OUEdTech
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AI in education – reality, uses, risks & ethics
Following on from previous talks in the seminar series I’m convening at the Open University, my colleague Wayne Holmes gave the last one on artificial intelligence. I found AI perhaps the most thorny of technologies in educational technology. Firstly, how much of it is hype? Secondly, what can it do usefully and realistically in education? And thirdly, perhaps most significantly, what are the potential negatives? These three questions are at the core of ed tech in 2018, and nowhere are they more prevalent than in AI. So, I was particularly grateful for someone who knows what they’re talking about to guide us through these. On the first of these, Wayne…
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Aspects of open – fieldcasting
As part of the OU’s 50th anniversary next year I’m going to be giving a lecture on aspects of open education. As well as the obvious, I think there are means of opening up education that get overlooked or forgotten in the new interpretations. An example of such is virtual, or remote field trips and laboratory work. At the OU we have an assortment of such approaches, including the OpenStem labs, a virtual microscope, and fieldcasts. This latter activity is the focus of this post. We have always conducted residential schools, but these are increasingly costly and difficult for students to attend, and there can be issues around accessibility. So…
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Asking the right questions
I mentioned previously that I’m hosting a series of seminars at the Open University, with the intention of showcasing our own expertise (internally and externally) and also getting us an institution to engage with current ed tech developments. Last Thursday my colleague Prof Bart Rienties looked at analytics. Not so much real time, but rather digging into large data sets across multiple courses to explore what it is that students actually do. This is always difficult to ascertain, but particularly so for a distance education university when you don’t get to see what they’re doing. We ask them of course through surveys, which are useful but these aren’t always reliable…
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Emotions, artefacts and education
I’ve been having bits of this conversation with various people, so I’m going to try blogging it as a way of clarifying the mess in my head (a little). During the recent OU Crisis™ one of the elements that kept arising on twitter discussions was students and staff saying the shift to online was flawed, and there was a strong preference for books. Similarly, in nearly all of our student surveys the components of a course that score the highest satisfaction are printed units. As one of the early proponents of online education at the OU, I used to resist this narrative, dismissing it as people sticking with what they…
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Sensible Ed Tech
Following the OU’s recent tribulations I have reflected that, as an ed tech academic, much of it was related to the implementation, or the perception of, technology in teaching. In this the OU is not alone – increasingly the strategy of any HEI is determined in part (sometimes a very large part) by its relationship with technology. And herein lies a problem. Most VCs, Principals, Rectors, and senior managers are not well grounded in ed tech. It is also an area which is subject to extreme views (for and against), often based on emotion, romance, and appeals to ego. I would like to therefore propose a new role: Sensible Ed…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2017
The Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out, this time in collaboration with the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). It’s the sixth year we’ve done one (well done to Rebecca Ferguson and Mike Sharples on pushing this through). When we started the intention was to make it distinct from the NMC New Horizon reports by focusing on pedagogy. I think, to be honest, in those early ones there was probably a technology focus still, but as it’s progressed it has really moved away from this to more pedagogy, socially focused issues. I’d also add I’ve found it increasingly useful as a resource.…
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Bridges between formal and informal learning
I’m considering doing an occasional series based on ed tech developments at the Open University. I’m interested in ones that roughly align with my take on ed tech, are offering practical, often small scale benefits and link to broader developments beyond the OU. So hopefully of interest outside the institution itself. I was thinking of this when I came across the unofficial OU counselling and forensic psychology site, run by a few of my colleagues at the OU. It’s hosted on Reclaim Hosting (I think on my recommendation, Jim you owe me), so sits outside of the official OU structure. This was partly a practical decision I think (it’s just…
