Students are at the heart of our approach to learning design. We focus on helping our module authoring teams make evidence-based decisions, and insights from students form an important part of that evidence. This is the reasoning behind our curriculum design student panel (CDSP), which was highly commended in the ALT Learning Technologist of the … [Read more…]

In this series of posts, we’ve been looking at student workload mapping. This final post looks at the other neat things we can do once we’ve mapped out a module. 

Our example student, Alex, has had their workload smoothed out in the previous posts. Now that we’re sure the volume of learning and teaching for this module is manageable we can start checking that it fits in with the wider context of their studies, and that the studies themselves are suitably varied and engaging. We’re able to do this with our existing mapping data through Concurrency and Activity mapping. 

In this series of posts, we’re looking at student workload mapping. This second post explains how we monitor workload during module design, and where we might make recommendations to authors.   Overall workload for a module is agreed right at the beginning of learning design, with set times to aim for based on the level of study, … [Read more…]

In this series of three posts, we’ll be looking at student workload mapping. This first post explains why planning is so important from a student perspective – and some of the thinking behind it. Alex is studying a 60 credit Level 1 module. Curriculum guidance suggest this should involve around 20 hours of study per week, … [Read more…]

The Bett 2019 Education Technology event has come and gone, and 2 intrepid Open University explorers decided to brave the cavernous space of the Excel and see what it had to offer. Mark’s account The day started with joining the bustle of thousands of expectant educators looking to transform their student experience and hopefully their … [Read more…]

Whilst we carry out fixed and clearly defined Learning Design activity as part of our core offer, we can also provide more hands-on input aimed at supporting module teams with specific challenges they are facing with their design. Below are three such examples where we’ve provided support to help module teams to progress either with … [Read more…]

This digest contains: UK conferences & workshops Online learning and adult education MOOCs Short external news items Professional Development UK Conferences & Workshops 21-23 Jan Oxford 8th Academic International Conference on Multi-Disciplinary Studies and Education – AICMSE 2019. [CONAL] 30 Jan London 13th International Conference on Language, Education, and Innovation 2019. [CONAL] 30-31 Jan Birmingham STEM … [Read more…]

Research in assessment practice points to an emphasis on summative assessment to test learner knowledge. However, this assessment strategy does not necessarily develop knowledge and skills. In fact, a strategic approach by learners to only engage with knowledge that will specifically apply to summative tasks creates a shallow approach to learning. It is a strategy … [Read more…]

One of the key areas of growth activity over the past year or so has been to gather more student input into the design process. To this end we have a number of core approaches to gathering student perspectives during design phases: we administer the curriculum design student panel, which provides us with access to … [Read more…]

This digest contains: UK conferences & workshops Online learning and adult education MOOCs UK HE news Commercial news Industry news Short news items Professional Development UK Conferences & Workshops 4 Dec Huddersfield Physical and digital library spaces: the final frontier. [CILIP] 4 Dec London The future for higher technical education in England – delivery, simplifying … [Read more…]