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.