as part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission – launched in 2004, it finally landed on the target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014. The photograph on this page shows Professor Ian Wright who was the principal investigator leading on the creation of Ptolemy, alongside a model of the Philae Lander.

Between 2014 and 2017, The Open University led a multi-partnership project alongside Milton Keynes Council and other partners, titled MK:Smart. This project won a number of awards and explored solutions for reducing energy and water consumption, coupled with other social and environmental aspects of city living in the 21st century.

The second video on this page features Dr Catriona Havard, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, outlining her research into eye-witness identification on social media and one of the experiments she has conducted into this.