About the Help Centre

The Help Centre exists to provide OU students with timely, self-serve information, advice and guidance throughout their study. It's the main hub of online support and a gateway to all the ways student support can be contacted within the OU.

The Help Centre is managed and maintained by the Online Student Experience team who use a user centred design approach when making any changes to the Help Centre.

Students, as the main users of the Help Centre, are central to the design process. The team work directly with students to understand their needs and requirements while studying with the OU and use this to keep the information and advice within the Help Centre up to date and relevant.

How we use your feedback

We've produced an infographic on How we use your feedback. (PDF 1MB)

Feedback left

If you've ever left feedback on the Help Centre, through 'Found what you're looking for?' at the bottom of each article, you might wonder does anything happen to the feedback you've left?

What do we do with your feedback?

The feedback is checked every day to identify changes that can be made straight away. Your feedback is also used when articles are up for review to help us identify the improvements that can be made.

How do we act on the feedback?

When you leave feedback about, for example, a broken link or information that's missing or incorrect, a member of the Help Centre team will go to the article to see what changes are needed.

Any simple changes will be made immediately. If the information on the article is no longer correct, we'll check with the information experts for that article and request the updated information. We'll also check where else the information appears in the Help Centre so that it's updated everywhere.

How you can help

We want to make sure the information provided in the Help Centre is what students are looking for. So, the more detail you can give in your feedback the better. Even if you only click Yes or No, this is helpful as we can look at how many positive or negative responses each article gets. Articles that get mainly negative responses are then reviewed to see what can be done to improve them.