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Sustainability: Our journey to connect colleagues with non-tokenistic action in the design process
James Openshaw and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers This article is the first of a two-part reflection about our collective experience at the EDEN 2023 conference in Dublin, Ireland and the EAUC conference 2023 in Bath, England. Alongside our shared experience and takeaways from those events this blog post will also include an update about…
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From email alert to delivering a talk: Unexpected scholarship
Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers Scholarship can happen in unexpected ways and an opportunity can present itself when you least expect it. In this instance, a colleague from the Open University Library shared a call for content at a webinar series curated by the University of Kent. The theme of the…
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‘Get engaged and enraged’: imagining sustainable futures for digital education in times of climate crisis
Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer Earlier this month, in a world first, the University of Barcelona announced that their students will take a mandatory climate crisis module from 2024. This development came in response to a sit-in by student activists as part of a protest to end fossil fuels and confront the climate emergency. A…
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“It’s OK not to know!”: Professor John Hattie and the power of feedback
Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer Feedback, according to Professor John Hattie, is ‘one of the most powerful notions we have’ in education – and also one of the most variable. Earlier this year, I joined an instalment of Phil Anthony’s award-winning Digitally Enhanced Education webinar series to learn more about how institutions around the…
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Working together in module design
By Amy Leon and Catherine Du Baret High quality, online and distance education materials, building on a huge legacy of groundbreaking distance education. This is what Learning Designers and editors, working alongside academic colleagues, at the Open University shape and hone during the creation of new modules. The Open University (OU) creates around 150 new…
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Listening to students in real time: how feedback leads to success
Like all robust development processes, our learning design approach includes a number of opportunities to learn from feedback. One is our curriculum design student panel (aimed at capturing students’ views on learning design ideas before they’re live). Another is real-time student feedback (RTSF), which gathers feedback from students as they’re studying with the aim of ensuring they get the support they need. Short questionnaires focusing on recently studied topics are embedded into…
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Learning from practice: refreshing the OU activity types framework
The activity types framework – a categorisation of learning material into different types based on the student activity involved – is one of our core learning design tools. It shows, simply and accessibly, the variety of ways in which module teams can actively engage students with their subject content and skills development alongside reading, watching…
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Conference to practice: reflecting on a week at ALT-C
I’ve been a Learning Designer for three years now, and ALT-C (The Association for Learning Technology Conference – September 2021) was my first conference within the role. While I’d never expected my first experience with this to be online, I must say I thought it was fabulous.