Designing assessment for distance learners: what matters?

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By Katharine Reedy and Mark Williams

What is the most important feature of assessment for you and your students? This is a question we put to those present at the Assessment Design workshop our team led for the OU staff community in May 2021. The word cloud below shows that people thought that assessment should first and foremost be fair. They also believed it should be innovative, useful, interesting, challenging and enjoyable. Continue reading “Designing assessment for distance learners: what matters?”

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 students’ online study planners so they can reflect and comment on their experiences and receive extra guidance based on their comments.

Our module teams can learn from RTSF too. In this post, we take a look at how students and module teams can benefit from RTSF and some of the impacts it’s making.

Continue reading “Listening to students in real time: how feedback leads to success”

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 or listening. Continue reading “Learning from practice: refreshing the OU activity types framework”

Conference to practice: more takeaways from ALT-C

ALT-C was intense. It featured more than 100 sessions, many of which called for some deep thinking and reflectionSome time has now passed since the ALT-C conference, so we thought it would be good to reflect on what stood out for us. Here, Mark, Olivia and Shawndra share their highlights.

Continue reading “Conference to practice: more takeaways from ALT-C”