Technology Enhanced Learning – OU Learning Design team blog

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”

More conference catch-ups: Reflections on the OER23 conference

Catriona Matthews and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers

We had the honour and privilege of discussing this very blog site at the ALT Open Education Conference (#OER23) this year. OER, if you haven’t come across the term before, refers to Open Educational Resources.

Our talk, held on the second day of the conference and titled “Read all about it!! The benefits and challenges of creating a high-quality open access blog”, can be viewed here on YouTube. The last slide of the talk is represented in an image below. We would love for you to follow the QR code at the bottom of that slide and tell us how a particular blog post on our site may have inspired you to reflect on and develop your practice.

During the conference we were on Twitter, live-tweeting our thoughts and reflections. Some of these were being re-tweeted by the team account. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please follow the OU Learning Design team Twitter account. You will get a good flavour of our experiences and takeaways on there.

Continue reading “More conference catch-ups: Reflections on the OER23 conference”

Remixplay 5: Conference-in-a-pod

In January, I had the privilege of attending the GameChangers Remixplay 5: Secret agents of change conference in Coventry, a space for those who use playful practice to engage and build communities, and to then set that community loose on projects of monumental societal change.

I had a blast at the conference, and came away with new ideas around the place of community in change efforts and projects, some fabulously creative approaches to making STEM engaging, and about over five hours of recorded audio. As with my post on the Playful Learning conference last year, I’ve pulled my experience of the day in the form of audio snippets together with my subsequent reflections to form a conference-in-a-pod, a flavour of the day, my lessons learned – and some bonus discussions with the conference organisers. You can listen using the player below, or via the Pedagodzilla Podcast website.

There’s a few links mentioned in the interviews with Alex Masters and Sylvester Arnab at the end. I’d encourage you to go check out the ACES and GameChangers stuff, it’s unsurprisingly ace.

The ACES page: https://aces.gchangers.org
The ACES Charter: http://aces.gchangers.org/charter/
The ACES STEMBucket Challenge eBook: https://aces.gchangers.org/downloads/aces-stembucket-challenge-handbook/?tmstv=1674561289
GameChangers: https://gchangers.org
Frugal Education: https://frugal.education

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.

Continue reading “Help! A robot wrote my essay!: Reflections on webinars about ChatGPT”