Open Education: Teaching and Learning Away Day

By Professor Grainne Conole

Last week our Open Education team had a very productive teaching and learning away day. The aim was to reflect on the current ways in which we design and support our DCU Connected students. A background document was circulated prior to the meeting, which collated various Learning Design frameworks. We identified two overarching themes to improving our teaching and learning:

• New and more systematic design of online, open distance teaching and learning. In terms of thoughtful and explicit design, we need to
  • Ensure the workload across modules in consistent
  • Set up either a week by week or month by month schedule
  • Indicate the indicative time needed to complete activities and content and assignments
  • Split content into core and additional (extension)
• Supporting, and working with, online, open distance learners and teachers (learning students).

In addition, we identified 10 principles for online teaching and learning:

1. Flexible learning: An accessible learning experience to transform lives and societies and enable widening access
2. Teacher presence: Expert academic teaching, guidance and facilitation from specialist, passionate educators
3. Foster belonging: Fostering a sense of belonging
4. Meaningful interaction: Commitment to a deep level of meaningful interaction, where self-regulated learning is active, collaborative and participatory
5. Students as partners: Surfacing the student voice and involving them to design decisions
6. Rich learning resources: Universal design (accessibility standards); any device;
7. Authentic and reflective assessment: Use a variety of assessment (and feedback) mechanisms to ensure that learning is: active, authentic and meaningful
8. Personalised support: Student support personalised to the online distance learner: academic, pastoral, technical, and administrative
9. Research informed teaching and learning: Commitment to cutting-edge, research-led approaches to Learning Design
10. Open education practices: Practices, philosophy and co-creation

You can read more about operationalising these principles on Grainne’s personal blog where she expands on each principle.