About us

Evidence-informed innovation in online, open and distance learning

We are the discipline-based Centres for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at The Open University. Our aim is to create a culture of forward-thinking, student-responsive, evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning in higher education that promotes educational opportunity, enabling inclusion and innovation in line with The Open University’s mission to be ‘open to people, places, methods and ideas’.

We are experts in the field of online, open and distance learning. We share our knowledge with our key stakeholders who include students and staff at The Open University and other Higher Education Institutions, professional associations, funding bodies, businesses, third sector and public sector organisations, policy makers and the media.

Supporting Scholarship

In this video, Professor Kevin Shakesheff, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research & Innovation, explains why and how The Open University supports the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Kevin: So we do scholarship because I think it is so important for our students and for our staff.

I think thinking about our students you know the journey through higher education is a difficult one but really rewarding so we want to think very deeply about the learning experience of the student and by doing that depth of thinking we hope that the course is – is as good as it possibly could be.

Now the Open University does higher education different to anybody else and so there is a particular challenge for the Open University over how you engage personally with each student even though they're spread out across the whole of the UK and the world.

So ultimately for the student we want to get a really fantastic educational experience by thinking about what we call the pedagogy so how is the teaching building to give them the skills and learning that they need. How are we assessing it in a way that’s really enhancing their – their experience but it is also for our staff as well. I think it’s a really rewarding part of the job to think about how what you are doing as a professional is really influencing people’s lives and how you can change things in your teaching which will help all of our students have that better educational experience.

And then you know how do we do scholarship – well we have got four scholarship centres so each of our faculties has a scholarship centre where we cluster together sort of experts but scholarship is done across the whole of the university. I would like to think everybody is involved and in the process and that’s important because if you are doing a course in business it’s very different to say a course in physics or a course in nursing so we need to have the experts close to the courses that they are – that they are teaching on and that their understanding of course close to the students that they are going to be teaching.

So we have got these four centres umm my responsibility is to represent all of this at the university’s Vice Chancellor level umm and to make sure that scholarship is really prominent across the whole university.

And then we provide – and I should say the faculties do a particularly good job here of providing the funding that’s needed to do some projects umm and a project involves working with students and really testing whether a new intervention, a new way of teaching is effective. So they take quite a lot of time and they need some funding umm and also then we do scholarship by sharing what we have found out so we share it across the university because actually although nursing is different to physics is different to business there are some common themes there but also we share it across the UK and across the world so other universities look to the OU to provide some leadership particularly as everybody is now so interested in the online experience of students and we have been there doing it for so many years. We’ve got you know real depth to understanding.