OU Response to Your Views Shared in the Student Voice Festival in Feb/March 2024

Although it has been a few months, you may remember sharing your views with us on a range of topics in Student Voice Festival. Thank you once again for giving your time and sharing your feedback with us on these topics, to allow us to improve the student experience!

Since then, staff have been analysing your feedback and we are now getting in touch to share the full response to the Student Consultation Meetings (the in-person sessions) and the online sessions of Student Voice Festival, including next steps.

Here are some highlights of the changes we have been able to make or plan to make as a result of YOUR feedback:

Sustainability - Produce a recorded induction, explaining key sustainability terms and introducing students to the OU approach and signposting to activities, in collaboration with the OU Students Association.

Scholarship - Created a digital badge to award ‘Students as Partners in Educational Research’ who have completed 8+ hours scholarship work.

Access Modules - Created a ’Student Choice week’ in the Access module material to help students navigate to subject sites for more information on further study.

Library - We loved your enthusiasm for a badged course. It has encouraged us to continue to develop a three-level badged Digital and Information Literacy course which we hope to launch in September 2024.

Student Mental Health - Reviewed our use of language around sharing mental health challenges to move away from the terms ‘disclosure and declaration’ – we are updating this across Student Support Services.

First TMA - We are trialing new communications for modules presenting in October 2024 that provide reassuring support to students prior to their first TMA submission.

OU Students Association - We gave all students the opportunity to vote in our Conference to rebrand the Student Association as the OU Students’ Union (OpenSU). At the conference, 83.34% voted in favour for the change and we are currently working on this rebrand.

Enrolling at the OU – We have prototyped a ‘task list’ to show users how far along the journey they were, and what was left to do and delivered a ‘check you’re ready’ feature to a proportion of applicants in England as a pilot.

We will keep you updated on future work in these areas through our Student Consultation and Student Voice Newsletter and via our Student Voice website.