Category Archives: Generic

Generic

CALRG 2021 Online Conference – Registration Open

The Computers and Learning Research Group Online Conference is coming soon!

15-16 June 2021 (MS Teams)

CALRG’s annual conference provides a forum for members and other researchers and practitioners in the field to present their work. The conference will consist of two days of presentations and interactive sessions across a broad range of topics relevant to educational technology in 7-panel sessions:

  1. Learning and research during Covid-19 pandemic
  2. Assessment
  3. Teachers’ education and professional development
  4. Learning analytics
  5. Teaching and learning in OU
  6. Supporting learners in online environments
  7. Innovative methods

The conference is free to attend. If you wish to attend, please register HERE.

This conference will not be live-streamed. Recordings of the presentations will be available after the event. For any query regarding conference presentation and attendance, please email calrg@open.ac.uk.

We look forward to e-meeting you!

Events, Generic, Learning at Scale

L@S: The New SIG of openTEL

The launch of our new Special Interest Group: Learning at Scale (L@S SIG) happened on Wednesday, May 26th, 2021. Dr Shi Min Chua led the first online meeting of the SIG, which featured a presentation from a Senior Lecturer at The Open University (The OU). The interdisciplinary event welcomed 21 people across the university who had the opportunity to share their work on L@S with others.

Dr Anna Comas-Quinn kicked off the session with her presentation: Learning beyond the classroom: online volunteer translation. She shared findings from her doctoral research project that explored the experiences of a global sample of online volunteer translators. Anna also reported on two action research projects (Comas-Quinn & Fuertes-Gutiérrez, 2019; Cámara & Comas-Quinn, 2016) that piloted and implemented the use of online volunteer translation activities in language and translation teaching.

The meeting was then followed by a roundtable discussion with academics and researchers interested in learning more about the SIG. Attendees mentioned how their research and practice related to learning at scale. All the members in the meeting agreed that The OU is a pioneer of this learning modality, considering the large number of students taking distance learning modules at our institution since 1969.

The organiser also prompted the attendees to think of the aspects they would like to explore further in the upcoming sessions of the SIG. They mentioned the following topics for the L@S SIG agenda of 2021:

  • Impact on learners & educators
  • The methodology and data used to research L@S
  • The context of L@S in developing countries, including F2F and community centres
  • Automated feedback
  • Learning Analytics
  • MOOCs
  • Digital badges
  • Microcredentials
  • Self-regulated learning
  • Learners’ disposition and cultural influences
  • Assessment at Scale
  • The distinction between delivery and learning at scale

One of the members shared their thoughts on L@S and wrote: “What dimensions can ‘scale’ have? Obviously, the number of learners, but inspired by Anna’s talk and other comments, others come to mind. E.g. number of Learners, Teachers, Subjects (Sciences, Languages, Arts etc.), Pedagogical approaches, Technologies used, Communication media (audio, video, text, image, hypertext etc.), Distance (various forms: physical, transactional…), Languages, Emotions”. Another attendee shared an interesting article on students who set up their study support at scale in places like YouTube and Reddit. These platforms are part of The Study Web, “a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students”.

The discussions from the meeting will inform the future SIG events. If you would like to keep up to date with the Learning At Scale SIG agenda, please email us to add your name to the new L@S mailing list.  

Events, Generic, Show and TEL

Show & TEL 2021: Five presentations in a nutshell

Show & TEL has become an opportunity to learn more about the work of colleagues from The Open University (OU) and other researchers with similar Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) interests since 2015. This year’s event was not an exception. Members of openTEL hosted five online presentations on Tuesday, May 4th, 2021, from 09:00 until 13:00. The presentations included TEL-related topics, such as learning analytics, students’ success, chatbots and science. In a nutshell, we present here what you may have missed from these exciting talks on that day of the event.

Continue reading Show & TEL 2021: Five presentations in a nutshell →

Events, Generic, OpenAIED SIG

What’s in the openAIED SIG agenda for 2021?

The Special Interest Group focused on applying Artificial Intelligence in Education (openAIED SIG) from OpenTEL had its first meeting of the year on Wednesday, May 12th, 2021. The SIG event was led by Dr Duygu Bektik and Dr Francisco Iniesto from the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at The Open University.

The online session kicked off with a timeline that displayed what the openAIED SIG has done since it was launched by Dr Wayne Holmes and Dr Duygu Bektik in April 2018. The brief history of the SIG includes an animated series of sessions bringing together researchers across the university and beyond who are interested in AIED.

As you can tell, the SIG has welcomed numerous experts involved in a diverse range of topics, including ethics in AIED, e-assessment and learning analytics. They have also run a bidding workshop where researchers have had the opportunity to work together and write a proposal for potential research projects. It is expected that the upcoming sessions of 2021 will follow a similar vibrant timeline to the one presented above. Hence, the purpose of the meeting was to give people an opportunity to engage and decide the future agenda of the openAIED SIG.

Continue reading What’s in the openAIED SIG agenda for 2021? →

Events, Generic, Open & Inclusive SiG

The Struggle is Real: Missing Opportunities in Higher Education

“We are told we lack aspirations. No, we don’t. We lack opportunities.”

                                                                                   –Sumeya Loonat, 2021

The Open & Inclusive Special Interest Group from OpenTEL featured presentations from two external speakers in an online seminar on Wednesday, March 24th, 2021. The speakers covered interrelated topics about language, race, mental health, and financial hardship in higher education. Sumeya Loonat, a senior international student lecturer in the Business and Law faculty at De Montfort University, was the first to deliver her presentation on ‘Language and Learning: Breaking Barriers to Success’. Sumeya’s experience as an English teacher for Academic Purposes who provides academic support for international students has contributed to her research on the intersectionality between language and race. Under the Equality Act 2010, race can mean colour, nationality or ethnic or national origins. Sumeya’s PhD focuses explicitly on students of colour who use English as an additional language within a teaching and learning context.

She has identified key barriers bilingual students of colour face in higher education, including:

Continue reading The Struggle is Real: Missing Opportunities in Higher Education →