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The power of celebration: An exploration of how the simple act of celebration can impact student outcomes and wellbeing.
Catriona Matthews, Clare Hill, James Openshaw ~ Learning Designers Here at The Open University, we annually recruit a panel of students called the Curriculum Design Student Panel. Students who volunteer for the panel take part in activities designed to gather their views on learning experiences and this feedback can be used to inform the early…
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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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From email alert to delivering a talk: Unexpected scholarship
Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers Scholarship can happen in unexpected ways and an opportunity can present itself when you least expect it. In this instance, a colleague from the Open University Library shared a call for content at a webinar series curated by the University of Kent. The theme of the…
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‘Get engaged and enraged’: imagining sustainable futures for digital education in times of climate crisis
Hayley Johns ~ Learning Designer Earlier this month, in a world first, the University of Barcelona announced that their students will take a mandatory climate crisis module from 2024. This development came in response to a sit-in by student activists as part of a protest to end fossil fuels and confront the climate emergency. A…
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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…
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Will wonders ever SiSE?: Designing for Students in Secure Environments
by Hayley Johns During my work with the Open University so far, I’ve been really privileged to work with students from all walks of life. One key part of the OU student community, and a new one for my own practice, is students in secure environments. The OU’s work reaches over 200 prisons and secure…