25YearsOU
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25 Years of OU/Ed Tech – 2020: The Online Pivot
via GIPHY A “2 for the price or 1” post! As part of the ongoing 25 Years of Ed Tech project, I do one post that is based around the ed tech of that year that would have been included (the book stops in 2018 – oh and while you’re here, remember to check out the audiobook and podcast series of the book). I’ve also been doing my 25 Years of OU series reflecting on my career over 25 years at one institution. For this final post in the latter, and the 2020 entry for the former, there is a crossover of these two series, it’s like the time Magnum…
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25 Years of OU – 2019: The Open Programme
In 2019 I became the Director of the Open programme at the Open University. The open programme covers our ‘Open’ qualifications, such as the Open degree. When the OU was founded, you could only get an open degree, there were no named ones. This was part of the deliberate policy to imagine a new type of university and education. The OU’s first VC, Walter Perry put it like this: “a student is the best judge of what [s]he wishes to learn and that [s]he should be given the maximum freedom of choice consistent with a coherent overall pattern. …this is doubly true when one is dealing with adults who, after…
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25 Years of OU – 2018: The OU crisis
via GIPHY And thus we arrive at 2018, a pivotal year in OU history. Under the leadership of then VC, Peter Horrocks, the OU was making the headlines for all the wrong reasons – regional centres were closing, staff were striking, the finances were in a bad shape and the people at the top were disconnected from staff and students. It all came to a head in 2018 with the VC finally resigning. I’m not a brave or particularly militant person, and I’m very loyal to the OU as an institution, so I refrained from joining in much of the criticism publicly. Privately though there were a number of underground…
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25 Years of OU – 2017: TEF
In 2017 I applied to be an assessor for the new Teaching Excellence Framework, and was appointed. I wanted to be part of it because I felt that the process would not represent a distance education establishment like the OU very well, and as someone who likes to promote widening participation I feared it would favour the usual Russell Group suspects. In the end, my role as assessor had little impact on those areas, the OU did a lot of consultation with the TEF team, although the metrics still proved problematic for us. Before I list some of the criticisms, I will also highlight just how well the process was…
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25 Years of OU – 2016: Being a student
One of the benefits of working at the OU is that you are eligible for a staff fee waiver to study OU courses. When I first joined I studied one module in Shakespeare, but since then I had always found reasons to postpone further study: I had a young child, or a big project, or was focusing on something else. Around 2014 the personal stars aligned – my daughter was now older, I was single and work was well established, so I studied over the next four years or so. I completed a Masters in History, and then, because MAMA are good initials to have after your name, I did…
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25 Years of OU: 2015 – GO-GN
I mentioned that the OER Hub was probably the defining research grant of my career, but GO-GN is probably my favourite. It is also the most fortunate to have come my way. It was set up by Fred Mulder from the OU Netherlands. Fred, who sadly passed away in 2018, was an absolute force when it came to pursuing funding for things he deemed good ideas. He had the belief that OER field would benefit from research, but as the field was in its infancy the research community needed support to grow. By establishing a global network of doctoral researchers the reach and impact of OER could be increased. He…
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25 Years of OU: 2014 – Battle for Open
As an academic, part of the expectation is to publish journal articles and book chapters particularly with the REF in mind. I’ve always managed a reasonable level of output without being one of the people with an h-index of 60. But I would say my preferred output methods are at opposite ends of the effort continuum – blogs and books. I had written three books previously. When I published my first, Delivering Learning on the Net, I sat back and awaited the new lifestyle of riches, yachts and fame that would ensue. I am still waiting. It was with 2011’s The Digital Scholar though that I began to feel like…
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25 Years of OU – 2013: FutureLearn
via GIPHY At the end of The Year of the MOOC, the OU VC of the time, Martin Bean, invited a few of us to discuss a new project. There was political pressure (I believe but not had it confirmed) on the OU to engage with MOOCs. The argument went something like “you get all this money to widen participation in education, and there’s these MOOCs getting millions of learners for free”. I probably don’t need to explain why that is a deeply flawed take, but the sentiment was there nonetheless. More significantly, the OU had successfully entered the OER field with OpenLearn, which can be seen as a broadening…
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25 Years of OU – 2012: OER Hub
The OER Research Hub, funded by the Hewlett Foundation, is probably the defining research grant of my career. With Patrick McAndrew and colleagues in IET we were successfully awarded a grant for 3 years to examine the evidence for OER impact. At the time there was a lot of beliefs and claims around OER but not much evidence. We generated 11 hypotheses that tested these beliefs and set about trying to get evidence for them. The Evidence report is the best outcome of this work, along with a lot of other publications. What was really significant for me personally was that it facilitated networking with really interesting OER people. All…
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25 Years of OU – 2011: JIME
Around this time I became a co-editor of The Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) with my colleague Ann Jones. It had been founded in 1999 by Simon Buckingham Shum, operating their own software, fully open access and an open peer review model. It was very experimental at the time – even a fully online journal was novel. Simon and Tamara Sumner outline the innovative nature of the journal in this article. It transferred into IET later, and shifted its focus more to open education. The recurring academic institution issue of maintaining legacy software arose, and finding funding to do so, and so it was relaunched using OJS, the…
