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The pedagogical power of page-turners
What could be better than curling up with a good book? How about a little learning with your literature? Earlier in the year our unit ran an in-person event at the Open University Library, the LDS LINK event (Learner and Discovery Services, Learning Innovation and Knowledge for those who like two acronyms for the price…
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Fabulous formative failure
Michael Collins ~ Senior Learning Designer Last July I had the privilege of attending the Playful Learning 2023 conference for the second time, once more bearing a bulging bag of microphones and a question. Previously Dr Mark Childs and I asked attendees about their favourite games, what they loved about them – and how that…
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Remixplay 5: Conference-in-a-pod
In January, I had the privilege of attending the GameChangers Remixplay 5: Secret agents of change conference in Coventry, a space for those who use playful practice to engage and build communities, and to then set that community loose on projects of monumental societal change. I had a blast at the conference, and came away…
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Reflections on the Digital Ways of Working Project (DWEEP) evaluation
Mike Collins ~ Learning Designer In the past couple of weeks, our colleagues over in the Learning Innovation team published the report of the Digital Working Environment Exploratory Project (DWEEP), an in-practice exploration of the use of virtual environments to support collaboration and hybrid working. The Learning Design team took a lead on the evaluation…
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Playful Learning 2022: Reflections and conference-in-a-pod
It’s a few weeks after the Playful Learning conference, and even after a bit of time to decompress I’m still a buzzing, overstimulated mess. And you know what? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. In this article and accompanying podcast, I’d like to share my take on the conference: my impressions, my takeaways,…
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Conference to practice: reflecting on a week at ALT-C
I’ve been a Learning Designer for three years now, and ALT-C (The Association for Learning Technology Conference – September 2021) was my first conference within the role. While I’d never expected my first experience with this to be online, I must say I thought it was fabulous.
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Workload mapping part 3: concurrency and activity makeup
In this series of posts, we’ve been looking at student workload mapping. This final post looks at the other neat things we can do once we’ve mapped out a module. Our example student, Alex, has had their workload smoothed out in the previous posts. Now that we’re sure the volume of learning and teaching for…
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Workload mapping part 2: mapping in learning design
In this series of posts, we’re looking at student workload mapping. This second post explains how we monitor workload during module design, and where we might make recommendations to authors. Overall workload for a module is agreed right at the beginning of learning design, with set times to aim for based on the level of study,…