Personal Blogs

I work in the Open University London office as a regional academic, or ‘staff tutor’ as we are colloquially known.

A couple of weeks ago the university council met. One of the outcomes from this meeting meant that the London regional centre (as we know it) will close, and the office space will be given over to FutureLearn, an Open University funded MOOC provider, who are currently housed in the British Library.

London is one of seven regional offices that are going to be shut. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that the impact of these closures are going to be very significant; significant to the university as a whole, significant in the way that we support tutors and students and significant in terms of my day job.

Here’s the most important point: I need an office to do my job.

I need a space to interview tutors. I need a space where I can have one to one chats with students who might be struggling with important parts of their studies. The university needs a space where disability and accessibility assessments can be performed. We also need a space to run tutorials and one off associate lecturer development events. We also need a space to run, and plan, regional outreach and widening participation events. We need a space where we can run our bi-annual AL development conference. We also need a space where we can work with colleagues in other higher education institutions and run academic workshops.

Without a regional centre, or an office that I can regularly use many of these activities will become significantly harder to do. Also, the way that the university supports its associate lecturers (who are, arguably, the most important people within the university when it comes to student support and retention) will be significantly impoverished. It will be harder to get tutors in the same room together, because there will be more barriers and hurdles in our way.

There are other direct impacts on those of us who are staff tutors. One significant impact is that we will have less clerical and administrative support. I work with a great bunch of people who can help me to solve problems. If I need students moved between different groups, I can ask (which means to ‘speak to’) colleagues who get things done. These great people also help us to check documents and to prepare interviews for associate lecturers. When the faculty administrative support moves to Manchester, I shall miss them.

Finally, it’s going to be hard to create and sustain a community of staff tutors. We all need to share war stories about different aspects of our jobs. We need that space to share experience: this sharing of practice is, of course, a really important part of developing excellent teaching. By excellent teaching, I’m not just talking about face to face teaching: I’m talking about correspondence teaching and everything that goes with it.

Working at home will make it harder for us to do all these things: we will lose an important human aspect to our job that is really important. Losing our regional centres will make things harder for us and our tutors. And, sadly, I fear this will also make it harder for us to support our students. 

Other blogs:

• I’ve voted
• Don’t close our regional centres