A quarter-century at The Open University

Twenty-five years ago today, I walked into the Venables building at the Open University for the first time as a staff member, was greeted by my new head of department with a hug and a jar of home-made honey, and started to build my new working life. Today, I still have the same office in the same building, though most of the people I then worked with have left the university.

I love working for the OU. It's one of the treasures of the UK, often said to be the idea of which Harold Wilson was proudest in his time as prime minister (though the hard work was done by Jennie Lee). It's full of people who really believe in its mission of social justice through the expansion of high-quality education to as wide a range of people as possible. Like all the best UK institutions, it is quirky, innovative and idiosyncratic. It is also slow to change, frustrating bureaucratic and at times saddled with poor leadership. 

Five years ago I wrote a very comprehensive post on this blog on my work in twenty years at the OU: Reflecting on twenty years at the Open University. I can't really improve on that as a description of the work I've done, but I wanted to reflect a little bit on what's happened since and what might come next. 

Three ways in which the OU has changed since 2020 and/or my own big tasks:

• I've spent a lot of time working on EDI (Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) projects. I was school EDI lead from 2016 onwards, but mostly focused on gender equality through Athena Swan, and we gained an Athena Swan Silver award in 2021. The OU as a whole has progressively shifted EDI work to a wider focus on other areas of equality (especially around ethnicity, disability and economic disadvantage), notably through a focus on awarding gaps. In our school we've had a really active awarding gaps group (led by a couple of other colleagues) which has contributed to lots of other aspects of EDI. My own contributions were mostly in looking at data, and in a really successful EDI professional development series for our faculty. More radically I was involved in a long scholarship project on how to decolonise the curriculum in Computing & IT, which didn't quite answer the core question but did really good work in scoping out decolonisation work. 
• Writing on two big production projects has occupied much of the past few years - a substantial rewrite of the module I've long chaired on IT Systems: Planning for Success, just in time for the huge publicity on the Post Office Horizon scandal that we discuss as an IT systems failure; and a new postgrad systems module on which I authored, Codesigning interventions with systems thinking in practice. The latter of these took a lot of effort by myself and even more by the module chair, produced a really well-written module with some genuinely new ideas about 'systems thinking from the margins' ... and ended up being cancelled along with the apprenticeship programme of which it was a part. A sad business, but we still hope to find a home for the ideas.
• My reflections from five years ago were written a few months into the Covid pandemic. The OU long had a rather weird attitude to places and offices. Of course our students are home-based, and so are our associate lecturers (tutors), our single largest staff group. But staff based at the Milton Keynes campus were largely expected to be in the office most days - academics a bit less so (and with plenty of flexibility), junior professional & clerical staff very rigidly so. Then Covid happened, we very quickly shifted to home working, and many of us haven't gone back. We're told that the typical campus attendance midweek in 2019 was 3500; now it is about one-third of that. It's been a massive cultural change, with real benefits for flexible working and for introverts, but real downsides for community and those who need others around them. For myself: I used to be on campus about three days per week (my journey to work is about an hour by train and bike). Now it's usually one day per week at best, often not that. 

Like a lot of universities, the OU has had a financial crisis in the past two or three years, which all feels a bit grim. I've seen it up close as an ongoing member of Senate; and will see it closer still, along with lots of other decisions, as I've just joined the university Council (its governing body) as an elected member. That alone should lead to an interesting few years ahead - along with work to produce a new module on the ethics of artificial intelligence as part of a new AI programme. 

Where the university will go in the next five years, or the next 25, is really hard to see. The OU still feels like it has a vital social mission, and it still has a large body of people who are keen to do that. 

The OU logo when I first joined
(via TVark)

How that's achieved has changed hugely in the past 25 years - when I first arrived we largely sent out books supported by audio and video tapes (I mostly missed the days of broadcast television of programmes for OU modules). The first module that I chaired, in 2001, was one of the first largely online modules with some great discussion tools built into the website and interactive videos for learning about systems thinking. Now every module has a really good website using standardised tools, and only some modules send out printed books. We used to have residential schools at university campuses across the UK, with monthly tutorials. I chaired the last systems thinking residential school in 2008 and only a handful of modules still have them, and our tutorials have long since gone online. Some of this feels like a loss, some of it an inevitable change. 

What seems very likely is that the way that our social mission is achieved will continue to change just as much - through technological changes, through changes in what we teach, through the way we interact with students. There's much talk at the OU of various ways that things might change in the next few years - we will see how those work out, and changes in society will impact upon us as well, for good or bad. It will be very interesting to see and hopefully I will continue to be a part of it.

One last thing to say. The text above is too focused on 'I' language. The correct pronoun for almost all OU activities is 'we'. All our work is done in teams - every module, every project, every task is team-based. If I've done anything useful, it's been with others. All the stories above have other people behind them (sometimes one person, sometimes lots) who I worked closely with for a few months or a few years. That's been a complete delight, and remains the case. It used to be said (because of the social justice focus and its history) that most people working at the OU were either Christians or socialists, and while that might not be so true today, the communitarian ethos is still really important. The key to the OU's success is the team.

