open degree
-
The range of the Open Degree
I finally got around to reading David Epstein’s Range last year. It’s one of those popular books that makes a very powerful case, although you suspect some reporting of the academic findings may be over-simplified or contrary evidence maybe overlooked. But even so, it is a valuable validation of the multidisciplinary approach to education. As the Director of the Open Programme at the OU, which has a multidisciplinary open degree where students can combine over 250 modules into their own pathway, a combined stem degree focused on science pathways and a postgraduate Open Masters, this is of course, something that appeals to me. I’ve talked about interdisciplinarity in educational technology…
-
Open as in pathway
Open education is a term that has many interpretations. We mapped eight areas in this work, based on citation analysis. A lot of our focus tends to be on the individual module, for example, open pedagogy, open textbooks, OER, MOOCs, all operate at the level of the individual course. Other aspects, such as the Open University’s open entry to degrees, and open access policies operate at the institutional level. We have macro and micro levels of openness, but perhaps an absence of meso- level ones. I’ve blogged about this before, but one aspect that I think is overlooked is openness at the curriculum level. On the open degree, we allow…
-
Good online learning – asynchronicity
Following on from the last post about group work, I’m continuing my series (2 posts constitutes a series, right?) on trying to counter the negative views of online learning by highlighting positive aspects. In this post I want to look at an element that is, in my view, often overlooked – the ability to structure learning that is asynchronous in delivery but retains aspects of interactivity, collaboration and community. Much of face to face learning is based around the often unquestioned assumption of synchronous delivery. A student has to be present at a set time for a lecture, seminar, lab session, or exam. Traditional distance learning (largely print based) started…
-
Open programme exhibition
I’m the chair of the Open Programme at the OU – the multi-disciplinary degree where students can choose from over 250 modules to create their own degree (or PostGrad qualifications). As David Kernohan so handily illustrates in this WonkHe piece, we’re also the largest degree in the UK. You’re interested, right? You want to know more, don’t you? Well, we have you covered! The open programme team, along with the lovely people at the OU archive team in the Library have created a digital exhibition, where you can explore various facts about the open programme and marvel at artefacts drawn from the archive detailing the history of multi and interdisciplinary…
-
The tyranny of the timetable
Scheduling and the creation of timetables is a fantastically complex task in the world of increasing degree options. But it is also one of those things we take for granted, and don’t question its implications. James Clay wrote about creating more flexible, smart timetables that adapt to student needs, but even this has the lecture/class as an assumption. It has struck me during the pivot how much the lecture is still the default model, and the effort has largely gone in to shifting this online. This would seem to me a missed opportunity for a number of reasons (many pedagogic), one of which is that it recreates the tyranny of…
-
25 Years of OU – 2019: The Open Programme
In 2019 I became the Director of the Open programme at the Open University. The open programme covers our ‘Open’ qualifications, such as the Open degree. When the OU was founded, you could only get an open degree, there were no named ones. This was part of the deliberate policy to imagine a new type of university and education. The OU’s first VC, Walter Perry put it like this: “a student is the best judge of what [s]he wishes to learn and that [s]he should be given the maximum freedom of choice consistent with a coherent overall pattern. …this is doubly true when one is dealing with adults who, after…
-
Open programme art work
At the risk of making this blog a Bryan Mathers fanboi site, I am devoting another post to his work. As I’ve mentioned, I’m the Chair of the Open Degree Programme at the OU. We got Bryan in to help us think through our joint principles. The aim was also to create some artwork we can use in presentations, that are social media friendly and illustrate key benefits about the open degree. So here they are with some thoughts: Brave learners – we like to suggest that open learners are brave, in that taking control of your own learning path requires a sense of responsibility. It is easier in some…
-
Open degree generator
I’ve mentioned before that I’m the Chair of the Open Degree at the OU, which is our multidisciplinary degree. Bar some excluded combinations, students can combine modules from across the complete range of OU offerings. This creates some interesting combinations, and as I’ve reported before, it turns out that students really take advantage of the flexibility, with many different, often unique pathways. I had with the metaphor generator, which randomly selected a metaphor topic from one list and applied it to a randomly selected educational technology in another list to give metaphor prompts such as: “How is your favourite film an analogy for academics use of Twitter?”. I thought I…
-
Situated degree pathways
As part of my role in the OU’s open degree programme, we had a session with Bryan Mathers recently to draw out some of our key principles and vision (and get some nifty graphics of course). During this wide ranging session with the team, one of the things we talked about was the flexibility in the open degree. You can create your own pathway, but perhaps more importantly you can change and adapt it as you go along, responding to changes in your life, interest that has been sparked by your studies, topics of your study you have found less interesting than you expected, or shifts in society. This responsive…
-
Tracker bikes and open degrees
When I was young, in the 70s/80s we used to ‘make’ our own bikes, which went by the generic label of tracker bikes. These generally consisted of a second hand frame, usually no gears, knobbly tyres, massive cowhorn handlebars, and short (or no) mudguards. They were cheap, individual and occasionally dangerous. The handlebars of one of mine sheered off at the base midway down a hill once, leaving me holding them helplessly waiting to crash (I often marvel that any child of the 70s made it to adulthood). These largely died out with the advent of standardised versions, notably the Raleigh Grifter, and then the ubiquitous mountain bike. These, like…
