User:James Neill/Moodleposium/2009/Kirkpatrick

Moodleposium/2009

Moodle at the OU

Denise Kirkpatrick.

Overview: Denise presented about the 40 year history of Open University in the UK with being a recognised teaching and research university which delivers its courses flexibility and which therefore must engage with and development educational technology systems.

The Open University (UK)

The Open University (UK) - 40 years old; only educational institution across 4 countries (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland)

• Open to people
  • No prereq/entry requirements
  • But there are exit requirments
• Open to places
  • Can study whether they happen to be
• Open to methods
  • Using whatever approaches/technology/pedagogy will help to deliver effectively
• Open ideas
  • Research-institution (top 50 in UK)
  • Researching own pedgagogy is essential

JN note: This seems to be institutional-emodiment of flexible learning.

Scope

• 220,000 students
• 1200+ academics: Develop materials
• 8,000 associate lectures/'tutors': Face-to-face and online contact with students, marking etc.
• Technologies are central to what we do
• International reputation for quality
• International research profile
• International partners

DP indicated separation of material development and material delivery (separately bundled) is somewhat problematic - OU wants to bring the designers closer to the students.

JN: Comment; surprising separation by OU; maybe its a legacy of the British class thing?

Management of academics / material development

• Team teaching; long course production (typical course is 3 years in development) - quite different from individualised Australian approach with a v. short lead-in
• OU challenge is to speed this up.
• Courses are very structured / industrial (may have up to 5,000 students enrolled in a subject)
• Feedback is critical
• Calendars feature strongly - and multiple calendars with
• Lots of democractic consultation, getting student feedback, piloting, trialling etc.
• Scalability is v. important - therefore, say no to lots of techological opportunities and tools
• Strong emphasis on high quality feedback - OU see it as central
• Different kinds of feedback for different tasks, wide range

E-Assessment

• Helps with instant, automatic assessment and feedback, working on building the tools for feedback
• Staff bill is the biggest proportion of budget - feedback
• Moodle has helped to provide standardisation of delivery tools etc.
• If you want to use a blog in your teaching, you must use OU-blog (ditto OU wiki)

E-books

• OU has been working on translating material into e-books

L120 - Learnosity

• Voice training / development tools

Learning and teaching tools are used for other purposes too - admin/research etc.

• if we are asking teaching academics to use different tools for admin and teaching then uptake is predictably difficult

Mobile work and learning

• Students are/live mobile

Social networking

• Extensive Second Life use
• Strong social community

Moodle custom-build

• OU (UK) built its own Moodle for its own needs

VLE reporting and tracking

• Extensive collection of data - trying to catch up with analytics
• "Voice" used to record onversations etc.

Mainstreaming

• Staff development - developing a self-sustaining community
• Specific engagement in use of VLE - reward adapt/reuse as well as innovate
• Quality assurance - revising to take account of an enterprise VLE - how to ask the right questions at the right place in course development and other systems - but want to speed up development - usability of QA sounds key

Challenges

• Benefitting from the Moodle community - OU (UK) can learn more
• Facilitating adoption
• Communication
• Gaining and maintaining buy-in
• Technology skills & access arguments
• Build vs buy
• Customised vs vanilla
• Access & equity vs sustainability
• 20% of students in each of the 5 socio-economic bands

• 8,500 students in prison - e.g., have to work hard to make it accessible to all - e.g., off-line Moodle
• How customised to make the learning tools/experiences
• Lots of dilemmas/challenges

Reflections

• How unique an instance of Moodle should we have?
• Should we have engaged in a substantial Business Process Review exercise befroe we commenced our VLE developments?
• How ubitquitous should our VLE be?
• What was the real cost?
• Did we adhere to all of our original principles?
• Can we maintina a focus on enhancing the studnet learning experience?

Questions

There were a few questions.

Questions I want to ask

• Where does OU (UK) sit with regard to IP and OERS
  • OU owns IP - allows staff some use
  • OU puts some materials as OERs?? (unclear answer - they seem largely protective of material with some sharing)
• Is there a risk of over-Moodlisation - as opposed to integration with other tools/platforms?