Fig.1. Love steps in the snow. Spotted outside the Michael Young Building, home to the Open University Business School
I have a unique insight on the Open University. I graduated with a Masters in Open and Distance Education in 2012, worked at the Business School for a year and have done further postgraduate modules since – not just here but at other institutions too.
I know what you get:
- An online system and support network that is second to none: clear, robust, intuitive and friendly.
- You gain from educators who are just that – wedded to the process and their subject.
- And you gain most of all from the fabulous network of contacts and friends that you make – even if you never meet them, you have a myriad of ways to share your thinking and ideas online.
In the course of my duties I interviewed some twenty MBA international students during a residential school in Brussels – what a great, inspired and positive bunch. These were people in business, with aspirations, as start-ups, from the established to the new kids on the block, and from right around the globe. For this residential week they flew in from the US, from Japan and Russia … and everywhere in between or around the corner. That is the nature of the beast – International.
And then, perhaps like so many of us, you finish one module and itch to join another. Personally, I will never stop learning and have found no better way to achieve my goals than with the OU. My next step? After a lifetime of failing to do so, to learn French well enough not simply to understand it and to speak it …. but to write it too. That module starts in October 2014.
Then there’s the MBA. I had the most wonderful time on the module ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’.
