Sustainability – OU Learning Design team blog

Reflections on ALT conference 2023: Supporting colleagues to take practical actions to embed sustainability

Hayley Johns and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers

This blog post builds on our previous sustainability related post. You can read that here. If you have not had a chance to read it yet, do go back and check it out.

The work presented by Hayley and Paul on behalf of the Learning Design Sustainability Group (LDSG) at #ALTC23 in Warwick is available by scanning the QR code (below) from one of the opening slides from our workshop presentation.

We delivered a 60-minute workshop designed in part to provide an update about the journey that the LDSG has taken so far and also to challenge delegates to consider how they could take meaningful practical steps to embed sustainability within their own specific design contexts. Continue reading “Reflections on ALT conference 2023: Supporting colleagues to take practical actions to embed sustainability”

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 the work going on in the Open University Learning Design Team in relation to sustainability and where we are heading next.

Before we get to the exciting stuff about our own work let’s look back at our personal highlights and takeaways from the most recently attended conferences. Continue reading “Sustainability: Our journey to connect colleagues with non-tokenistic action in the design process”

‘Get engaged and enraged’: imagining sustainable futures for digital education in times of climate crisis

Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer

Earlier this month, in a world first, the University of Barcelona announced that their students will take a mandatory climate crisis module from 2024. This development came in response to a sit-in by student activists as part of a protest to end fossil fuels and confront the climate emergency. A professor described the new course as a ‘change in the paradigm of university education’.

Similar changes are afoot in the educational technology (ed tech) sector. Back in June, ahead of a summer of record-breaking temperatures across the northern hemisphere, I attended a talk by Professor Neil Selwyn of Monash University, entitled ‘Studying digital education in times of climate crisis: what can we do?’. Sustainability in ed tech is an emerging topic but an important one, and Neil began by posing a key if troubling question – is digital education part of a realistic ‘liveable future’? Continue reading “‘Get engaged and enraged’: imagining sustainable futures for digital education in times of climate crisis”