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Will wonders ever SiSE?: Designing for Students in Secure Environments
by Hayley Johns During my work with the Open University so far, I’ve been really privileged to work with students from all walks of life. One key part of the OU student community, and a new one for my own practice, is students in secure environments. The OU’s work reaches over 200 prisons and secure…
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Working together in module design
By Amy Leon and Catherine Du Baret High quality, online and distance education materials, building on a huge legacy of groundbreaking distance education. This is what Learning Designers and editors, working alongside academic colleagues, at the Open University shape and hone during the creation of new modules. The Open University (OU) creates around 150 new…
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Designing assessment for distance learners: what matters?
By Katharine Reedy and Mark Williams What is the most important feature of assessment for you and your students? This is a question we put to those present at the Assessment Design workshop our team led for the OU staff community in May 2021. The word cloud below shows that people thought that assessment should…
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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…
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Feedback loops: reflecting on five years of feedback from the curriculum design student panel
If you’ve ever felt frustrated by a product that doesn’t seem to work for you, you’ll understand the importance of building opportunities for feedback into a design process. It’s certainly an essential part of our learning design process: alongside various organisation-wide evaluation initiatives whose insights we access as part of our work, the learning design team runs the curriculum design student panel, which provides opportunities for students…
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Student journeys: embedding skills into the curriculum
The Open University approach to designing for learning puts a strong focus on knowing who the learners are, catering for their needs and supporting them to succeed. One of the strengths of the OU is that its students are very diverse – the OU’s mission is to be open to people, places, methods and ideas…
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The art of conversation: why collaboration matters in online learning
If you’ve ever witnessed an awkward role play exercise in a training session, you may dread the idea of collaborative learning activities. The good news is that when it comes to online learning, you can plan and manage collaborative activities to ensure that nobody’s embarrassed and everyone benefits – possibly in ways they hadn’t anticipated. You may have already designed some online collaborative activities. If you found it tricky, you’re not alone. They…
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Practical tools for developing student-centred learning
Over the last decade, The Open University has developed its approach to designing and evaluating student-centred learning through a wealth of research and scholarship. The basis for much of what we do derives from the tools developed through the OU Learning Design Initiative.