Exhibition: 50 Years of the OU Students Association

Making digital strides

Over the last decade the Association has made every effort to ensure it remains as relevant and accessible to OU students as ever, which has included the move of three Association cornerstones to digital alternatives. 

 

Online elections  

The first of these developments included the move to a fully online elections process in 2016. In keeping with the principles outlined in the original Association Constitution, the Association is a democratic member-led organisation, which means the Student Leadership Team and some of our trustees are elected by students. By involving students at all levels of governance the Association can ensure that it is achieving its charitable objectives, doing the best it can for students and living within our values.  

The elections are a chance for any student to nominate themselves for a vacant position and for students to then vote for their preferred candidate to represent them. Prior to 2016, there was no provision for all OU students to participate in the Students Association elections. Standing for election and voting for candidates took place at Conference, where voter numbers were limited to around 300 students who were able to attend the event. 

In 2016, the election process introduced ‘one member one vote’ to extend voting rights to all Association members and ‘self-nomination’ to allow any student to stand as a candidate. Consequently, there is now no maximum number of candidates who can stand in an election. 

Thanks to the move to this new system, engagement levels improved and a total of 4,368 voters participated in the main election, with 68 candidates standing for 28 roles. As a result of the successful change to an online secret ballot using the single transferable voting system, all students are now able to vote for the candidates they want to represent their views to the University and beyond, giving students a voice on the issues important to them. 

 

 

Launch of the Hoot 

The Hoot, the Association’s online student magazine, is a dynamic space filled with blogs, stories, articles and quizzes from OU students and the Association. 

Prior to its launch in 2019, the Association had previously shared a print magazine with students, which then transitioned into a digital magazine in the form of a PDF. Unfortunately, as reading a PDF version of the magazine wasn’t a particularly reader-friendly way to take in the latest news and information, readership for quarterly editions had dropped, and we knew it was time to look at developing an alternative. 

As the PDF version was limited in length to keep it readable, the favoured option was a magazine site which could have as much student driven content as readers could keep up with. Following Student Leadership Team discussions and approval, support from Association staff members, lots of workshops, design ideas and everything that goes into developing a website, The Hoot was created.  

Since it was launched The Hoot has become home to an incredibly wide range of content, with over 500 articles available to read and engage with. 

 

 

Online Conferences 

As previously discussed, Conference has long been one of the highlights of the Association calendar, as it offers a positive, community-driven experience for OU students, as well as the chance to discuss and vote on key decisions that affect how the Association is run, the opportunity to meet other students and access a packed programme of student-focused activities. 

Plans for the 2020 Conference were all but finalised when Coronavirus spread across the Globe, and the Association, like the rest of the world, found all plans thrown into jeopardy whilst the Pandemic took hold. 

In an impressive organisational feat, the student-led Steering Committee and Association staff were able to reimagine plans in less than 12 weeks and hold the first ever online Conference. Whilst a fully digital Conference was something that hadn’t been considered until all other options were removed, the event proved to be a roaring success with the highest engagement from students, and highest voting figures, of any Conference in recent years. 

A second online only Conference held in January 2022 followed closely in the tracks of the 2020 event, which aimed to build on this success, and the many benefits that were seen as a result of the inaugural event, such as a lower carbon footprint and overseas students being able to part in the same way as their peers based closer to the Milton Keynes campus.