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Elitism is not innovation
via GIPHY Like a few of you I exercised my eye rolling technique at this Guardian feature on Minerva, breathlessly titled: “The future of education or just hype? The rise of Minerva, the world’s most selective university“. I’m not going to talk about their model (it looks ok, but isn’t nearly as innovative as they think), but rather the futility of any model that is based in exclusivity. The article states that: This year Minerva received 25,000 applications from 180 countries for undergraduate entry in 2020 and admitted just 2% of them, making it the most selective degree programme in the developed world. This is portrayed as good thing. But…
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25 Years of OU: 2001 – UKeU
via GIPHY Before MOOCs, before FutureLearn, and all the rest, there was a bold venture to deliver online education globally. In 2000 the UK Government announced the launch of the UK eUniversity (UKeU). It was effectively acting as a portal and broker for UK universities to deliver online courses to a global audience at the heart of the first elearning boom. I was part of a team, along with Robin Mason and Chris Pegler, who developed a new Masters course, Learning in the Connected Economy, as part of the MAODE. The course was one of three from different unis that formed the first wave of UKeU offerings. As such we…
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GO-GN community in a time of crisis
I thought I’d post an update the work we’ve been doing with the GO-GN network during the pandemic. I know other people run similar types of networks and communities, and so I thought I’d share what we’ve been doing (and also get any other suggestions for what else we could be doing). GO-GN is a Doctoral network of OER/OEP researchers globally. It combines a lot of online community building and a strong face to face element usually. We bring around 15 researchers together every year for a 2 day seminar, which then goes into a conference (OEGlobal or OER). This is a very intense few days and our members often…
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25 Years of OU – 2000: Open Source Teaching Project
via GIPHY Towards the end of the 90s, the viability of the open source approach to software development gained credence. I’ll address the issues with open source later, but at the time it was a significant challenge to conventional, capitalist thinking that software which was as good, if not better, than commercial products could be realised through a community driven model. Like Wikipedia versus the Encyclopedia Britannica, it made no sense that this approach could produce such robust, reliable, functional outputs – and yet it did. The cultural change since then is interesting. At the time the open source approach was seen as almost unassailably positive, set against the evils…
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25 Years of OU – 1999: e-learning works at scale!
via GIPHY I should stress that lots of people at the OU across all disciplines were working on online versions of courses. There were all online versions of existing courses, elements of online in blended courses, fully online postgrad courses, etc. So, the online course I mentioned in the previous post wasn’t a radical intervention that no-one else had considered. But T171 did have two things going for it – it was undergraduate, fully online & it had big numbers. The combination of these two helped settle the “is elearning for us?” argument pretty decisively. On the experience of this course and getting into elearning I would write a book,…
