The Open University

Open University Logo10+ Projects in Total 

Over the years Pareas Associates has carried out more than 10 projects for the Open University (OU), commissioned by their Research Unit.

These include running telephone interviews for their Teaching Courses team to identify the extent of the market for a degree in Primary Education – and desk research for their Health and Social Welfare faculty on the numbers and demand for child and paediatric nurses in the UK.

By interviewing employers and using data available from students we collaborated with programme tutors to help redesign the course content of their programme in Computing for Commerce and Industry – and we carried out preliminary research to establish the potential market for the management level Certificate and Diploma programmes in Leisure and Tourism.

We devised and worked on an online survey for the OU – for recent enquirers about their language courses. They were keen to establish why the conversion rate from enquiry to enrolment was not higher and whether this was an issue relating to the courses, or if it was due to the circumstances of the enquirers.

We also carried out a telephone survey with 300 students to establish the reasons behind the uptake of one of the courses in the ‘Early Years’ suite of awards – and we undertook qualitative research to identify reasons why certain programmes were unsuccessful, including finding out why students dropped out and whether they intended to resume their studies.  

In addition, we finalised a major report for the OU Marketing team for a project which examined the effect of learner styles on qualification, outcome and progression within the OU Business School.

We carried out the initial stages of a readership survey on how students utilised the OU magazine, ‘Sesame’, to help inform future development, content and format, and we ran focus groups with academic staff to evaluate their use and experience of electronic journals available through their library.

We have also carried out research projects on the subject of volunteering and the role of non-executive directors.

Download Research and Evaluation Portfolio 

Project Management for The Open University