Foreign Perspectives

One of the quite noticeable features of the Open University is that they use your information to promote courses in much the same way as Amazon use your previous purchases to promote books to you.

Thus, once you’re entering the sign-up period for your next course you can expect a little email noting a few courses that you might be interested in. Typically if you’re following broadly the normal path towards a degree these will make some kind of sense. Thus whilst I was doing the French sequence in the French Diploma, I’d get an email basically letting me know that it was time to sign up for the next course in the sequence. However, if you’re not following a standard sequence, the suggestions can be just ask wacky as those from Amazon frequently are.

Since we’re in somewhat more difficult financial times than usual, they’re pulling out the stops to promote courses even more than normal at the moment. Thus even small courses like Plants and People (S173) which would normally only get a brief mention as part of a general promotion of short courses was pushed quite heavily during the SXR270 summer school and has just had another push from the course manager yesterday. Oddly, the summer school for next year hasn’t, yet, had any sales pitch although perhaps they’re assuming that we’ll do that anyway.

What they haven’t done, yet, is the more sophisticated joined-up marketing that some places get up to. Thus, although presumably S173 would help with the plants residential (SXR375) there hasn’t been any cross-marketing of the two of them.