Katharine Reedy – OU Learning Design team blog

Designing assessment for distance learners: what matters?

Photo of multi-coloured shoes on a beach — https://pixabay.com/photos/shoes-rainbow-lgbt-red-orange-1485427/

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?”

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”

Student journeys: embedding skills into the curriculum

The Open University approach to designing for learning puts a strong focus on knowing who the learners are, catering for their needs and supporting them to succeed. One of the strengths of the OU is that its students are very diverse – the OU’s mission is to be open to people, places, methods and ideas – but it does also mean that our curriculum teams can’t assume a common baseline when they start creating new learning materials. OU courses therefore build in opportunities into the learning journey for students to develop their skills alongside their subject knowledge. Continue reading “Student journeys: embedding skills into the curriculum”

Practical tools for developing student-centred learning

Over the last decade, The Open University has developed its approach to designing and evaluating student-centred learning through a wealth of research and scholarship. The basis for much of what we do derives from the tools developed through the OU Learning Design Initiative.

Continue reading “Practical tools for developing student-centred learning”