higher ed
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Wellness washing in higher ed
When the OU was going through its crisis in 2018, staff were suffering because of unrealistic demands, and in witnessing the institution they loved be undermined. Around this time we all received an email informing us that senior management were aware of the mental stress, and here were a bunch of resources on Resilience to help us cope. The implication of course was not that they should stop destroying the university, but that we should develop some more grit to cope with it. Let’s say it wasn’t well received. Thankfully things at the OU have changed a lot since then and it is now a much more sympathetic environment. But…
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Like an extinct fish: January review
via GIPHY Seeing as January seemed to last about a year, I may as well do a review of themes over it as if it was an end of year review. I may attempt one of these at the end of every month with the same headings. Highlight: I sent the complete draft manuscript of my book Metaphors of Ed Tech off to the publisher, Athabasca University Press Teaching: In IET under the tireless direction of my colleague Leigh-Anne Perryman we continue to develop Microcredentials for the FutureLearn platform. We have a new one, Online Teaching: Accessibility and Inclusive Learning, starting in March which joins these as part of our…
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Distance ed lite
via GIPHY Now that we are into the second semester of this academic year, with nearly all higher ed teaching taking place completely online, and many students studying from home, we are in effect seeing a nation of distance learners. I know educators are working very hard to keep the process going, and don’t want to criticise anyone, but from things I’ve heard, I thought ‘d suggest some things that can be done fairly easily which will help students enormously. It is unrealistic to expect face to face providers to pivot online and to be operating with the same distance ed provision of a specialised provider like the OU. What…
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Creativity space
via GIPHY One of the claims I make in the metaphors book I’m about to send off is that they provide a much needed route for creativity for practitioners in learning technology. I think this is important for two reasons: 1) it lets us think about ed tech in different ways; 2) people working in learning tech are creative people, often from other disciplines, who need some release from the daily grind of releases, roadmaps, support, etc. As Jim Groom likes to argue, the original open web was a creative space, and we can all do with a bit of creativity in our approach to teaching. So, it’s rather ironic…
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25 Years of OU – 2017: TEF
In 2017 I applied to be an assessor for the new Teaching Excellence Framework, and was appointed. I wanted to be part of it because I felt that the process would not represent a distance education establishment like the OU very well, and as someone who likes to promote widening participation I feared it would favour the usual Russell Group suspects. In the end, my role as assessor had little impact on those areas, the OU did a lot of consultation with the TEF team, although the metrics still proved problematic for us. Before I list some of the criticisms, I will also highlight just how well the process was…
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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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Online pivot & the absence of a magic button
via GIPHY Now we’re getting into the online pivot more substantially, higher education institutions are coming to terms that it may not be a short-term emergency shift. It looks like the first semester of the 2020-21 year may be online, and if Covid-19 flares up again, who knows how long it may continue. While you could get away with “sticking classes on Zoom” for the immediate emergency, that won’t cut it in the medium term. More long-term, the pandemic will make many HEIs review the overall robustness of their offering, and seek to move portions online as a possible response to any future crisis. In a lot of senior management…
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The online pivot – student perspective
I posted a piece yesterday on what it will mean for educators and institutions to shift online as a result of COVID-19. And most of the articles and advice out there is aimed at educators, but we should bear in mind that it is an unfamiliar experience for many students too. One of the functions of face to face education is that it does a lot of the organising for a student: here is a timetable, here are locations to be in, here is where the resources can be found, etc. The physical structure of a campus is also a time and planning structure. When you move online (depending on…
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The COVID-19 online pivot
The outbreak of COVID-19 has seen many universities closing campuses and shifting learning online. It’s unprecedented and suddenly puts ed tech front and centre in a way it hasn’t been before. For those of us who have been doing online learning or distance ed for a while it can seem a bit irritating to have been seen as second class for so long and then suddenly deemed worthy of interest. So I tweeted over the weekend: It’s interesting seeing all the unis that disparaged distance ed as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education — Martin Weller (@mweller) March 7, 2020 It was kinda snarky, but…
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25 Years of EdTech: 2019 – Micro-credentials
This is year 27 in my 25 Years of Ed Tech series (no – YOU do the math). The book is scheduled to come out next year, but I thought I’d add one for this year which won’t make it in to that. For 2019 the educational technology I would choose would be micro-credentials. I was at OpenEd and WCOL conferences recently, and micro-credentials were a common topic, plus in my place of work, IET at the Open University, we are busy developing courses for these. So it seems I can’t turn anywhere at the moment without bumping into them. Micro-credentials are smaller, certified chunks of learning, often allied to…
