WELS news

Dr Mike Courtney’s career began with a high-flying role as a commercial airline pilot. Yet academics would be where he’d earn his wings, eventually becoming an Associate Lecturer (Tutor) in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics. Discover his inspirational teaching style – an approach that recently saw him win a student-voted Tutor Award.

A new toolkit to provide practitioners with the information they need to implement ‘relational care’ in practice with older people in a range of care settings has been launched by Dr Manik Gopinath and Professor Mary Larkin at an event hosted at the House of Lords on 17th May, attended by 120 delegates. 

The 13-member Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) recently produced a report on cost-effective approaches to improve global learning. This panel is co-chaired by the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD) – Prof Kwame Akyeampong and Prof Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel prize-winning economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Open University nursing student Grace McAleer, a final year student on the Northern Ireland (NI) Adult Future Nurse Pre-Registration Nursing Degree Programme, and a Senior Nursing Assistant at the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, presented her work on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) at the NI Chief Nursing Conference on Thursday 4 May 2023.

In this article, OU academic and registered Social Worker Dr Gillian Ferguson reconceptualises workplace learning for Social Workers using her social work research 'When David Bowie created Ziggy Stardust'.

An interactive resource written by Dr Philippa Waterhouse, Senior Lecturer in Health, has been shortlisted for a 2023 Learning on Screen award.

Dr Deborah Steele is impressive. Not only is she a tutor (we call them Associate Lecturers at the OU) in nursing and healthcare, but she is also the first in her family to get a degree, which like many of our students, she did whilst working two part-time jobs and raising four children alone. Here’s how... 

Each year, OU PhD students have the chance to make a cake that represents their studies for the annual Graduate School ‘Bake Your Research’ competition. We caught up with previous contestants from the Faculty to see where they are now.

Two exciting new project proposals by members of the Centre for the Study of Global Development have been accepted by the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) programme, an OU initiative bringing together the university’s academic community to develop inclusive research that will drive positive societal change. 

Paulette Johnson, WELS Academic Lead for Access, Participation and Success, is a qualified Social Worker. In this article for World Social Work Day, she shares how the OU's social work curriculum is tackling equality, diversity and inclusion.