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Scaffolding learning: What does it mean for students?
Clare Hill and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers When you scaffold your learning materials, you build students’ understanding and ability gradually and in a planned way by adjusting the amount of support offered. Researchers have described scaffolding as ‘support from experts enabling learners to accomplish what is beyond their current ability’ (Wood et al.…
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EAUC Conference 2024: Reflecting and connecting with sustainability.
Catriona Matthews and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers From the 25th to 27th June 2024 we travelled to the University of Winchester for The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education (EAUC) conference and its 20th birthday celebrations. As well as the usual conference fare, we faced moral quandaries in an SDG focused game where we…
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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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Evolving design: shaping our work around a service-led model
Gerald Evans ~ Head of Learning Design Since 2020 our experiences as a Learning Design (LD) team have been heavily influenced by much of our work moving online. The pandemic led to us resetting how we operated and in particular required us to find effective online mechanisms for running collaborative sessions while continuing to have…
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Virtually reality: Learning while we play with VR at work
Mary Simper and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers Who knew that meeting other humans inside a virtual world could create a sense of togetherness and promote positive wellbeing. Well, it turns out that it can. The Learning Design team have been experimenting with the use of virtual reality (VR). This article will explore how it…
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The Introverted Facilitators’ Club: How to be a quiet LD in the sometimes noisy world of module design?
Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer Back in September, I attended my first ever ‘real life’ or in-person conference (the ALT conference, at the University of Warwick – you can read about my and my colleague’s experiences here). It was a brilliant experience, and we learnt a huge amount. As well as all of the fascinating…
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Who needs superpowers when we have SKILLS!?
Clare Hill ~ Learning Designer Let’s face it, we’d all secretly like to have a superpower but do we really need one? We already have the capacity to learn how to do something and practise to get better, and in doing so we develop skills. We have all been developing a variety of skills to…
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Student Voice on GenAI: Use, Concerns and Educational Applications
Mary Simper and Eleanor Moore ~ Learning Designers Like much of Higher Education, we in the Learning Design Team at The Open University have been both fascinated and challenged by the introduction of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT. In this blog post, we’ll uncover what our students have told us about their use of…