End of Summer Term 2021

The sunny summer is calling! The long-awaited summer holiday season marks the end of our series of seminars and it is time to get moving rather than sitting in front of the screen. I can’t wait to go out and about, though I would be careful since Covid-19 is pretty much still around us.

In this series, we have had colleagues from IET, including Rob, Simon, Jane, Maria, sharing their research on open education, digital and supporting learning during Covid-19. Agnes, Bart and Corina also held a session on the Innovating Pedagogy 2021 introducing some of the topics covered, i.e., chatbots, telecollaborations and gratitude. Our alumni Katy talked about her work on Ed-tech hub in low-income context and the challenges facing her team during the pandemic. Mike also hosted an interactive session that brought us on a journey of mobile learning through 10 objects. IET PhD students Wendy and Xinyu also presented their work-in-progress, both of which about using human intelligent agents for learning.

Beside colleagues in IET, we were also pleased to have Mathijs from WELS sharing with us about designing serious games for adolescent mental health and Zsuzsanna discussing about language MOOCs. A big thanks for all of you who have offered to present in our sessions and those of you who have participated and initiated conversations with us!

Last but not least, we have had a fruitful two-day online conference. A total of 85 participants have attended our conference. We have had the pleasure to have IET alumni Prof Simeon Yates talking about digital inequalities and Assoc Prof Tamara Clegg from United States discussing about communitizing sciences and data analytics. A total of 25 papers were presented by our colleagues and alumni across OU, local and international collaborators.

If you would like to revisit some of the topics mentioned above, or simply just missing us, how about watching some of the recording of the seminars? The conference recordings are also available.

Our next series of weekly seminars starts on 14 October 2021. If you are interested in presenting or coming up with some creative 1-hour sessions, please feel free to write to us at calrg@open.ac.uk to express your interest to present.

Till then!

Best wishes

Shi Min