OUseful Info

OU Course Discounts with the Tesco Clubcard

...or should that title be: Towards a TescOU? ?!

An interesting announcement I just picked up from an OU student blogger about the forthcoming Tesco Clubcard deal that will allow the use of Tesco Clubcard vouchers in full or part-payment for OU courses: Tesco Education Deals.

[For non-UK readers, Tesco is to UK supermarkets what Google is to web search. Their dominance of the market means they can't help but be evil, as their large stores get larger and their ownership of smaller convenience stores develops apace.]

A couple of interesting things to notice about the announcement. Firstly, the link from the Tesco site is to the OU at www.openuniversity.co.uk/clubcarddeals.

Secondly, the advertising slogan that's being used for the campaign:

I have to admit the first thing I thought of on seeing this was the Planet Dog record label who used the title "Feed Your Head" for several compilations ;-)

Another thing to notice about the landing page is the "Get instant answers" query box, which seems to feed in to a natural language asking, FAQ answering service provided by a company called askadmission, who don't seem to have a working homepage at the moment. Googling them turns up several academic institutions who use the service, which seems to run under the "Virtual Advisor" brand.

The OU landing page for this QnA service is here; although an OU branded page is offered for the resutls, you still see the askadmission URL, which is a bit scrappy.

Back to the Tesco deal, and it's informative to see who else has signed up to their education products:

I wonder when Tesco will start selling education products, as well as finance deals, telecoms services and "own brand" software at their supermarket cash tills?

This isn't necessarily as far-fetched as it sounds - Tesco already run Tesco Debut - which offers "on-line training and development, financial guidance, discounts and career advice to help 16-24 year-olds through the transition from full-time education to full-time careers."

And get this - "So far, 21,071 students have become members of Debut, and we have launched our Debut Clearing House scheme, which organises transfers for students between their home stores and stores local to their university." Ah, bless...

(If you know anyone who can get me screenshots from inside the site, I'd be interested to see them. Maybe I need to set up a Tesco Blogoscoped site to track this sort of stuff?)

Anyway - back to the Clubcard site: at the moment the OU is one of five items listed in the Tesco education deals area, the others being Brilliant Books, Linguaphone (who get two entries for some reason) and The National Extension College.

As the Tesco deals give you £10 worth of tokens for every £2.50 worth of tokens ('earned' at a conversion rate of 1 pence per point, and 1 point per pound spent) I'd be interested to know how the cash flows for making up the 4:1 exchange rate (and what HEFCE might have to say about that ;-)

What with OU Gift Vouchers as well as Tesco Clubcard vouchers, I'm starting to wonder again just what it is we sell, exactly?

Posted by ajh59 at January 21, 2007 06:20 PM