User:James Neill/Moodleposium/2009/Kirkpatrick
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Moodle at the OU
Denise Kirkpatrick
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