Ten things you didn’t know about The Open University

Proctors has just delivered a brand new pan-European website on its behalf… and we discovered some interesting facts along the way.

1. Open University (OU) students are the most satisfied in the UK, according to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. What’s more, the OU has consistently come out on top since the survey’s inception five years ago.

2. Over 1,400 prisoners are taking OU courses to help them get back on track.

3. Alumni include Joan Armatrading, Jerry Hall, Sheila Hughes, Lenny Henry, Mylene Klass, Gerry Hughes (the first deaf person to sail the Atlantic single-handed), and Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

4. Every week, the main (student guidance) website gets a whopping 70,000 hits. Meanwhile, 110,000 students use the OU’s conferencing facilities for over 16,000 conferences.

5. This national institution has star quality. It famously featured in Educating Rita, in fiction in Arthur C Clarke’s Sunstorm, and on the small screen in programmes from Life On Mars to Black Books and Brookside.

6. It offers a hugely diverse course list… and you can even pay for some courses using Tesco Clubcard points!

7. The seed for long-distance learning was sown in 1926, when J C Stobart (BBC employee, educationalist and historian) wrote a memo advocating a 'wireless university'.

8. The OU began life as ‘The University of the Air’. According to the OU’s main website:

‘In March 1963, a Labour Party study group under the chairmanship of Lord Taylor presented a report about the continuing exclusion from higher education of the lower income groups. They proposed an experiment on radio and television: a 'University of the Air' for serious, planned, adult education.’

9. The University has a huge – and hugely popular – Library. It contains a mind-boggling 23,975,684 books and receives more than 2.5 million annual page views each year.

10. It is the UK’s largest university, the third-largest in Europe, 29th in the world, and its Business School is the only distance learning provider with triple international accreditation (AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA).