OPEN
UNIVERSITY
9180 OU 1 - Starting at the Open University
When I heard that I was being offered the job of Lecturer at the Open University (OU) I felt almost as if I had won the lottery. In fact, so glad was I with my good fortune that I started with its Open Business School (OBS) before my official start date! In turn they were so desperate to get people on board, especially to write the first level course of the MBA, that I was immediately hired on consultancy basis. This ad-hoc consultancy was a very enjoyable change from the stresses of selling Mentor packages.
As I have said elsewhere, the marketing course in the Diploma was, to put it mildly, basic. On the other hand, the only way that the OBS could actually pull together the complete foundation course was to literally encapsulate all the existing Diploma courses.
At the time this looked horrendous, because the courses stretched about five feet along a bookshelf. However, the students were not required to do all of them; since study guides were written for each one. We rationalised this as being that the students got a good education, and had the rest of the Diploma material (which was enough to provide two to three years of education) thrown in for free. Fortunately the students agreed with this viewpoint.
My consultancy job, therefore, was to write a guide to the marketing course. In fact, my guide ended up being almost as long as the original (P677) course itself. As I have said the marketing course was very basic, and I had to put in a lot of extra theory in order to make it intellectually challenging enough for the new MBA students.
The team of us producing this foundation course used to meet either in the Technology block of the University, where one of the OBS team, Lewis who had come from technology, still had an office or in the London Region HQ. It was a good team to work with. It was led by Ian, who had been the Dean of the OBS before that time, and was then the London Regional Director. Also on it was Sheila Cameron, who was the OBS' manager at Oxford Region, plus the Lewis who had previously been in technology; as well as one of the best course managers I have worked with. It was, in fact, very high-powered team. This was fortunate, since we needed to get the whole one credit programme out in a year. At that time the OU used to measure its courses in credits -- one credit was equivalent to a year of full-time study -- where in later years this changed to the national standard of points, where the equivalent of a year's study was 240 points.
As already hinted, I found this work very relaxing. It was true that to attend the regular weekly meetings I had to travel from Ashford to the University, 50 or 60 miles along the motorway, but this was before the M25 became a solid traffic jam and -- in any case - going out of London it was against the peak-time traffic. Anyhow, I spent most of the time writing; basking in the sun in Windsor Great Park. I had always enjoyed writing and now I found it even more enjoyable. This was a good thing, since the next decade and a half of my life were to be given over to writing for the Open University.
When I eventually took up my position in OBS, I drove down the main avenue leading to Walton Hall to find it lined with glorious daffodils. Somehow it felt like coming home, which for the next ten years it was. Indeed, every spring thereafter -- when the daffodils came out in their thousands -- I felt the same warm feeling.
At first were just a handful of us, probably not many more than a dozen in total, on the top floor of the administration building. There was little camaraderie then, but that all the changed when we moved to Stony Stratford.
As my work on the foundation course, B800, of the MBA had more or less finished, my main job was the Chair (in maintenance) of P677 which was the marketing course in the Diploma. My predecessor had been somewhat of the disaster, and had not had his contract renewed, but I later heard that the University he moved to actually valued him highly; success really does depend on finding the environment which matches your talents.
There was nothing I could do to that the course, since it was -- in OU terms -- in maintenance. In essence this meant the course team chair's job, my job, was just to run it in the field. You weren't expected to make dramatic changes to it, though I did to other courses later on. It was only when a course got into development or production, that was either a new course or a significant revision of an existing course, that large amounts of new material were written
Accordingly I spent much time, with my various course managers, running residential schools and exams. This sounds as if it was a relatively light workload. But, with approaching 1,000 students on course, it actually was quite onerous. On the other hand, after so much time in the wilderness, I loved it.
I also took over another course, P671, which covered international marketing. It was an unusually short course. Where P677 was quarter of a credit long, three months equivalent as were most of the Diploma courses, P671 was only an eighth of a credit -- in other words just about six weeks long. Even so, somehow, in addition to a weekend residential school, we also ran a day school. This was quite impressive; since we used to hold it in the boardroom at the BBC in Regent Street. We sat around the table with a massive portrait Lord Reith glaring down on us. The BBC at that time thought that the OU was one of its departments, and we made good use of this.
It was, though, not a very good course since it really concentrated on the routine administration of exports. It was one of the few OU courses which had been sponsored, in this case by the BOTB - the British Overseas Trade Board. We never really made a success of such sponsored courses, because the sponsor's demands usually meant that courses themselves never met the academic standards we would have wanted nor the students’ own needs.
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