Open learning

• Article 8 of 15
• EducationInvestor, June 2012
• View a PDF of the original article

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Google is another firm endorser of the OU's giving away of its content. "We have a free Google AdWords grant. It's a large sum of money that we can use for AdWord advertising campaigns," says Law. The more free content an organisation provides, the bigger the AdWord grant available. Although it might be tempting to think the OU is merely hopeful that free pans out, Law has strict key performance indicators relating to the free content he provides. These measure its value to the brand, the assets it gives back and more - so far, these "hard-nosed" metrics have been exceeded and despite overall budget cutbacks, Law has chosen not to cut back free content as a result.

iTunes U as well as Apple are both important to the OU, although no formal business relationship exists between the two organisations. The OU was one of only four universities involved in the launch of Apple's iTunes U application last year, the only one outside the US, and it now has 300 eBooks and 51 'courses' in iTunes U. Naturally, most of that content is available for mobile devices as well as PCs, and May saw a threefold increase from 11,000 users to 32,000 users in mobile device access to iTunes U content for the OU. It was also one of the first to release textbooks for Apple's iBooks store.

Nevertheless, the OU doesn't want to become an educational publisher, despite producing "some of the most sophisticated interactive textbooks in the world", although Law says the OU doesn't rule out any partnerships with publishers. Nor does it want to get tied down to just one supplier. "Apple has shown real leadership. We like what they do and they like what we do. But we are absolutely determined not to be locked into Apple."

Focusing on iPhone apps, for example, would also cause accessibility problems in certain cases, which is something the OU wants to avoid. That doesn't mean turning to Microsoft - Law says that despite vice-chancellor Martin Bean's background with Microsoft, the university is not currently in commercial discussions with the software giant - but remaining 'agnostic', focusing on developing web products with open standards like HTML5 and then adapting them for different platforms, including Google's Android, Amazon's Kindle and so on. Much of the video content available on iTunes U is also available on YouTube, for example.

The university has no plans to stay still when it comes to technology. It's ready to release a social networking tool for education called "Social Learn" this August, which will allow groups of learners to share information and link their learning experiences, something Law says will be "part of the post-VLE world - a personal learning environment that's a lot more social, dynamic and flexible. The social element could show us interesting ways of engaging with learners in the future in, using learning analytics and recommendation to drive it. It's not there just to be another social network." It's also applied for a European grant related to semantic technology, which will help content to become machine-readable so that the OU's considerable archive of material can be mined for more information and more easily accessed. And there's also a Gates Foundation bid being run with MIT to investigate how to encourage to people to learn digitally.

With a consistent top-three placement in UK surveys of student satisfaction and a 93% satisfaction rating from its students last year, however, the OU is clearly on the right track in its use of technology already. "Our capability to deliver to market using technology is in our life blood," says Law.

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