Open University help for other institutions – drop in sessions

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Several people (no, they’re not imaginary) have asked if the OU can make its expertise available to other institutions and educators as they engage in the online pivot. Of course, the immediacy of this shift is very different from designing a purposefully distance ed course with the luxury of time, so some of that expertise may not be appropriate. But some of it will. In addition, I think as the immediate implementation settles down people will start looking more medium to long term. Will the first semester next year be at a distance? Should we build in more distance ed options as part of our contingency planning?

So I’ve press ganged some of my IET colleagues into saying they will join me. I haven’t had time to do a full recruitment, so ALL Open University colleagues please join and share your experience. I’ll see if it gets any traction, if it’s just me and the dog, fair enough, we can play solitaire. If more popular then we may theme later sessions and get in appropriate staff. At the moment they will start general.

I have scheduled them for every Wednesday 3-4pm GMT in clickmeeting, starting Wed 25th March, using the same URL: https://bit.ly/OUonlinepivot

This is unofficial I ought to stress, and if an official version comes along, I shall bow out. But in the interest of moving quickly and all that, I thought I’d start here.

Note, it’s not aimed at supporting Open University staff, or students, there definitely are official things for that, which I wouldn’t want to cut across. This is help for those in other institutions: individual educators, ed tech support teams, student support, admin, library staff etc who are now faced with operating at a distance.

Obvious caveat: we may well not have the answers to queries and anything we do say is not official advice.

Hope to see some of you online – we’re winging this, but let’s wing together.

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