Open University Programmes
 
This section on Series on Art and Architecture gives summary information about the series offered by the Roland Collection: thirty series on art and architecture, and four on Modern Literature and Philosophy

It also includes profiles of three key producers, which give fascinating insights into how their films are made and the thinking behind their work.

English Heritage
The National Gallery
Open University

Series on Art and Architecture

These titles are no longer available from the Roland Collection. However, film details remain on this site for the benefit of previous customers.

The Open University

The Open University was set up in Britain twenty-five years ago, in partnership with the British Broadcasting Corporation, to pioneer the system of open and distance learning for adults that is so well known today. Since then open universities round the world have modelled themselves on it, with the help of British OU advisers. Television programs are an integral part of the sophisticated learning system by which students study at home. These are made by the BBC, which provides production, operational, engineering and support facilities at the OU's Production Centre, in cooperation with the university's academic staff.

About 200,000 students are registered at any one time for undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education courses. But in addition to the OU's 'official' students, the BBC estimates that six to eight million people watch the OU's broadcasts every week. The university is required by its charter to promote the educational well-being of the wider community, and research shows that a large percentage of students who enrol were originally members of this 'drop-in' audience, attracted by the popular appeal of so many of the programs.

'Of course we want the programs we make to be accessible to the general public', says Charles Cooper, producer of several OU series, such as Culture and Belief in Europe 1450-1600. 'It's part of our brief - otherwise, we wouldn't be an open university. And I get a lot of letters from the public about my programs as feedback!'

All the producers of OU programs are academically well qualified, many being subject specialists in their own right, and are full members of university faculties. Charles Cooper trained first as an art historian, but even as an undergraduate he had a great love for film. 'Painting and film, they're both image-making', he says.

The production of an Open University course can take two or three years to complete. OU producers play a vital rôle in advising the course team on the best way to convey the educational concepts through the medium of television.

'Our programs bring together disciplines which aren't normally associated, like literature, history of art, music', says Charles Cooper. 'That's rare in higher education, and we may have as many as forty-five experts pooling their expertise on a series'. Among the production staff at the OU Production Centre is a wide spread of scientists, mathematicians, technologists, social scientists, educationalists and specialists in the humanities, trained to work to BBC standards on all programs.

Back in the 1970s, everyone's image of an OU program was of a bearded man in a dreadful shirt standing in front of a blackboard: an attempt to transfer the lecture room to the student's home. But nowadays that's entirely out of date - the film Educating Rita did a lot to show the OU in a different light! Program production techniques have long since moved away from studio-based material towards location work. 'We like to go on location, especially to places our students are unlikely to be able to visit', says Charles Cooper. 'To go somewhere like Seville or Toulouse, so that they can see for themselves what they look like - three minutes of location footage can tell a hundred times more about the atmosphere or sense of scale than ten or twelve flat photographs. It's surrogate experience'.

When it comes to presenters, he believes (in common with Joan Lane of The National Gallery, London) that 'real people' - enthusiastic experts who are amateurs in front of the camera - convey love and knowledge of a subject better than professional presenters. They're not all OU academics, though. 'When we went to Istanbul (for Ottoman Supremacy: The Suleimaniye) we were very lucky to get Godfrey Goodwin, the author and art historian who is a world authority on Ottoman architecture. He almost single-handedly began the active research into it, and he was working at the university in Istanbul at the time. If we haven't got a homegrown expert on any subject, we go out and find the very best person for the job'.

Open University Programmes