This is a very strange moment in the UK, from where I write this blog entry. There are almost no flights in and out of the country due to the volcanic ash from Iceland, and international meetings have simply stopped.
In memoriam Robert Beevers
Dear all, first of all let me wish you a belated Happy New Year! The winter in England has been fiercer this year – certainly we have had more snow than we are accustomed to – but is beginning I
A quiet cup of tea in Sun Yat Sen Park, Beijing
Contribution from Martine Vidal, Vice-President On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, and of the tenth anniversary of the China Distance Education Society (CDES), CCRTVU, now the Open University of China, has organised an International Forum on the 16th and
Bucharest, Beijing: impressions and developments
This month has taken me first to Romania where I had the pleasure of presiding over the awards ceremony for some 80 Open University graduates and Diplomates from our Business School partnership with CODECS. This is a fascinating organisation that
Keep the Classroom Open
The Executive Committee met twice in the last month! The first time we met using the CISCO Webex system, where we were able to work from 8 different locations with both video and audio, looking at documents managed by our
New academic year ahead
The summer holidays are well and truly behind us and working life is busy as ever! I had a very good break and the only academic thing I did was to assess a PhD thesis from the Allama Iqbal Open
Sustainability in education
It is getting to the height of the summer here in England: what we call the height of the summer anyway. We have had some really hot weather in July, but have now returned to the more familiar mixture of
After EDEN Gdansk
I am writing this blog entry following the EDEN conference in Gdansk. First of all what a discovery the city of Gdansk was to me! The medieval city was reconstructed from the 1960s on after the total destruction of the
Enquiry: at the core of everyday
I have been working with fellow Pro-Vice-Chancellors at The Open University UK on a policy to support Scholarship, that is to say a policy and associated practices and resources to support not only that we understand by the terms research,
EDEN Executive Committee meets in Porto
This entry has been written shortly after returning from our two day Executive Committee meeting in Porto, hosted by the Universidade Aberta of Portugal and its Vice President Professor Antonio Teixeira, himself a member of the EDEN EC. Our task