OUEdTech
-
July round-up
My “doing it for the newsletter” monthly round-up of activity and random bits for July. It’s been a bit of a disjointed month, because after returning from the Eden conference in Dublin at the end of June, both Maren and I came down with covid (no-one else from the conference seems to have been inflicted so probably an airport/plane thing). It was as rough as the first time around, a reminder that it’s still there and still carries a punch. I made sure to take time off work this time around though – last time I soldiered on attending Teams meetings and I think that meant it lingered around longer…
-
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…
-
Innovating Pedagogy 2020
Sorry I’m a bit late with this, I’ve been writing (more on that in the next post). The annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out. As ever this is written by my colleagues in IET, in collaboration with another institution. This time it was the super smart gang at the National Institute of Digital Learning at Dublin City University. The report continues with the aim of focusing on pedagogic developments that are related to technology, but crucially not focusing on the technology itself. This year’s innovations are: Artificial intelligence in education Posthumanist perspectives Learning through open data Engaging with ethics Social justice pedagogy Esports Learning from animations Multisensory learning Offline networked…
-
The rootless ed tech units
One common complaint when I hang around with ed tech/learning technologist people (to be fair, we have a few) is that often universities don’t know quite what to do with them. They know they want them, but they’re not quite sure what for. If you look at where learning technology units are placed in organisational structures, this uncertainty is highlighted – sometimes they are aligned with the library, other times they are part of IT, or inside the education faculty, or sit on one side under the direct aegis of a PVC. My own unit, IET at the OU, has been reviewed at least six times since I’ve been there.…
-
Questions about openness – the audience decides!
During my inaugural I made extensive use of PollEverywhere, in order to make it more interactive and gain feedback (I also had a sore throat so these parts gave me a chance to swig water, but let’s go with the pedagogic justification). Following on from the previous post detailing the theme of the inaugural, here are the responses to the questions, and some musings on what they mean. First of all, lots of lovely people came in from across the globe (disc if you’re a flat-earther) which in a way, demonstrated the point I was making about exploring openness. These were often people I have met via blogs, social media,…
-
A journey through open education
On the 19th Feb I gave my inaugural lecture (rather belatedly, having become a Prof about 15 years ago), as part of the Open University’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Given the delay it was something of a mix between an inaugural and a valedictory, as I chose to trace the changing nature of open education through the personal narrative of my own involvement in projects at the OU. My pitch was that up until the 90s, ‘open education’ roughly equated to the open university model – there were some variations, but it was largely focused on access to higher education. The advent of the internet, and wide spread popularity of the…
-
Yeah, but what do _we_ know?
I hosted a series of seminars here at the OU, with the intention of sharing research we have in various aspects of ed tech, prompting the OU to ask questions of itself and also to showcase that we have lots of internal expertise (and, ahem, don’t need to pay consultants to tell us how to be a good Open University). They’ve now finished so this provides an opportunity to summarise the series. Firstly, here is a recap of the topics and speakers: Martin Weller – models of open, online flexible learning Bart Rienties – learning analytics Wayne Holmes – Artificial intelligence Rebecca Galley – Learning design Denise Whitelock – automated…
-
Automating assessment to understand assessment
In the last of the series of seminars I have been hosting at the OU, my colleague Professor Denise Whitelock talked about her work on assessment. Denise takes us through a number of projects she has worked on, which have automated aspects of assessment. These have always had a strong conceptual underpinning, for instance Dweck’s work to develop Open Comment which provided feedback to Arts students. With Open Mentor, she used Bale’s work on interactive categories to help tutors develop effective and supportive feedback. And SafeSea allows students to trial essay writing before taking the sometimes daunting step of submitting their first one, using analysis based on Pask’s conversational framework.…
-
Learning design – the long haul of institutional change
The latest in the seminars that I’m coordinating at the Open University was held recently. I was delighted that this one was presented by my colleague Rebecca Galley, talking about 10 Years of Learning Design at the OU. I was part of this project, building on the excellent work of Grainne Conole. Learning Design is a good example of how you implement institutional change in higher education. The project developed tools, worked with ‘friendly’ course teams, became integrated into the formal course approval process, developed standard workshop and support, refined practice, and then adapted to particular needs, eg using LD to focus on retention. It is not easy, but we…
-
Innovating Pedagogy 2019
As you may know, a group of academics in the Institute of Educational Technology at the OU, produce an annual report looking at innovations in teaching and learning. Led by Rebecca Ferguson and Mike Sharples, we collaborate with a different educational research unit each time, and this year it was the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen, Norway. We skipped the 2018 one and nudged it into 2019, so here is the new report. It proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not had a profound influence on education in their current form. These are: Playful Learning Learning with Robots Decolonising…
