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25 Years of OU – 1998: “I have an online course”
By 1998 I had experimented with an online tutor group, worked at summer school sessions on HTML and produced some web pages for courses and personal use. There was a lot of interest in the use of the web for distance learning, and elearning was gathering a good head of steam. I started going to educational technology conferences at this time (they were fun back then!). I wanted to experiment and see if it was possible to develop an OU undergrad course delivered entirely online. So using MS FrontPage HTML editor (for which, I plead forgiveness), I created a dummy. I chatted with John Naughton about it – he was…
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Making the ask
via GIPHY I’m quite a reserved person and I also like to be helpful, so when people ask me to give a keynote or a talk, I usually say yes, particularly online. Also, when you’re from a not particularly privileged background you tend to be grateful for stuff rather than demanding. I still expect someone to tell me they’ve made a mistake in appointing me professor, and in fact I should be working in a supermarket (no disrespect to supermarket workers, I was one for years). All of this means that I tend not to ask for anything. If I can do the talk, then I’ll do it. But since…
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25 Years of OU – 1997: summer schools
Of course, no account of early OU life would be complete without mention of summer schools. When I joined the OU, it was part of your contract that you spend 2 weeks working at one of our summer schools. These were one week long residential courses held at a number of universities over the summer months. In many ways they were the core part of the OU identity, and had an often justified licentious reputation. Like Vegas, people used to say “what happens at OU summer school stays at OU summer school”. I heard a story once from one of the founding staff that campus universities were snooty about the…
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25 Years of OU: 1996 – online tutor groups
When I joined the OU we still largely held f2f tutorials, but with some online support. Some specialist courses had been experimenting with totally online tutor groups. We used a system called FirstClass, and once you had your dial up modem working, it was pretty easy to use with its own software client, and it would synchronise offline so you could dial in, get updates and then disconnect. Prior to always-on broadband this was important! The History of the OU blog has a good entry on the conferencing software and courses that used it at the OU. I got a small bit of funding to set up and evaluate a…
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25 Years of OU – 1995: AI module
I joined the OU to work on a course T396, Artificial Intelligence for Technology. It was chaired by Adrian Hopgood, and I was lucky to join on that particular course because it set the tone for many things to come. It was an innovative course in a number of respects: It used 3rd party text books as the main study content. This meant we didn’t have to produce as much custom content and could operate with a small course team. This was a model I would borrow later. It was produced relatively quickly. The OU had then a very labour intensive, laborious course production model involving large course teams and…
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A new course & the untimely demise of the MAODE
First of all, some good news. On June 8th we launch a new microcredential course – 15pts at postgrad level so not _that_ micro I grant – on FutureLearn. Titled “Online Teaching: Creating Courses for Adult Learners” it is part of the OU response to Covid-19 and has been developed by Leigh-Anne Perryman, Rebecca Ferguson and myself. It has taken 5 weeks from proposal to delivery, and anyone who has developed courses at the OU knows that is light speed. It takes that long to decide on a title usually. I hope it’ll be useful for those studying it. Now the bad news. Since I joined I have worked on…
