OU
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An OU Farewell Transmission
As they say, some personal news. The OU has been offering a round of voluntary redundancy, which I decided to apply for, and have been accepted. I will therefore be leaving the OU after 29 years. However, I’m doing what in the UK is known as a “Nadine“, ie announcing my departure and then not actually leaving for ages. In order to meet various commitments I’m not actually leaving until June 2024. So that leaves you plenty of time to compose either a moving eulogy or just the right side of legal slur for my departure. The reason for announcing it with soooooo much notice is that higher ed (and…
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Too much bloody vision
There’s a scene in This Is Spinal Type where they visit Elvis’s grave and after some failed harmonising, Nigel says “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”, to which David responds “Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective .” It’s a line that often comes to mind, replacing “perspective” with whatever there seems to be a current abundance in. Recently this has been “vision”. It’s a strange one, because I think we all say we want a clear vision from any leader in an institution. Maybe it’s just me, but I currently feel Vision Fatigue quite strongly. We have an overall University set of priorities. Then we have…
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The pandemic response and the OU
I’ve just had an article published in the OTESSA Journal, entitled “The UK Open University COVID Response: A Sector Case Study“. I wrote it last year as I was interested in the various actions the OU took during the pandemic. Lots of people in other unis came to us formally and informally seeking advice as they were required to shift their teaching online. You may remember I ran some drop-in sessions on different topics back in 2020. The OU also set up a research fund, developed teaching content and gathered resources on openLearn (most notably, the Take your Teaching Online free course). In the paper I categorised the different responses…
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Give me an M! Give me an A!
via GIPHY One of the things I have enjoyed working on the most during my 375 year career at the OU, is the Masters in Online and Distance Education (MAODE). I’ve blogged previously about how I was saddened when this was closed down at the OU. Since then we have continued to produce curriculum in IET, most notably very successful microcredentials, under the leadership of my colleague Leigh Anne Perryman. We have also been working on developing a new Masters in Online Teaching (MAOT). This will comprise of the existing course H880 Technology Enhanced Futures, then 60 points chosen from the array of microcredentials (or a module from the appropriate…
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Universities interpret change as harm… but that’s probably ok
We were discussing the new Open University strategy recently, one strand of which calls for innovation in teaching. This has been a constant thread in nearly all strategies that I can recall in my 27 odd years at the OU. And, to be fair, it is something the OU and colleagues have largely delivered on. However, based on my own experience and that of nearly all colleagues I speak to, the university (and it would seem, all universities), often acts to counter and thwart such innovation. From delivering all online courses in 1999, to establishing the VLE in 2004, to introducing Learning Design, to trying to establish microcredentials more recently,…
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It’s always about the biscuits
I was in a meeting the other day where we were considering some of the difficulties of recruiting student representatives to numerous panels. Someone commented that the shift online had removed one key element of appeal, which was a regular visit to the Milton Keynes campus. For students who aren’t inside the institution this provided more informal interactions with staff members, who they may have previously only come across in course materials. This kind of standing around the tea tray moment (I’m not calling it water cooler) perhaps then facilitated interaction in the more formal meetings that followed, which can otherwise seem quite intimidating. No matter how encouraging or welcoming…
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The OU as your new favourite open textbook provider
via GIPHY TL;DR – the Open University has an excellent range of free ebooks on Amazon or from the OU which you should check out. What’s in a label? To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the answer is, ‘quite a lot it seems’. The Open University has a very successful (even more successful since the pandemic) OER site, OpenLearn. We tend to think of this in terms of individual resources and short courses. It comes in a number of different download formats, including ePub. What triggered my ‘what’s in a label’ comment is that we also list all the ebooks on Amazon in Kindle format. These should be available in most countries…
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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…
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OU drop-in session – long term vs short term
Last Wednesday I held the last of (for now) the OU drop-in sessions for the sector. We looked at immediate solutions versus longer term ones, and issues of care and avoiding burnout. The video of the session is below. We looked at questions such as: What is acceptable now? – Students and institutions will accept a more rough and ready offering now, given the immediacy of the crisis. Now the emphasis is on doing whatever it takes, helping students complete, and offering support and care. What is acceptable in September? – Come the new semester however, course offerings, particularly for first year undergrads, will need to be more substantial and…
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The advantage of your own platform in a crisis
So here’s my Covid-19 conspiracy theory – Jim Groom started it all to demonstrate how useful it is to own your own domain and tools. And also to relaunch DS106 Radio. Allow me to elaborate. Organisations, particularly higher education ones can be slow to react. Someone commented once that the OU was like the army or the health care system, it took its time but when all those elements aligned it was powerful, robust and effective. The OU, like every other HEI, has been dealing with the very immediate issues of the Covid-19 crisis, and doing it very well. This is where those industrial systems pay off. However, like many…
