Reflecting on twenty years at the Open University

Twenty years ago today, I started work at the Open University, and I haven't stopped there since. This seems like a long time - as I'll be 50 in a few months, it's just over 40% of my life, a much higher proportion of my adult life. There's been times I've been very fed up with the OU or various of its aspects, but I've always been proud to work there. So to mark the occasion I've been reflecting a bit, on what I've done and what I might still do there.

The OU is amazing in the way it touches people's lives - giving the opportunity for higher education to those who have missed out in one way or another. It was set up with an explicit intent for social justice, and despite ups and downs has always retained that. I'm constantly struck by how much colleagues buy into the mission of the university, and especially this goal for social justice - as much as anything else, this is what has kept me at the OU all this time. Years ago I remember speaking at Quakers' Britain Yearly Meeting in a session about social action, with lots of people talking about brilliant work they were carrying out, feeling quite inadequate, but realising that working at the OU was its own form of social action - and I still feel that way.

In addition: I like the many people I've worked with at the OU, uniformly creative and caring; I like the fact that I'm basically paid to be a writer of high-quality teaching texts; I like the amount of freedom that my job allows, in what I do and when I do it; I like the way that around us academics is a huge infrastructure of people to turn our draft materials into really polished collections of learning resources (whether on paper or online); I like the caring nature of the organisational culture; and indeed I like working in Milton Keynes (even if I'm not sure when I'll next be there in person). 

My office door for the past 20 years

I also like having had the freedom to change my academic interests and affiliations over time. I've had the same office and the same job title for twenty years, but institutional changes have meant that I've been in three different faculties and four different departments, each with a somewhat different scope. When I joined, I was in the Systems Discipline, part of the Centre for Complexity and Change (still the best department title ever) in the Faculty of Technology; today I'm in the School of Computing & Communications in the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics. Some of that's a merging process - we have much larger departments and faculties than 20 years ago, and I'm not sure that's all for the best - but quite a bit of it is to do with boundary shifting. 

Like most academics, my brain is wired to think of my work in the three categories of teaching, research and administration, so I'll write a bit in those categories.

Teaching

The bulk of everyone's work at the OU has always involved teaching, and really good teaching at that. This sets us apart in the sense that a lot of universities (especially the more high-status ones) look down on teaching. In my twenty years I've written significant amounts of teaching materials for eight separate modules (which used to be called courses when I first arrived). These have the codes (the only way OU insiders refer to them) of T205, T853, T810, T215, T219, TM353, TM255, TB872; and they cover topics of systems thinking (in various forms), information systems, information & communications technology, and environmental management. 

Each of these modules/courses took a team of several academics (smallest was just me, largest over a dozen) around 2-3 years of intensive work of generating ideas, writing and rewriting, along with lots of media specialists to edit and make it look nice, at an investment of over £1m for the university. And each one (apart from one) has lasted around 8 years, with hundreds of students and a series of ongoing tasks of writing assessments, modifying materials, dealing with the tutors who teach our stuff directly, and many more. 

View from my office window in springtime

I've chaired four of these modules, three of them in 'production' (of a new module, including T810 which never quite got off the ground but begat the very successful Systems Thinking in Practice postgraduate programme), and three of them in 'presentation' (i.e. the actual study and management of the module over several years). For all these modules, the commitment has been multi-year and involved building an ongoing relationship with a team of academics and others. At any one time, I've only usually been working on a couple of modules (though I've been on various exam boards for other modules at the same time), but almost always have been writing for one module or another. 

None of this is especially unique - all OU academics have a similar story of teaching. I'm moved around somewhat in the subjects I've taught, more than some people, less than others (I know people who have written on both electronics and music, as just one example). But it's a very distinctive way of teaching, that non-OU people don't always realise. 

Research

My research interests have also changed over time. By many academics' standards, my research career at the OU has been somewhat low-key, even weak. I've had no significant large-scale projects and no external grants (I've seldom seen the need, though occasionally I've applied for grants). I've published 3 books, 7 journal articles, 6 book chapters, and 7 good conference papers - not hugely many. But some of my research work I'm immensely proud of. 

