Language educator Wayne Rimmer, who graduated from The Open University’s (OU) Masters in Online and Distance Education in 2022, tells us about how it impacted both his teaching and his desire for further study with the OU.
Wayne Rimmer writes:
I embarked on the MAODE because I felt my teaching was getting stale and I’d always been curious about the Open University experience. In the distant past, I had done a TESOL teaching diploma by correspondence course (how dated does that sound!) so I felt I could cope with asynchronous learning. Plain sailing? Well, two things happened to blow my boat off course. First, the pandemic struck. Second, almost concurrently, I started my new job teaching English for Academic Purposes at the University of Manchester. New course types, all the teaching switched online, I had colleagues and students I’d never physically met, an assignment was on the horizon… Time to bail out?
I can honestly say that the MAODE kept me afloat. The course contained a lot of content which I could adapt to my teaching context. For example, I became much more aware of the affordances of technology and I began to see advantages of online teaching such as interactive documents for collaborative student writing. I also became very interested in Open Educational Resources and their potential for sharing and the co-creation of knowledge. The discussion boards were also a terrific stimulus as students were approaching the course from all sorts of perspectives and I found it refreshing to switch off from my English-teacher persona.
I completed the MAODE in 2022 and immediately signed up for an MA in Classics (OU A863). Things are going swimmingly with Classics, thanks to the springboard of the MAODE. I can’t say land is in sight, there is a dissertation to write next year, but the water is lovely!
Interested in finding out more about The Open University’s Masters in online teaching?
In 2023 we launched the OU’s new Masters in Online Teaching, an innovative postgraduate programme exploring the ways that new media, digital pedagogies and cutting-edge educational technologies can be used effectively and equitably, across multiple sectors, to engage diverse learners and meet their needs. The programme offers flexible study pathways featuring a choice of topics, study intensity and study timing, and the option to include credit from a select postgraduate microcredentials.
Find out more about the OU’s MA In Online Teaching here.