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The Learning Design Cross Institutional Network: Creating a space for Learning Design discussions
Mark Williams ~ Senior Learning Designer Natasha Huckle and Mark Williams were excited to host the Learning Design Cross Institutional Network this year at the Open University campus in Milton Keynes. With support from Jim Harris (University of Northampton) and Simon Walker (UCL) they identified themes for exploration and called out for learning designers across…
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Sustainability: Our journey to connect colleagues with non-tokenistic action in the design process
James Openshaw and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers This article is the first of a two-part reflection about our collective experience at the EDEN 2023 conference in Dublin, Ireland and the EAUC conference 2023 in Bath, England. Alongside our shared experience and takeaways from those events this blog post will also include an update about…
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Beyond the “real world”: exploring authentic assessment design
Mary Simper ~ Learning Designer The Learning Design team at the OU has been exploring assessment practices, which has led to some rich discussions on accessibility, student choice, learning outcomes and authenticity. Discussions around authentic assessment have led us to think about how we can design assessments, well… more authentically! Let’s start with an analogy……
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Kicking off Pride Month at the OU: exploring LGBT+ visibility in STEM
Eleanor Moore ~ Learning Designer June is Pride Month and here at The Open University, we have a packed calendar of events exploring diverse perspectives and themes of inclusion. One of the first was an online seminar led by Dr Jessica Gagnon of Manchester University and Dr Marco Reggiani of Strathclyde University. Jessica and Marco…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…