Learning in an Open World online only conference

Monday, June 14th, 2010
As knowing where we are going, or might go, can help provide a new perspective on where we’ve come from, this conference, 22nd to 23rd June 2010 could help. It is 9am to 5pm and online http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2012

There is a blog by organiser Matin Weller here and the programme is here

The OU has a conference every year to share practice and research around learning and technology. This year the event is completely online and open to all. The event will take place across 2 days (22nd and 23rd June), with the synchronous presentations being held in Elluminate and asynchronous discussion held in Cloudworks.

The theme of the conference is ‘Openness in education’ and in keeping with that theme it is open to everyone, not just OU staff. It is an opportunity to engage in dialogue around the four main themes of open content, teaching, learning and access.

If you are interested in ‘attending’ some or all of the conference, please go to the Cloudworks site http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2012 and also check there for up to date information about the programme, practice sessions and call for contributions. You will need to register on Cloudworks to add any content and to indicate you are attending.

Contributions will be in a web format, such as YouTube, Slideshare, Animoto, which might result in a broader audience, able to engage with the projects and ideas within the Open University, and a discussion which will aid the University in its exploration of the theme of open education.

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Has the OU got a history?

Monday, May 17th, 2010

For David Sewart, at first the OU was:

like Athena springing fully grown and fully armed from the head of Zeus [it] appeared to have no mother and never to have had the opportunity to have been an adolescent, let alone a child … I began to realise that the UK OU was part of a world wide phenomenon – and a late entrant at that, to the world of distance education.

Review, Open Learning, June 1995, pp. 62-63, (p. 62). 

 

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Happy 41st birthday

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

On 23 April 1969 the Royal Charter of The Open University was granted and the institution officially became a university. Indeed, this time a year ago the University was marking its official 40th birthday with futher celebrations throughout 2009. For more details see here.

The Charter stated that ‘the objects of the University shall be the advancement and dissemination of learning and knowledge by teaching and research by a diversity of means such as broadcasting and technological devices appropriate to higher education, by correspondence, tuition, residential courses and seminars and in other relevant ways’.

Uniquely, the University was also ‘to promote the educational well-being of the community generally.’

It was this obligation to the wider community that led to the development in the 1970s of the ‘Continuing Education’ programme with courses such as P911 ‘The first years of life’ and P912 ‘the pre-school child’.

It is this same obligation within the charter that informs continued University collaboration with the BBC on current popular programmes such as Bang Goes the Theory, Child of our time and Coast. For more information see here.

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