Should Open University students be entitled to particular types and amounts of tuition during their studies? Should provision be consistent across tutor groups, regions and nations, and qualifications? What are the most successful pedagogical strategies for online synchronous sessions? How should we engage with Facebook as an institution? What role do face to face sessions […]
The UK government recently released a paper: Higher Ambitions: The future of universities in a knowledge economy. There’s a short section on digital learning hidden within this 115 page document on p78-79. Three points emerge clearly: University leaderships will have to take responsibility for driving the use of new technologies throughout institutions. That can be […]
A group of us met earlier in the year from my office and from Learning and Teaching Solutions at the Open University to discuss some of our ideas around the future development of our Moodle-based VLE/LMS. Out of this discussion emerge, I think, some principles which could be taken into account when looking at new […]
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has issued a document called Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology: A revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning. Naturally I was interested to see what they are recommending. Various other studies are quoted which demonstrate the benefits of elearning, and there are references to […]
At the Oxford Shock of the Old Conference: I’ve just listened to a thought provoking talk by Ian Bell, Records Manager and Information Compliance Officer at the University of Dundee. It would be fun to get Ian in the same room as people like Martin Weller, who’s sold his soul to Google, and Tony Hirst, […]
Moving to a browser-based rather than PC-based policy has been on the cards for a while at the OU. Now Macworld has picked up on our new Mac policy which is summarised here: Since the 1990s The Open University has primarily supported PC users. This decision was made on cost grounds as fewer than 3% […]
The Open University of the Netherlands, as previously reported, doesn’t have fixed start and end dates for their courses which means that conventional VLEs (LMSs) don’t easily fit their business model. Courses with fixed start and end dates – where a cohort of students has access to content and activities solely within those dates are […]
During the last couple of days I was at the Open University of the Netherlands where I had in-depth discussions with Kathleen Schlusmans, Henry Hermans, Steven Verjans and others, and discovered that they are struggling with almost exactly the same set of strategic issues regarding elearning as we are at the UK OU. I presented […]