Co-INSPIRE

Co-productive, co-creative and participatory approaches underpin the OU’s global pre-eminence in the field of educational research.

• At the Institute of Educational Technology, we develop and apply innovative technologies to co-create solutions to complex educational challenges working with EdTech companies, educational providers, colleges, schools and learners.
• At the Centre for Global Development Studies we work with governments, teachers and communities to co-produce knowledge and tools that enhance teaching practices, promote workforce and systems strengthening, promote inclusive education and redress gender inequality in education.

• Co-created with teachers, schools and others, Reading for Pleasure is part of a programme to enhance literacy and promote social justice across the UK through co-productive and participatory research, creating spaces for teachers to learn together and co-producing policy.

  The OU’s Post-Graduate Certificate in Education and Masters in Education programmes generate extensive co-creative and co-productive work including work with other HEIs, schools and learners on theorising, designing and teaching curriculum.

  Find out about projects under the ‘Co-creating education’ heading. 

Traversing a vast terrain including local and regional democracy, ageing, care, reproduction, sexuality, disabilities, and migration, we co-create the spaces and tools communities need to re-frame narratives, claim and defend rights, and forge powerful solidarities.

• Community-led design and community-based research support place-based communities to realise and share assets and rearticulate needs, priorities and demands in ways that promote common ownership and re-make the places in which they live.
• Arts-based participatory approaches support migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to develop civic engagement and citizenship, negotiate immigration welfare in the UK and participate in education and employment.
• Deliberative work using citizens’ panels co-creates new framings and responses to common challenges.
• Community-based education enables activist communities to share skills and knowledge through powerful learning.

Find out about projects under the ‘Co-creative communities’ heading. 

Our teaching is developed and delivered in dialogue with learners, communities, civil society, industry and government. Co-creation is vital for both core and open-access education in teaching, curriculum development and pedagogic innovation.

We challenge traditional conceptions of learners as passive recipients, promoting new roles where learners co-create their own learning, contribute to others’ learning and innovate teaching and learning. This work is essential to transforming pedagogical practices that perpetuate social inequalities.

OU students act as mentors and interns in the development of teaching and learning and are increasingly involved in module production. This work prioritises learners from marginalised groups and those with lived experience of disadvantage, disability and caring responsibilities.

Postgraduate study at the OU is increasingly co-creative, including masters-level study, professional doctorates and innovative doctoral research using co-productive and participatory approaches.

Find out about projects under the ‘Co-creating OU teaching and learning’ heading. 

Co-production and co-creation are defining aspects of the OU’s work in global development.

Colleagues at the Centre for the Study of Global Development and across the OU work with governments, NGOs, universities and professional groups, as well as communities, particularly marginalised young people, women, girls and refugees, to co-create essential research and knowledge tools in poverty, health, wellbeing, education and employment.

Co-productive work entails a critical and reflexive position, addressing discourses embedded in global development agendas such as neo-colonialism and geopolitical inequalities.

This interdisciplinary work draws on arts-based, pedagogical and community-based approaches.

Find out about projects under the ‘Co-creation in global development’ heading.