Blog

During the Covid-19 pandemic we have seen an exponential growth in the number of online academic conferences. While the online medium has posed some challenges, it is increasingly becoming apparent that holding conferences online offers a lot of opportunities beyond the pandemic. Online conferences are more accessible for people with disabilities or caring responsibilities. They are a lot cheaper (given that there are no travel or venue costs and no catering or accommodation have to be provided for delegates) and environmentally friendly (again, because online conferences don’t requir

Between August 2011 and July 2019, I was the Lead Academic Conduct Officer for the Arts and Humanities at The Open University.  My role during this time primarily involved investigating cases of poor academic practice (aka plagiarism) which had been referred for disciplinary treatment.  As such, these cases required a formal approach, including sending students evidence of our concerns in the form of marked-up copies of their essays and asking students to explain in writing the reasons behind the lack of appropriate referencing in their assignments.  Students’ responses almost invariably br

Submitting an assignment is usually accompanied by a sense of relief but then there is the wait for the mark and the feedback which can cause anxiety amongst students.  This is particularly the case for the first assignment on a new module and happened with DD212 Understanding Criminology in its first year of presentation. 

There exists in the Open University (OU) a large set of largely unheralded workers who put themselves forward for one of the most important roles – the role of monitoring, which involves looking at a sample of another colleague’s marking and assessing it for standardisation to the marking criteria and quality of feedback. This group of workers monitored 36,000 assignments across the OU in 2019, 6 percent of the total received, including 3,735 from the School of Psychology & Counselling and nearly 1000 from one module alone (DE300 ‘Investigating Psychology’).

An experiment in creative learning

On a grey Saturday morning in March 2020, as the UK teetered on the brink of the first lockdown, a small group of students gathered at the Open University campus in Milton Keynes to take part in an experiment. Half of the group were studying Creative Writing, and the other half were students of Art History.

Hiding behind any respectable project that seeks to improve the student experience is always an element of nerdiness – an obsessive love of stats and number-crunching – as well as a curtain-twitching urge to take a peek into the lives of others. What precisely do teachers and students get up to in their classrooms? How does it all go so right for students – and sometimes so wrong?

​FASSTEST (FASS Teaching Excellence and Scholarship of Teaching) is the Centre for Scholarship and Innovation at The Open University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. By ‘scholarship’, we mean the scholarship of teaching and learning. This means that FASSTEST supports the critical, scholarly evaluation of approaches to teaching and learning in the Arts and Social Sciences with the aim of providing an evidence base for good practice in higher education.