Two areas to mention specifically:

• Systems Thinkers: this is the biggest and best thing I've done. Back in 2002, Karen Shipp and I hatched a plan to take up one of the Systems Discipline's unfinished project, to write about the lives and work of the key people in systems thinking. After 2.5 years of a reading group with colleagues, and almost 5 years of intensive writing (and huge amounts of reading), this became our book Systems Thinkers (2009), which discusses 30 amazing people in loving detail through a series of 2500 word essays pinpointing their ideas and their lives accompanied by extracts from their work. Ten years later, Karen and I went through the 30 authors again, re-read our chapters, I read everything new I could find by or about our authors, and rewrote each chapter in the light of this, to produce our second edition (2020). I felt a real sense of passion for every single one of those 30 people as I wrote about them, a real urge to tell their story and link their ideas to the body of systems work; and I continue to be really pleased when I meet people who've found the book helpful. To date, chapters from the book have been downloaded more than 90,000 times.

• DTMD: my other big research work at the OU, this time with David Chapman. In 2007 we co-organised an internal workshop to look at the way different academic disciplines gave a prominent role to information as a concept, but treated it in very different ways. This led to an edited book, two more workshops in Milton Keynes but with an international reach and some excellent speakers; and then three more workshops at other people's conferences. Many of the events ran under the label 'DTMD', The Difference That Makes a Difference, from Gregory Bateson's celebrated definition of information. We brought together a lot of interesting people and really managed to contribute to the burgeoning field of information studies (and even had a research group for a time under the DTMD label). Latterly, with other OU colleagues, we moved the work in a more critical direction, looking at the social, political, racial and gender impact of information and refocusing it under the banner of 'critical information studies'.

In addition to these, I've written more on online communications and collaboration, a topic which was really niche when I did my PhD in the mid-90s, still not that popular when we produced a book-length reader for T215, but now extremely mainstream. I've supervised two PhD students to completion, and I'm supporting a third at present. And I edited the long-standing journal Kybernetes for four years (with three other OU colleagues), which was exciting and high-profile but a huge amount of work and eventually just too much (especially publishing around 100 papers a year). So not too small an amount of research!

Admin

And lastly to the member of the academic trio that we all profess to hate. The OU does have an extraordinary amount of bureaucracy, stifling processes, growing hierarchy and form-filling. But it's all done in the cause of high-quality education and social justice, so it's still just about tolerable. And we still have vestiges of a collaborative approach to governance and self-management which I really appreciated when I first arrived, and some of which we still see today. 

So as well as the module chairing, I've regularly attended department and faculty meetings every few weeks or months - when I was first at the OU, monthly Systems Discipline meetings and quarterly Senate meetings (originally open to all) felt like really special and important occasions. I've been on a series of departmental committees, occasionally participated in organisational reviews and restructurings, and sat on various teaching committees. 

Since 2014, two admin roles have increasingly defined my working life at the OU. 

First, I've been an elected member of Senate for six years, participated in its quarterly meetings, written reports on each meeting, had numerous pre-meetings and side meetings, and participated in various attempts to work through Senate to lessen the damage of a series of really foolish attempts at organisational change (which ultimately led to the vice-chancellor being forced from office). 

Second, I've been part of the department's work on gender equality, first as a member and later as chair of the self-assessment team for the Athena SWAN scheme. I profoundly believe in gender equality, and the field of computing and communications which bounds my current department is discriminatory against women in all sorts of ways. So it's satisfying work, although also very very procedural and bureaucratic, with action plans and accreditation scheme. It's also drawn me into university-level gender equality work. 

All this admin takes a lot of time, and I sometimes doubt my usefulness to it. But it also contributes to the ongoing building of the OU.

The future

Who knows? People stay at the OU for a long time. I've thought about leaving more than once, and actively tried to go elsewhere a few times, but those didn't work out. For now, the variety, the commitments to social justice and high-quality teaching, and the chance to continue reading and writing, keep me there. Working with systems thinking again in the past couple of years is especially pleasing. I've been proud to be at the OU for 20 years, and I'm certainly not bored of it yet!