Helen Cooke is a Senior Manager in the Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation team in PVC Students and responsible for the day-to-day running of the Open Programme. She is a Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, based on her work supporting multidisciplinary students in an online environment.

Way back at the end of March (remember those pre-lockdown days…?), our eminent Director of the Open Programme, Professor Martin Weller, sensibly suggested that we should run a weekly drop-in session for students in response to the disruption caused by COVID-19. Less sensible, we thought, was his suggestion that the focus of the conversation could be on toilet roll hoarding and stockpiling pasta… Continue reading →

Jay Rixon is a Senior Manager in Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation and responsible for the MA or MSc Open qualification. In this post, Jay reflects on a staff-student online drop-in session titled ‘Four Famous Poems – a literary discussion’ held on Tuesday 30^th June 2020.

In the session, Jay was joined by Dr John Butcher, Director of Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation who led the discussion.

Our drop-in sessions were created as a response to going into lockdown.  They were intended to be an antidote to the challenging news at the time and an opportunity to explore and wallow in well-known topics and enjoy a community of people who value learning across a range of subjects. We have explored many topics in these online sessions, from music, film, books, TV and art among many others. For this occasion, the topic of poetry was selected, and four poems were chosen to be delved into, explored and examined. Continue reading →

Jay Rixon is a Senior Manager in Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation and responsible for the MA or MSc Open qualification. In this post, Jay reflects on a staff-student online drop-in session titled ‘Four Famous Artworks – a creative discussion’ session held on Tuesday 16^th June 2020. 

In our student and staff Open Programme drop-in sessions we have covered many a key topic such as music, books, films, TV, travel, pastimes/hobbies and food among other themes, and for this week’s session our spotlight landed on the world of art.

We chose to spend our Adobe Connect session focusing on four famous artworks: exploring the paintings, the artists who created them, and delving into the back story behind each piece.

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Jay Rixon is a Senior Manager in Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation and responsible for the MA or MSc Open qualification. In this post, Jay reflects on a staff-student online drop-in session titled ‘Lockdown Likes’ which was held on Tuesday 2^nd June 2020. 

This period of lockdown has been punctuated with welcome initiatives that have been local, national and international. For this student and staff Open Programme drop-in session, we explored some of these initiatives that have seen a creative use of ideas, collaborative approach, technology, social media and entrepreneurial spirit. For this session we use Adobe Connect, where we can verbally exchange ideas and capture comments in a chat box making full use of this technology to connect in our Open Programme community. We opened the session discussing the different lockdown initiatives we have been exploring.

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