Change anxiety

Today in Quaker Meeting for Worship, some ministry came to me, around change in the world and my associated anxiety. After some deliberation (we are urged to wait to see whether ministry is just for us or for the whole meeting), I spoke - I suspect not entirely coherently. To avoid being over-long and because it didn't seem relevant enough, I didn't speak to the full context behind my thoughts. But while they're still in my head, I wanted to capture them here, for my own sake if no-one else's.

Three sources, two of them related. First, in our meeting's book group, we're reading the novel A Single Thread by Tracey Chevalier. The book is set in 1932, and is about the experiences of a single woman in the years after the First World War, and she (and society more broadly) changed in the aftermath of that terrible conflict. 

Second - and this might seem tenuous but was real for me - as part of my service to the meeting, I keep a mental record of the number of people present (which I later store in a spreadsheet to analyse patterns of attendance), and to keep it in my head I remember it in the form of a date. Today when I counted there were 19 adults in person, 2 children, and 3 people attending via Zoom - thus forming the date 1923. 

That reinforced the book's setting, and made me think: how do individuals respond to the most terrible of changes? Millions died in that war (from 1914 to 1918), millions more in the terrible aftermath as populations shifted across Europe, and yet more millions in the influenza pandemic that came immediately after the war and has never been as well remembered. How do societies recover? Do they try to return to something like the time that had been before, or do they end up creating something new? 

In our own time, we have seen terrible wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Syria (among others), causing destruction and considerable human displacement; we have seen an economic catastrophe in 2008 which led to economic and ongoing political turmoil which is still poorly explored; and a pandemic which caused large numbers of deaths and disruption in the short term which has led to longer term social consequences around working patterns. All significant, though none as terrible in its scale as the First World War. All however are examples of very large scale external changes, and attempts by society and individuals to respond. 

My third source came from my working context. In September of this year, I shall have been working for the Open University for 25 years, something that seems just extraordinary to me. When I first joined, to teach systems thinking, we didn't at the time have a systems department but a systems 'discipline' within a kind of federal department grandly called the Centre for Complexity and Change. I remember telling this to someone I knew who told me that perhaps we ought instead to have a Centre for Simplicity and Stability. Of course, we sought to understand complex systems, and we were situated in a time of great change - as well still are. But since Quakers very much value simplicity, this old story did make me think this morning: do we over-value change? Is there a place in our world for stability? What would that actually look like?

I tend to think of myself as being quite good at change - coping well with large-scale discontinuities. But as the meeting progressed, I realised that in at least three areas of external life, I am currently quite struggling with change. In each of these areas, I don't feel as though I have much sense of agency. In each case, I don't like the direction I see things moving; I don't like the sense that I personally feel ill-equipped to handle the change; and I don't like the sense that institutions I care about also feel ill-equipped to handle the change. These changes (which are all connected in various ways):

• Climate emergency: Last year (2024) was the hottest on record and reached the dread 1.5C above the pre-industrial average; there are currently wildfires in California in January; there are constant floods and massive storms. And society not only seems unable to respond, but in many places is actively going backwards. 
• Right-wing populism: Societies around the world are currently succumbing to political movements which value excessive nationalism, extreme social conservatism, cruelty in the treatment of one's enemies, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hate, and leaders who speak to the deprived of their self-interest but govern for the economic elites. Eight days from today, the United States will inaugurate a president of this kind, but they hold sway in Hungary, and could soon have significant power in France, Germany and perhaps one day the UK. They are supported by rich owners of technology firms who can amplify their message. And centrist governments (whether leftish or rightish) really struggle to counteract their appeal. 
• Generative AI: In a way, I have a more self-centred concern here. My job, based on skills which I have honed over decades, is one of writing high-quality texts. The technologies of ChatGPT and comparable tools make that skill look outmoded, perhaps even unnecessary. At an ethical level, I despise the sense of dishonesty which these tools introduce - of passing off automated words as one's own writing. I despise the enormous resources required to produce these fictions, in energy and water usage; and the massive human cost to workers in the Global South who examine the training data. And I despise the potential impact on public discourse from deepfakes, on education from students scraping through education through submitting fake assignments, and on the economic impact to artists who might also lose their livelihoods. Yet the bandwagon rolls on, lots of people (including sometimes other academics) who should know better are using these tools, and tech firms who have invested billions are trying to make them an inevitable part of search engines and office suites. 

How will these change society? How will I respond to these? Is it simply a sign of privilege that I've spent 54 years on this earth without being challenged by change at this level? And where (as a friend asked me after the meeting) is God in all these considerations? I don't know the answers. I simply feel uncertain and anxious. Change is inevitable as a process (though any given change can be resisted and is definitely not inevitable), but my goodness it's sometimes unsettling.