25YearsOU
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25 Years of OU: 2010 – podstars
I became interested in the implications of new technology on academic practice towards the end of the 00s. This would later come under the digital scholarship term, and I’d write a book about it in 2012. At the OU I was promoting the idea of using free, low-entry tools to disseminate research, or add pieces into learning content. I ran a small project at this time called ‘Podstars‘ which sought to progress this approach. In this I got a number of volunteers from across the university. At the time smart phones weren’t a thing, so we loaned them all Flip video cameras (I loved a Flip). I got them together…
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25 Years of OU: 2009 – Learning Design
via GIPHY Before Jisc went all neo-liberal and started selling corporate services, they used to fund interesting schemes in UK further and higher ed. One of these was a round of Learning Design projects. With Patrick McAndrew I had some small funding via this route. Grainne Conole was the recipient of a larger grant, the OULDI project, which really helped kick off Learning Design at the OU. Now we have a Learning Design approach that is embedded in all module production. It requires designers to consider student activities using six categories which arose from Grainne’s work in her time at the OU. There are also a set of other tools,…
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25 Years of OU: 2008 – SocialLearn
via GIPHY Web 2.0 was big back in the day, and at this distance it’s sometimes difficult to remember how much it caused us to examine many aspects of education. The OU was interested in how platforms like Facebook could be used for learning, or more specifically, if one could create a Facebook for learning platform. We are tired now of all the “X for education” takes, but at the time this was interesting – social media was showing how people came together quickly around topics, how peer to peer learning was operating, and the way resources (eg YouTube clips) were being incorporated into informal learning. It wasn’t quite the…
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25 Years of OU: 2007 – eportfolio
via GIPHY In the latter half of the 00s eportfolios gained a lot of attention and there was a proposal that all universities be mandated to provide students with eportfolios that they could take with them between institutions and employers. There was an IMS standard and several providers such as PebblePad and Mahara. The OU set about developing its own system (as it often does), called MyStuff. Part of the role of IET’s Masters programme (before it was axed) was to act as a testbed for the University more generally. So we developed a module called H808 The Elearning Professional, which had the new OU system at its core. My…
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25 Years of OU: 2006 – broadcast review
via GIPHY Around this time I was asked by my OU colleague Tony Walton to join the Broadcast Strategy Review, which he was leading. The OU has a long, and innovative history with broadcast, having been set up with a collaboration with the BBC. For those of a certain age, when you mention the Open University people will say “oh, I remember those programmes in the middle of the night on BBC2”. The OU programmes used to be linked to specific courses and be broadcast in the ‘dead’ time of late night, before late night TV was a thing (we’re talking the 70s here). It was often the route by…
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25 Years of OU – 2005: OpenLearn
Around this time I was asked by my OU colleague Tony Walton to join the team preparing a bid to the Hewlett Foundation. They had funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare and we’d been in conversations with them about doing something similar for OU material – releasing it as OER. The thing about the early MIT stuff was that although it was open, it wasn’t that useful. A course syllabus, reading list and some notes is not a distance learning course that can be studied independently. The OU course materials are designed specifically for that purpose, and prior to open textbooks this looked like the best use of OER (it still is, I’d…
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25 Years of OU: 2004 – blogging
I didn’t start this blog until 2006, but it was my 3rd attempt at blogging. About 2004 I had seen Tony Hirst and John Naughton making good use of blogging, and I followed a lot of the nascent Northern Voice crowd. I attempted using Blogger, then a hosted WP site before I set up on Typepad (and then migrated to Reclaim Hosting a few years later). I’ve blogged about blogging a LOT, it is the default topic for bloggers when you run out of interesting things to say, so I won’t repeat the stuff about identity and digital scholarship here (I love that the tag I used for this initially…
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25 Years of OU: 2003 – VLE
via GIPHY After my experience with T171, the UKeU, and helping develop their platform, I was approached by the PVC at the OU to be the first VLE Director. I was still a relatively young academic (well in OU terms anyway), so it was a bold choice which wasn’t an immediate hit with everyone concerned. At the time the OU had developed a range of bespoke technologies and was using some third party ones, but there was a desire to have a uniform solution now that elearning was definitely part of our mainstream offering. I undertook a stakeholder consultation with all the faculties, support staff, IT services and students. My…
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25 Years of OU: 2002 – IET
via GIPHY The years are blurring a bit here in my 25 Years of OU series. I joined the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology around 2001 to work on the UKeU course with Robin Mason, but I’ll put it in this year as it was when I began to get settled there. IET was set up at the very inception of the OU, long before educational technology became synonymous with computers. The intention was to use the best media and technology available and to test the effective design of distance learning courses. Ed tech may now be largely synonymous with online, but that is still essentially the same mission. Considering…
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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…
