News Story

UK REF confirms OU as World Leading and Internationally Excellent!

Stefan Rueger, Thursday 18 Dec 2014

Computer Science and Informatics at the OU (including KMi and Computing and Communications) performed very strongly in the recent HEFCE REF exercise, with 75% of outputs rated world-leading or internally-excellent (up from 70% in 2008), an excellent research environment (100%), and a 30% larger submission (31 FTE, up from 24 in 2008).

This result places Open University computing research (REF panel 11) neatly in the top third of UK universities overall, and if you consider "Research Power" (taking into account the number of submitted researchers) we are rank 21 out of the 87 submitting UK Universities.

KMi colleagues also contributted to the Education REF submission which saw an excellent rating also with 69% of outputs rated world-leading or internally-excellent. Indeed, the "Research Power" ranking for the Education panel (25) places OU education research at rank 2 out of the 76 submitting UK Universities – a spectacular result!