Shawndra Hayes Budgen – OU Learning Design team blog

More conference catch-ups: Reflections on the OER23 conference

Catriona Matthews and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers

We had the honour and privilege of discussing this very blog site at the ALT Open Education Conference (#OER23) this year. OER, if you haven’t come across the term before, refers to Open Educational Resources.

Our talk, held on the second day of the conference and titled “Read all about it!! The benefits and challenges of creating a high-quality open access blog”, can be viewed here on YouTube. The last slide of the talk is represented in an image below. We would love for you to follow the QR code at the bottom of that slide and tell us how a particular blog post on our site may have inspired you to reflect on and develop your practice.

During the conference we were on Twitter, live-tweeting our thoughts and reflections. Some of these were being re-tweeted by the team account. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please follow the OU Learning Design team Twitter account. You will get a good flavour of our experiences and takeaways on there.

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The power of celebration: An exploration of how the simple act of celebration can impact student outcomes and wellbeing.

Catriona Matthews, Clare Hill, James Openshaw ~ Learning Designers

Here at The Open University, we annually recruit a panel of students called the Curriculum Design Student Panel. Students who volunteer for the panel take part in activities designed to gather their views on learning experiences and this feedback can be used to inform the early development of activities, materials and tools. We also ask panel students a ‘Question of the Month’ in a forum, which is usually a brief question about their study experience.

Recently, we asked panel students to tell us how they celebrate their achievements, big and small. Whilst a seemingly light-hearted question, it led to some useful insights about the student experience. There was a lively discussion in the forum with panel students sharing what they considered to be celebratory study events and telling us how celebrating is beneficial to their study. It even led to some panel students vowing to start celebrating or to celebrate more, so the discussion had an immediate positive effect on those involved.

Continue reading “The power of celebration: An exploration of how the simple act of celebration can impact student outcomes and wellbeing.”

Help! A robot wrote my essay!: Reflections on webinars about ChatGPT

Eleanor Moore ~ Learning Designer

With experts across the world sounding alarm bells about the impact of AI (disappearing jobs and widening wealth inequality to name just two issues), how worried should we be about its potential in education?

When ChatGPT burst on the scene in November 2022 with its human-sounding prose and extensive knowledge base, the worried frown in academia suddenly got a lot deeper. With the last bastion of academic excellence – the essay – under threat, learning technologists and academics across the globe are asking: what are we going to do? It will therefore come as no surprise that the recent University of Kent webinars on ChatGPT exceeded the maximum user limit in Teams with 1337 attendees.

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From email alert to delivering a talk: Unexpected scholarship

Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers

Scholarship can happen in unexpected ways and an opportunity can present itself when you least expect it. In this instance, a colleague from the Open University Library shared a call for content at a webinar series curated by the University of Kent. The theme of the event was around the role of the ‘learning designer’ in supporting student retention and success. We felt that this provided an excellent opportunity for us to share the role of the Learning Designer at the Open University and to specifically discuss how we support module teams in relation to student retention and success. Continue reading “From email alert to delivering a talk: Unexpected scholarship”