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CATE 2026 awards: Reflections on what being The Open University nominee means to us
Paul Astles, Joanna Helms, Eleanor Moore, James Openshaw, Jack Orbell ~~ Learning Designers In the autumn of 2025, after a rigorous application process, the Learning Design AI group was proud to be chosen as the OU’s CATE (Advance HE’s Collaborative Awards for Teaching Excellence) nomination for 2026. Competition for the award was high and we…
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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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Learning Design and sustainability: Reflections on the 2025 Advance HE Sustainability Symposium
Kathleen Calder SFHEA ~ Senior Learning Designer In March I joined a panel to present our poster ‘Learning design as a catalyst for embedding sustainability’ at the AdvanceHE Sustainability Symposium. The poster describes some of the structured approaches the Learning Design Sustainability Group has taken to support embedding sustainability in curriculum design through connecting with…
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Tip of the ICEBERG: Updated learning design principles for student retention
Catriona Matthews, James Openshaw, and Jake Hilliard ~ Learning Designers When we think about student retention and the factors that can lead to students withdrawing from their studies, learning design is often just the tip of the iceberg. The decision to complete a course – or to withdraw or pause studies – is often…
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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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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…
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Learning from practice: refreshing the OU activity types framework
The activity types framework – a categorisation of learning material into different types based on the student activity involved – is one of our core learning design tools. It shows, simply and accessibly, the variety of ways in which module teams can actively engage students with their subject content and skills development alongside reading, watching…