Our staff stories

I enjoy the flexibility and variety of working at the OU and the wide range of different people both as students and colleagues that one meets.

Leadership is an area that I kind of fell into teaching, through being involved in research around teamworking and health services management.

Mintzberg believed that to become a good manager, as well as gaining academic knowledge, you would also need to learn management skills and practice from hands-on experience of managing: effective managers need to be able to draw on a wide range of experiences.

I knew that OU had been teaching remotely, successfully for decades and I could learn from their success.

I really enjoy working with a wide range of students and always learning things together as we progress through a module presentation, and its especially pleasing to see students progress over that duration.

I enjoy working for the OU Business School because it has such a great reputation with its triple accreditation and quality materials but more importantly because supporting students on their professional journey is very rewarding especially as they have a great wealth of experience that we can all share.

Supporting students achieve their potential and seeing them make the critical ‘learning connections’, linking theory with application.

I became an AL because I vividly remember the wonderful student experience I benefitted from when studying my MBA with the OU. I really wanted to replicate my experience for others and when the OU were recruiting ALs for a postgraduate module called Leadership in Healthcare, I thought that was an area where I could translate both my professional experience in OD and leadership into a tutoring experience for this module, bringing practice and theory together.

I have always been very intrigued by the OU, its philosophy and the quality of its programmes. OU students are often living “real lives” while they study - and that’s an important business and life skill. I had never delivered an online course before, so when the opportunity arose, how could I resist?

In his varied career, tutoring for The Open University Business School is easily the most rewarding thing he has ever done.