Open University Associate Lecturer

[Lareunion974]

Hello everyone, this is my first ever post on Mumsnet! I am applying for an Associate Lecturer job with the Open University. It's a part-time, work from home position and I have been told I can organise my own hours. This all sounds amazing, but I wondered if anyone had any recent experience of working with the OU in terms of hours, work load and progression possibilities. I have two very young children so I am very attracted to the flexibility of hours. Thanks in advance.

So basically don’t bother applying to OU and find a permanent role is what you’re saying to me 😂 got another interview tomorrow for another module. Maybe will be appointable to that too and still have no job lol

You need to look at when the assignments will be due because you have to mark them within a certain time frame.
I was an AL for 22 years and there is no career progression. When I left I didn’t get a goodbye or a thank you. However, I loved the work and interacting with students and knowing that I had helped them achieve their goals. You will need to set aside time to get grips with the course material. The OU has lots of resources to help you and you will have a Staff Tutor as a manager.

Well I tried the OU AL route for a couple of years after getting my PhD. By the end of my stint the OU money was just enough to live on (I had a couple other side hustles too). But it became clear to me as @mdh2020 says that there was no career progression. The module I did most of my teaching for recruited well and I could have kept doing it presumably for years, but it became obvious that 10 or 20 years down the line I would be doing exactly the same thing. During my time there a couple of "central academic" jobs in my area came up but I didn't even get shortlisted for an interview (and I had strong publications...).
Eventually I got hired elsewhere, thanks mostly to my publications. Still, the AL job gave me very valuable teaching experience. When I started it, I had only taught a couple dozen hours as a GTA... with the OU I became much more confident in delivering teaching (at the time there were still f2f tutorials, I think now there's much less), marking piles of essays, and it also exposed me to a more diverse student body than had been the case at my PhD institution. That's the kind of thing that you can draw upon when asked about teaching in an interview, and also the first time you find yourself in a classroom in another institution.
Some of the MK central academics actually seem to have started their OU careers as ALs. I would have loved it to become a permanent academic with the OU as I am big fan of their ethos. But there are multiple times more ALs than central academics, so clearly it will only be a minority to make it.