-
APT24: Reflecting on our experience presenting on AI at King’s College London
Katia Shulga and Mary Simper ~ Learning Designers This summer we had the pleasure of delivering two presentations at the annual APT conference at King’s College London on behalf of the Learning Design Team at The Open University, UK. It was a hot June day when Mary and I met at the train station…
-
Ed Tech talk up North: reflections on ALTC24
Kathleen Calder and Shawndra Hayes-Budgen ~ Learning Designers This year’s Association for Learning Technologies conference (aka ALTC24) was held over three days in September in Manchester, England. We were invited to share experiences of using Miro to support remote teamworking and to launch the new ALT Digital Sustainability SIG. We’d delivered presentations for ALTC…
-
Virtually reality: Learning while we play with VR at work
Mary Simper and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers Who knew that meeting other humans inside a virtual world could create a sense of togetherness and promote positive wellbeing. Well, it turns out that it can. The Learning Design team have been experimenting with the use of virtual reality (VR). This article will explore how it…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
“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…