There are of course two ways of looking at everything:
a) you might conclude that, If the present interfaces do not convince a majority of the users, you will have a hard time getting them to use any new ones;
b) nevertheless, new cohorts of students will not be influenced by already acquired experiences, so you always have a ‘tabula rasa’ on which to introduce new features.

Even so, I suspect that user expectations will be the main issue – but here again, the Catch22 of new technology is also two-sided:
a) familiarity breeds contempt – so, if they have used better interfaces elsewhere or have chosen to reject some, they will also reject them on the OU environment;
b) if they are presented with unfamiliar interfaces and these are not intuitive, they will also show reluctance towards them.

The baseline requirement is precisely what has always been lacking in education: proper familiarisation and full practical training on how to use the systems for both staff and students – preferable in that order! They introduced Moodle over ten years ago at my old institution and the staff still haven’t a clue on how to use even 20% of the facilities properly.

You are obviously intending to improve things and have put a lot of thought into the above, but there is some way to go when certain elements of confusion still exist in the present system. Presentation of the facilities through user guides is not enough; it is active engagement with these facilities as an inbuilt part of the course that is required. IT courses do a fair bit of this (e.g. in collaborative learning on the use of email/chatroom/forum/netiquette, etc.) but it is still fairly limited.

Maybe that is an unavoidable problem of large institutions and the disparate staff outlooks on learning … I wish you well.

The problem with Niall’s killer question (and to a lesser extent the others) is that suppose you get one of last year’s students to describe how effective the university’s teaching methods where (I would rather not single out online stuff, we really care about the overall picture). This year’s sixth former reads that when planning where to study next year. That is a minimum of two year’s lag, and with the rate of technology adoption, is that meaningful?

If we are talking about online communication, should we not instead ask: Where can potential applicants go now, to try out the tools they would use for learning, to communicate with current students about what studying at that institution is like?

Thought-provoking post… Thx.
Steven