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Student Voice on GenAI: Use, Concerns and Educational Applications

Mary Simper and Eleanor Moore ~ Learning Designers Like much of Higher Education, we in the Learning Design Team at The Open University have been both fascinated and challenged by the introduction of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT. In this blog post, we’ll uncover what our students have told us about their use of…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Reflections on the ALT Conference 2022

The in-person ALT Conference experience By Paul Astles How did it feel to be at a conference “in person” again? With the uplifting melodies and syncopated rhythms of some of my favourite bands soundtracking my journey to Manchester, not even the (at times) slow moving motorway traffic could take the shine off what I anticipated to…