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Maximising student support: Equitable Outcomes Challenge Week 2025
Jannah Aljafri, Anna Judd-Yelland, Penelope Lee, and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers The days may be getting colder and darker, but the Christmas season is upon us, plus we’ve just enjoyed some great virtual ‘fireside chats’ during The Open University’s Equitable Outcomes Challenge Week. 🍵🔥 Colleagues from across the University shared their projects on…
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How do online students use digital technologies to manage their emotions?
Jake Hilliard ~ Learning Designer Have you ever put on a music playlist to help you focus on a task, or turned to YouTube for a quick break when you feel stressed or overwhelmed? For many online learners, these aren’t just habits, they’re strategies for managing emotions while studying. Last month I had the…
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Innovating Learning Design in Higher Education: Reflections from an International Collaboration
Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers Since 2022, members of The Open University’s (OU) Learning Design and Institute of Educational Technology (IET) teams have played an integral role in the Erasmus+ project Innovating Learning Design in Higher Education (iLED). The three-year iLED project was co-ordinated by the University of Zagreb and alongside…
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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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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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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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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…