Chris Mason has been part of The Open University family from the very beginning – signing up for his Education Studies degree with the first intake of students and graduating in 1973.
He spent his working life as a secondary maths teacher before retiring in 2006 and going on to work as a teacher training moderator at his local university.
Returning to the OU
In 2014, Chris wanted to support the University and became a volunteer reader with the OU’s Audio Recording Centre based in Milton Keynes, which he describes as an ‘enjoyable challenge’!
“The OU provides for a large number of disabled students for whom the traditional university environment would be difficult to manage,” explains Chris. “The University is committed to providing accessible versions of all its module material and the Audio Recording Centre team plays a major part in this process where over 120 modules are produced in audio as a DAISY talking book, supporting around 6,500 disabled students.”
Some of the work is produced through synthetic voice technology, but a significant amount can’t be successfully managed in this way, particularly in subjects such as maths, science and the languages where it is essential that the audio is produced by people who understand what they are reading. Chris and the team of volunteers use their skills to describe this content in the clearest way possible.
“I travel to Milton Keynes once a fortnight to do about four and a half hours of recording of maths units either side of lunch. I find it enjoyably challenging. One challenge is to recall maths I may not have used for decades or get my head round new ways of working on maths – particularly where computer programmes are involved. The other main challenge is to produce recordings of a high a standard as I can manage. We are not professionals, but we do have professional pride!
“The centre is desperately short of readers for maths and science. In my day as a student, the written word was all hard copy. These days most of it is online. This means there is a much shorter turnaround from the production of new or revised material to written copy being available to students and, consequently, much less time for the ARC team to produce audio versions.”
Could you become a reader?
If you are interested in becoming a reader at our Milton Keynes campus and helping to support disabled students, we would love to hear from you. We need speakers for many subjects, from art history to psychology and maths, and full training and support will be provided. Most volunteers read for one or two hours a week, but this is flexible depending on your convenience.
“Many OU graduates are now retired, with time on their hands and the need to keep mentally fit!” says Chris. “If I can put in worthwhile stints, there must be many of you out there who could do the same? These audio versions are produced primarily for print disabled students but have proved to be a comfort and support for many other students with differing needs.”
The ARC team can be contacted on 01908 653892 or by email to the team coordinator, Paul Williams at Audio-Recording-Centre@open.ac.uk