Cookie Statement

This page explains how we (KMi, The Open University) use cookies on this website.

Cookies explained

A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer or mobile phone browser from a website's computer and is stored on your computer's or mobile phone's hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, which the site can then access when you visit it again to track online traffic flows, for example. A website cannot access cookies sent by other websites.

How we use cookies

We use cookies to manage your login session effectively and to improve your user experience. Information supplied by cookies can help us work out how you use our site; for example, which pages you look at. We also use cookies to understand how you interact with our site.

Types of cookie

Three types of cookie may be used during your visit to our website:

Session or temporary cookies that are deleted after each visit.
Persistent cookies that are valid across visits. They help our website remember you as a user each time you use the same computer to revisit us.
Third-party cookies that used by external content from other third-party websites within our website.

Cookie categories

We have listed cookies used on this websites based on the International Chamber of Commerce guide for cookie categories:

Strictly necessary - these cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around our site and use their features, such as accessing secure areas of the website.
Performance - these cookies collect information about how visitors use our website in order to improve it. For example, they tell us which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from any of our pages. All of the information that these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous - it does not identify individual visitors.
Functionality - these cookies allow our website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

Cookies you may see if you browse our site without signing in

We currently add no session cookies to the site if you are not signed in, but we do use our own analytics server which is an instance of Matomo (https://matomo.org/). The data gathered by our analytics remains on our own servers. Details of the cookies created by Matomo can be seen in the table below:

Name	Nature and Purpose	Category	Expires
_pk_id	Checks if you are a new visitor	Performance	1 year
_pk_ses	Measures visited pagess	Performance	30 minutes

Additional cookies you may see if you browse our site signed in

Please note that if you set your browser to disable cookies, you will not be able to sign in to secure areas of our website. Without these cookies, services you've asked for can't be provided.

Cookie Name	Nature and Purpose	Category	Expires
nssidp.sid	This cookie is a 'session cookie' which tells us that you are actively visiting our site.	Strictly Necessary	Session

Additional cookies you may see from the main Open University website

If you have visited or are logged into the Open Unviersity main website (open.ac.uk), before you visit this website, you may see additional cookies. What additional cookies you see will depend on what you agreed to on the main Open University site, and whether you are logged in to the main Open Univerity website. For full details of their cookie policy, please see: The Open University Cookie Policy

Disabling cookies

You can block or remove cookies yourself by altering the settings of your browser to block cookies or to send a warning notice before a cookie is stored on your computer.

You can find information on disabling cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org.