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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…
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Playful Learning 2022: Reflections and conference-in-a-pod
It’s a few weeks after the Playful Learning conference, and even after a bit of time to decompress I’m still a buzzing, overstimulated mess. And you know what? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. In this article and accompanying podcast, I’d like to share my take on the conference: my impressions, my takeaways,…
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Fit for learning: CPD as a daily exercise
By Paul Astles So what is CPD? CPD stands for Continuous Personal Development. Often, CPD can be perceived as something that happens through mandatory training sessions rather than being an active process that you can be involved with daily. Al-Asmari (2016) discovered that some staff viewed CPD as a challenge to overcome rather than a…
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Working together in module design
By Amy Leon and Catherine Du Baret High quality, online and distance education materials, building on a huge legacy of groundbreaking distance education. This is what Learning Designers and editors, working alongside academic colleagues, at the Open University shape and hone during the creation of new modules. The Open University (OU) creates around 150 new…
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Designing assessment for distance learners: what matters?
By Katharine Reedy and Mark Williams What is the most important feature of assessment for you and your students? This is a question we put to those present at the Assessment Design workshop our team led for the OU staff community in May 2021. The word cloud below shows that people thought that assessment should…
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Listening to students in real time: how feedback leads to success
Like all robust development processes, our learning design approach includes a number of opportunities to learn from feedback. One is our curriculum design student panel (aimed at capturing students’ views on learning design ideas before they’re live). Another is real-time student feedback (RTSF), which gathers feedback from students as they’re studying with the aim of ensuring they get the support they need. Short questionnaires focusing on recently studied topics are embedded into…
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Learning from practice: refreshing the OU activity types framework
The activity types framework – a categorisation of learning material into different types based on the student activity involved – is one of our core learning design tools. It shows, simply and accessibly, the variety of ways in which module teams can actively engage students with their subject content and skills development alongside reading, watching…
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Conference to practice: more takeaways from ALT-C
ALT-C was intense. It featured more than 100 sessions, many of which called for some deep thinking and reflection. Some time has now passed since the ALT-C conference, so we thought it would be good to reflect on what stood out for us. Here, Mark, Olivia and Shawndra share their highlights.