News

The Open University Law and Business Schools celebrated their highest achieving students in a joint awards ceremony in Milton Keynes on Friday 12 July.

Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, libra, is being heralded as the moment that cryptocurrencies and blockchain, the technology that supports them, become truly mainstream. More importantly, it gives legitimacy to the idea that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are here to stay. And, as I have argued in my research, must be taken seriously, not least by regulators.

As part of the ongoing 50th celebrations of The Open University, the Business and Law Schools are holding a series of events in July.

On first glance, what does The Open University’s success in winning a £6.7 million grant from Research England to expand its Astrobiology Research Group have to do with the Law School or Business School?

This major three-year project starting in December 2019, led by Dr Karen Olsson-Francis, a Senior Lecturer in the STEM faculty, aims to help address fundamental questions about life beyond the Earth.

The Law School’s Open Justice Centre has joined forces with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to help deliver its Education for Justice (E4J) initiative.

The Open University has this week launched The Carers Scholarships Fund, which will provide 50 UK-based carers with a full fee-waiver scholarship of up to £18,000 to study an OU course of their choice. To ensure young adult carers are encouraged to apply, 15 places have been reserved for those between the ages of 18-28.

OU Law students from around the UK have collaborated with prison learners to record a series of radio programmes for broadcast on prison radio, as part of a pioneering project by the University’s Open Justice Centre.

Increasingly, online participation is being threatened through manifestations of online violence, especially online violence against women. This directly undermines the scope of the Internet, which should be a foundation for challenging the everyday normalisation of abuse and inequality but is increasingly becoming a tool for reinforcing inequality and silencing women online. 

The Open Justice Centre’s Law Clinic, which offers free online legal advice led by the OU students supervised by qualified solicitors, won the Best Legal Tech Contribution in the Attorney General Student Pro Bono Awards.