Employee development

The Open University (OU) and the OU Business School work with thousands of organisations to promote professional and management skills that deliver business results. With its range of business, management and vocational courses and renowned flexible learning methods, the OU is ideally placed to suit your corporate or personal training needs.

The OU works with employers through an action-oriented, needs-responsive team of Corporate Development Managers (CDMs) who seek to provide cost effective and results driven business solutions.

Even the OU can do business speak! It’s a win-win situation!

OUBS France

The OU Business School is a faculty of one of the world’s largest universities – the UK-based Open University. The Open University has pioneered and popularised blended learning throughout the world. For the international management executive, the flexibility and quality of our courses and our support systems are crucial to personal success.

Our unique method of blended learning – a mix of texts, DVDs, online working, residential schools and personal tutorial support – is renowned as the best available. Courses are taught in English, the international business language.

The French website is one of many international OUBS sites designed by Green Cathedral.

Research at the OU

Same old stock images but the layout is nice (fantastic grid design). Some bad usability going on here though. On the research highlights page there are a bunch of things that look like links when they aren’t (at least in Firefox). The Back to top link has an arrow facing downwards which is very odd.

New to the OU

The ‘Get instant answers’ feature is very useful and gives a nice personal touch. The prescribed 1-5 ordering of things to look at on the homepage is interesting. The subpages have less of a design and fall into the same design trap as Courses and Qualifications and other early new brand designs. As with most new OU websites, the text is a tad small for the majority of users (especially the navigation systems).

You, Five, Career or University

Youthful, playful, attractive design. Graphics arn’t very well optimised though which is particularly evident on the main homepage image where there is significant amounts of blurring around the people and “What are your study options” typography. That aside, there are some nice features in here: rollovers on the 01, 02, 03 (but what do the ‘option >>’ labels mean?

The URL of this site is open.ac.uk/five but it’s not apparent why this is the case. There are only three Herbie numbers on the homepage, not five. What exactly is the title of this site – I can count at least three potential candidates.

Seen any cool new brand designs?

Use the Learning Journal to reflect on key milestones in your development. It can help you to analyse your progress and to reflect on what you have learned.

Teachernet

The crucial thing is that students can reflect on something they have done in their studies. This is commonly known as reflective learning.

The most popular vehicle for promoting reflection is a ‘learning journal’ (see Moon, 1999a for an excellent introduction to their practical usage). There are many different types (workbooks, diaries, logs, progress files, profiles) but virtually all serve as a point of focus for students to look back over their recent learning and order their thoughts in order to identify strengths, weaknesses, new levels of understanding learnt and review attitudes. They are also used increasingly to record learning in situations like fieldwork and work placements (see second case-study).

Learning and Teaching web

There are many different types of learning journal. Some are highly structured, prompting the user to fill in forms in order to aid their reflecting. Some are more free-form, like a weblog or diary where there is a single box to do the reflecting in.

The OU Profile software is one example of a structured learning journal.

For the ePortfolio, we need to enable the student to do some reflecting on their learning using a learning journal. Because there are different types of journal, we need to make the system flexible enough to cater for these.

Today I’m thinking about exactly how we might do this. If you have any thoughts, please share them!

Who says the new brand needs to be bland? Whoever designed the “YOU” (learn, earn and be free from debt) publication doesn’t think so. It’s been out a while but it still stands out from the crowd of normal OU publications as being rather exciting and enticingly designed. Whoever came up with it really ought to be doing more of this work.

The accompanying website has also recently been redesigned in the same style. It works quite well but doesn’t quite capture the zest of the print publication. It is, however, a huge improvement on the previous site and has a cool scrolly thing happening on the in-page links.

Seen any great ‘on-brand’ designs lately? Let me know.