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It’s all about me
(This is a picture of a fish. I don’t know why it’s here either) Like many of you, I get asked to do bits of ‘scholarship on the side” – webinars, interviews, podcasts etc. These seem to have come in a burst recently, after not much in the preceding six months. Some of them are parts of interesting series, so partly because you may find these interesting, and also as a means of collecting them for my own purposes, here is a list of recent ‘other stuff’: Open Education: What Now? – This was a webinar for part of European Distance Learning Week, along with Catherine Cronin. Although we didn’t…
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Aspects of open – fieldcasting
As part of the OU’s 50th anniversary next year I’m going to be giving a lecture on aspects of open education. As well as the obvious, I think there are means of opening up education that get overlooked or forgotten in the new interpretations. An example of such is virtual, or remote field trips and laboratory work. At the OU we have an assortment of such approaches, including the OpenStem labs, a virtual microscope, and fieldcasts. This latter activity is the focus of this post. We have always conducted residential schools, but these are increasingly costly and difficult for students to attend, and there can be issues around accessibility. So…
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Asking the right questions
I mentioned previously that I’m hosting a series of seminars at the Open University, with the intention of showcasing our own expertise (internally and externally) and also getting us an institution to engage with current ed tech developments. Last Thursday my colleague Prof Bart Rienties looked at analytics. Not so much real time, but rather digging into large data sets across multiple courses to explore what it is that students actually do. This is always difficult to ascertain, but particularly so for a distance education university when you don’t get to see what they’re doing. We ask them of course through surveys, which are useful but these aren’t always reliable…
