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Welcome ....
to your festive newsletter, featuring the latest news from The Open University Business School (OUBS)
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The OUBS Alumni Engagement team thanks you all for your support throughout this most unusual of years. We are delighted and thankful to have such engaged and proactive alumni and we hope that you will continue to stay connected to us and each other in 2021 and beyond.
The pandemic continues to dominate our lives and the ever-growing ‘Business and Law in the time of COVID-19’ online series captures the School’s range of ongoing research, scholarship and public engagement activities. To help keep up festive spirits, we invite you to take a light-hearted view at the Vietnamese Government’s public health message, a catchy pop song, which has enjoyed millions of YouTube views and been an effective public health intervention, included in a blog by our postdoctoral researcher Victoria Murphy. Unrelated to this but also worth sharing for festive smiles is when CNN interviewed one of the first Britons to receive the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine here!
Season’s Greetings and let’s hope for a Happy, Safe and Prosperous New Year.
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It’s mission accomplished for student winner Rebecca
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There are some fantastic student stories from our Student and Alumni Awards which will be further showcased in the New Year – winners here. One such story belongs to determined Rebecca Pooley, the Professional Certificate in Management 2019 Student of the Year. Her husband was already undergoing chemotherapy for cancer when she signed-up in 2018 as a stepping stone to the MBA programme. He unfortunately passed away on 26 August 2019, just eight days before her final assignment was due and three weeks before the exam.
Rebecca, who has two young sons, was undeterred even though she was a month behind. She submitted her assignment on time and sat the exam, nervous and under prepared. She said: “I cried when the results arrived and my assignment mark was a whopping 96% which I’m really proud of. I also passed the exam and it was mission accomplished as I’ve now started the MBA programme.”
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Online public lecture: Grace to advocate for a Green New Deal
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You are invited to join esteemed author and economist Grace Blakeley for her online public lecture early in the New Year. This event on Thursday 21 January (18:30 start) is being hosted by the Research into Employment, Empowerment and Futures (REEF) academic centre of excellence and its Director Dr Owain Smolovic Jones.
Grace, who appears regularly as a political and economic media commentator with appearances on Question Time, BBC This Week and BBC Breakfast, will draw on ideas from her new book, The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism. She will argue that the pandemic will reshape the UK and global economies in profound ways and the time has come to organise for a Green New Deal, one that aligns climate justice with social and economic justice.
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Alumni contribute to new course launched today
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Our Alumni of the Year Award winner Maggie Miller and former Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King are two of the contributors to our new skills-focused microcredential short course being produced by OUBS academics. Four members of the OUBS International Advisory Board (IAB) – MBA alumna Maggie (Chair) and colleagues Bruce Lee, James Crotty and Sanjeeb Chaudhuri – have been involved in ‘Management of Uncertainty: Leadership, Decisions and Action’ which opens for enrolment today and starts on 15 March 2021. Professor of Organisational Behaviour Mark Fenton-O’Creevy (pictured) and Dr Layla Branicki, a Senior Lecturer in HR Management and Organisation Studies, are the two academics involved. Microcredentials are industry-endorsed online courses designed to help learners quickly build in-demand career skills. This 12-week postgraduate level short course is hosted on our digital learning sister platform, FutureLearn. Find out more and register here.
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Webinars highlight diversity and inclusion along with strategic agility
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Award-winning OU MBA alumna Rachel Blackburn, Dr Habib Naqvi MBE and Head of the Business School and FBL Executive Dean Professor Dev Kodwani were on the panel for ‘How can business schools help create more racially diverse businesses?’ on Wednesday 2 December. Watch the webinar recording here and also read a follow-up article by Senior Lecturer in Management Dr Terry O’Sullivan here.
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More than 170 civil servants joined a lively panel discussion for a ‘Getting beyond the moral argument for diversity and inclusion’ webinar on Wednesday 25 November. This was chaired by Professor of Law Simon Lee, with research-led contributions from Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour Dr Stefanie Ruel and Waqas Ahmed, a Visiting Fellow working with Executive Education. Stefanie joined from Montreal, where she is currently based, to share her extensive research in this area and personal experience of working as a STEM professional and only female Mission Manager at the Canadian Space Agency. Watch the recording here.
