Open University 2027 Autumn

Education and marketing are usually imagined as fundamentally different activities: education is associated with cultivating knowledge and judgment, while marketing is associated with attracting attention, creating demand and persuading people to choose or act. Yet both depend on a surprisingly similar range of practices: understanding an audience, identifying what matters to others, framing information, creating trust, telling compelling stories and motivating people to engage. This raises a broader question about the purposes of communication itself. Why do institutions share information, and what happens when different institutions share it for different purposes? A university, a school, a company, a museum, a media platform or a public institution may all communicate knowledge, but they do so within different economies of attention, authority and responsibility. The semester therefore explores the relationship between education, communication, entrepreneurship and marketing without assuming either that these practices are equivalent or that they are fundamentally opposed. Jane McDonnell’s Reading Rancière for Education provides an important conceptual perspective here: it challenges the assumption that education is necessarily a relationship between someone who possesses knowledge and someone who lacks it, and instead foregrounds intellectual equality and the learner’s capacity to think and act for themselves. What, then, distinguishes communication that enables people from communication that merely succeeds in moving them?This question also connects education to the contemporary problem of information overload and mediated public discourse. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death draws attention to the ways in which the forms and media through which information circulates shape what can be communicated, what counts as serious knowledge, and what audiences come to expect from public discourse. The semester will therefore consider how young people might be educated not simply to access and produce information, but to recognise its purposes, forms and contexts, and to use it responsibly. The apparent similarities between a good teacher and a good entrepreneur — curiosity, empathy, audience awareness, creativity, storytelling and the ability to create engagement — become a starting point for a larger question: how can these capacities be understood within an ethical framework in which the aim is not simply to influence others, but to enable them to become more capable of making sense of the world and acting within it?