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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

I know, I know, I’m silver jubilee obsessed. As this year marks my 25th anniversary at the Open University I had the idea at the start of the year to follow the mediocre hit of 25 Years of ed tech series with a 25 years of OU one. I mentioned at the end of last year that I was having a bit of a blog identity crisis, and was worried it was becoming too self absorbed. I decided to double down on the self absorption with a whole series, but then the pandemic hit and I shelved the idea. But I’m resurrecting it now for two reasons: the first is…