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The second in a series of webinars from the Strategic Management and Leadership research cluster outlined current thinking on strategic agility and its practical implications for organisational leadership. Dame Stella Manzie DBE was joined by Phil Atherton and Professor Peter Rodgers (University of Southampton), also on Wednesday 25 November, to share experiences of agility in both business and public sectors. Watch the webinar recording here and also read Professor of Strategic Management George Frynas’ follow-up article here.
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Deadline nears for Future Leader Fund nominations
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The Future Leader Fund is a scholarship for the first two modules of the MBA for someone with the potential to be a Future Leader – further details here. Please share with friends, family and other colleagues as the deadline for 2021 applications is Thursday 7 January – how to apply. The beneficiary will be announced in February and their studies are due to start in May.
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Massive thank you to the #OUfamily in The Big Give
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More than £44,000 was raised for the OU’s Disabled Veterans’ Scholarships Fund (DVSF) through the Big Give Christmas Challenge with the match-funding target of £40,000 reached in a record 55 hours! The Fund provides life-changing scholarships and disability and careers support to veterans injured during, or due to, service. With more than 160 veterans already having received scholarships through the Fund and other fundraising and support from the #OUfamily, it is hoped to offer another 50 disabled veteran scholarships in 2021-22.
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Pandemic lockdown learning in English secondary schools
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Dr Jacqueline Baxter is the lead for a near £300,000 project investigating online learning and strategic planning through, and post, lockdown in English secondary schools. It will look at how school leaders strategically manage and plan for online provision of learning, through the pandemic and beyond, and particular challenges such as a lack of equipment, absence of learners from school, and provision for Special Educational Needs (SEN) students. This 18-month project began on Monday (14 December) thanks to funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19. For the full story.
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Helping to empower the world’s most disadvantaged women
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Three OUBS academics are part of the OU project team which has received £400,000 funding from UN Women, the United Nations entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women. Dr Michael Ngoasong is the Academic Lead, together with Professors Liz Daniel and Jo Brewis, for a nine-month initiative. The OU is piloting an approach to course development of three high-quality courses in six target countries (Chile, Australia, Cameroon, Mexico, India and Jordan), building on the local partner content and addressing high priority gaps. For the full story.
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Top 20 hit for Project Management: Beyond the Basics
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Project Management: Beyond the Basics has been ranked as the 16th most popular online course in 2020 on our digital learning sister platform FutureLearn by the learner-supported classcentral.com. This is the OU’s successful free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in partnership with the Association for Project Management (APM), the chartered body for the project profession. The four-week course was launched in January for those already working on or leading projects in their work who may not have previously considered themselves as professional project managers. It also offers the opportunity for people to explore project management as a career. Supported by Executive Education, the course leaders and authors are Dr Giacomo Carli, a Lecturer in Strategic Management, and OU colleague Dr Matthew Moran.
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We are immensely proud of our alumni community and this space is an opportunity to share some of your news, a personal achievement or a promotion, so please get in touch.
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Helping marketers to understand their customers
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A new free short course on OpenLearn, Understanding your customers, underlines the relevance of understanding customers as individuals, members of society and members of organisations. It clarifies, over eight hours of study, some key marketing concepts and terminology and highlights some differences between consumer and business-to-business marketing. This was adapted from the new Understanding Customers (B206) module which saw two willing alumni, Highways England’s Stewart Evans and Tillmann Henssler from Pfizer, provide practitioner insights following a great response to a call-out for help in 2018.
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Welsh alumni may be eligible for start-up funding
A Business Wales Barriers Grant is recognising the impact of the pandemic with any potential applicants needing to access business support first from Big Ideas Wales. Applications close on 31 March 2021 (or sooner if funds are used up before that date). More information here.
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Some success stories in the year of coronavirus
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No industry has escaped the effects of Covid-19. For most, it has been a stressful time; for some, it has resulted in the closure of businesses and job losses. However, as companies have risen to the challenge of reinventing around the constraints of the pandemic, there are some sectors that have had a remarkably good year. A report from The Career Farm, Hiring trends in a post lockdown Europe, aims to highlight opportunities within the job market, and which sectors are still growing and hiring.
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We have a range of exclusive offers for our OUBS alumni. Click the buttons to find out more. Remember, you can access our career webinar recordings on our website along with a whole range of online careers articles.
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Best wishes
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OUBS Alumni Engagement Team
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