Is the Open University going to be closing up shop?
February 25th, 2014 | 
Author: Things are not looking too good for the Open University at the moment.
The changes in the financing of higher education in England have hit it hard. Gone are many of the possibilities that they had to subsidise courses and with that the numerous named science degrees, the popular science summer schools, the lovely books and the face to face tutorials. Instead we will, from 2015, have only the Natural Sciences degree, the last science summer school ran in 2012, as courses go online the printed books are disappearing and most courses have only online tutorials these days.
Associated with those changes are restrictions on the degrees that mean that the very popular 10 point science courses are on their way out and the various 15 and 20 point courses will be gone by 2017. Some, but far from all, of the 10 and 15 pointers are reappearing as packaged 30 pointers but the freedom of choice is gone as is the sampler aspect of the 10 and 15 point courses.
At the other end, i.e. level 3, courses seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate in some faculties with others finding that some quite difficult 30 point courses are packaged into 60 pointers, again limiting choice somewhat.
An article by one of the OU staff in the recent edition of The Biologist tried to point out all the plus points of doing lab work online but even he started off by saying that you don’t get the distinctive character of working in a lab – from the smells, the experiments that are awful to do, the experiments that don’t work and even the bits that nobody likes to do i.e. the cleaning up. Tellingly he also mentioned the need to educate employers about how much virtual experiments are like the real thing. Sorry, but they aren’t – in real life, people need to be able to do real experiments.
For many people the choice after level 3 was to do a masters with the OU but that’s no longer the case. The very popular psychology masters disappeared several years ago but for many the first thought is to look outside the OU which didn’t seem the first option even quite recently. Mind you, that isn’t entirely the fault of the OU – it’s that there is much more choice around these days.
Add it all up and there seems to have been quite a drop in enrolment of late. Whether that will continue, we don’t know for sure at the moment but the signs seem to point that way.
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Yes, it’s all very sad. I was interested in starting a degree in Maths & Physics, or doing an Open Degree. However, the physics offering is very weak. The main physics unit is on it’s last run this year. I’ve contacted the OU and their response didn’t exactly fill me with much hope for the future, although they say there will be a suitable replacement. It’s a shame.
The Social Science dept. postgrad set up seems to have been left in disarray (they have a note on their web page saying they are sorting things out). I get the impression a lot of the modules are on their last legs.
So, this raises a point, should I pay out £1250+ for a 30 credit module when the future offerings are not clear? You can buy an awful lot of books for £1250 – including OU books (I recently picked up the book for the Social Science course for a penny on Amazon). OK, so it’s not the same as having a tutor and the full-support that a University can provide, but I don’t actually need another degree – this learning is for fun. And do I really want to sweat my way through exams?
I think there are a lot of people who study at the OU for fun, who will seriously be considering whether it’s worth it, and also considering what alternatives for study are open to them.
I think the OU will be around for a while yet, but like many aspects of higher education things are changing, and not always for the better.
I’d go with Q77 as S207 is being replaced with the main difference being that it’s going to be online only i.e. you wouldn’t get the books. Many of the physics courses are being refreshed over the next couple of years so if you were starting soonish then they’d all be quite new by the time you reached them (though most/all would be online only).
The social science PG seems to be restarting with a new version of one of the main modules starting later this year. That leaves three or four modules still to be done (which they may not).
To be honest, I wouldn’t be worrying too much about the “full support” of a tutor as you put it. With the move to online teaching, you don’t get that to the same extent in my experience. Mind you, sometimes there is a LOT more tutorial time online than there ever was before that e.g. the almost weekly 2 hour+ tutorials of my chemistry course.
If you are doing it just out of interest, have a look at coursera.org which has hundreds of courses. Variable quality but some are really excellent and few that I’ve seen are awful.
PS If you already have a degree, have a look at the masters courses on findamasters.com . In a lot of cases, they are cheaper than the OU and, depending on the subjects you fancy, there is the option of doing distance learning through one of the European universities which are a LOT cheaper than the OU and in some countries they are free (nope, you don’t have to live in them to get them free).
Arnold, thank you so much for your interesting advice, especially your “PS”. It’s funny you mentioned doing a Masters. As I already have a degree (1984) and Master’s (from 1994), my ultimate goal was to do an MPhil. I’ve been in my career (IT) for 30 years, so I really don’t need another degree to progress things. I wanted to do some kind of original research, but felt a PhD was way too long. The idea behind doing the OU course was to refresh my maths as much as anything, with maybe a couple of other units thrown in for pure interest. I am thinking now I’d be better off not doing the OU degree, but maybe doing some foundation work/revision through self-study (I already have the books) and then doing either a taught masters or MPhil, either at the OU or somewhere else. The web site you pointed out looks excellent – I had never thought of studying with a European University, but I think that is an excellent idea – thanks for suggesting that. I’d heard of Coursera, but never checked them out, for some reason I had assumed they were programming courses only – I’ll see what their maths offerings are like. Your advice also helped me decide to focus on Maths – that can then be applied to a variety of areas later – but for now I’m going to focus on maths. Thanks again! 🙂