Reflection – OU Learning Design team blog

Help! A robot wrote my essay!: Reflections on webinars about ChatGPT

Eleanor Moore ~ Learning Designer

With experts across the world sounding alarm bells about the impact of AI (disappearing jobs and widening wealth inequality to name just two issues), how worried should we be about its potential in education?

When ChatGPT burst on the scene in November 2022 with its human-sounding prose and extensive knowledge base, the worried frown in academia suddenly got a lot deeper. With the last bastion of academic excellence – the essay – under threat, learning technologists and academics across the globe are asking: what are we going to do? It will therefore come as no surprise that the recent University of Kent webinars on ChatGPT exceeded the maximum user limit in Teams with 1337 attendees.

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Reflections on the Digital Ways of Working Project (DWEEP) evaluation

Mike Collins ~ Learning Designer

In the past couple of weeks, our colleagues over in the Learning Innovation team published the report of the Digital Working Environment Exploratory Project (DWEEP), an in-practice exploration of the use of virtual environments to support collaboration and hybrid working. The Learning Design team took a lead on the evaluation and reporting, and I had the pleasure of coordinating the effort.

The report itself is great, I heartily encourage you to go and read it. Andrew McDermott’s summary that accompanies it is also a nice accessible hopping-on point, bringing together the key points and narrative of the report into the wider context.

In this post, I’ll take a step back, and reflect on a few of the things that stuck with me from our findings.

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Playful Learning 2022: Reflections and conference-in-a-pod

It’s a few weeks after the Playful Learning conference, and even after a bit of time to decompress I’m still a buzzing, overstimulated mess. And you know what? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

In this article and accompanying podcast, I’d like to share my take on the conference: my impressions, my takeaways, my general experience. It’s been a highlight of both my professional and podcasting career to date, and I’m hoping that through the process of reflecting on it I’ll identify some of the reasons why it resonated with me, and how I can translate the experience into my practice.

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Fit for learning: CPD as a daily exercise

By Paul Astles

So what is CPD?

CPD stands for Continuous Personal Development. Often, CPD can be perceived as something that happens through mandatory training sessions rather than being an active process that you can be involved with daily. Al-Asmari (2016) discovered that some staff viewed CPD as a challenge to overcome rather than a supportive process.

The logic of using reflection as a tool for CPD is not new (Yearley, 2003). One important consideration (explored by Yearley) is that reflection should be a guided process to be meaningful in relation to CPD.

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