Ed Tech – OU Learning Design team blog

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.

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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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“It’s OK not to know!”: Professor John Hattie and the power of feedback

Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer

Feedback, according to Professor John Hattie, is ‘one of the most powerful notions we have’ in education – and also one of the most variable.

Earlier this year, I joined an instalment of Phil Anthony’s award-winning Digitally Enhanced Education webinar series to learn more about how institutions around the world are prioritising feedback as a key part of learning. Amid a wide variety of talks on assessment and feedback, a few really stood out. I’m particularly excited to share with you some of the wisdom of Professor Hattie on the power of feedback as a process of constant learning, of asking questions, and of low stakes ‘failure’ in a supportive environment.

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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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