Staff development day

Open University region 02 associate lecturers had the annual get together for a staff training day. It started with a talk from our regional director, Celia Cohen, who had the job of giving us the bad news of how our funding is being cut. The long-term outlook is bleak because of cut backs on funding on students with equivalent or lower qualifications (ELQ) than they are studying for and other probable public expenditure cuts. Although student numbers are rising, in the long-term we still must reduce costs. So we'll remove courses that don't make a contribution, have too few students, are too complex, or are expensive to run.

In our faculty groups we then had to come up with good ideas to help the situation. Usually we get told something about the state of the faculty, and which courses are being withdrawn or rewritten.

So it was a bit of a bleak day compared to previous years.

Still, there were some good sessions, like the one on using Elluminate, and we finished with strawberries and cream, and a big 40th birthday cake for the OU.