Mick Jones

Associate Dean, Faculty of Health and Social Care

 

Project: The OU Learning Design Initiative (OULDI)

Programme: Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design

 

The OU Learning Design Initiative (OULDI) started with institutional strategic funding in 2007 and has been funded by Jisc under the Institutional approaches to curriculum design programme since September 2008. Project objectives were as follows:

• To apply OULDI learning design methodology across a range of institutional contexts and to capture the barriers and enablers
• To review existing curriculum processes and then pilot, document and evaluate the roll-out of design innovation across the OU and four other institutional contexts
• To capture, build and promote communities for the sharing of knowledge within the context of Web 2.0 technologies
• To undertake necessary technical developments to adapt key tools, including Cloudworks and CompendiumLD
• To build a body of evidence and evaluation by following selected teams longitudinally through the entire course development process working across five institutions and two pan-communities

 

Alignment with institutional agendas and strategies

The OULDI project aligns and links with two other key OU strategic projects, Curriculum Business Models and Curriculum Planning and Approval Processes.

 

The Curriculum Business Models project had the job of helping all the faculties to take a fresh look at the way they designed and produced modules, with three major objectives in mind:

• to improve financial viability
• to increase business agility through becoming more flexible and responsive in approaches to curriculum development and
• to be more pedagogically effective with a particular emphasis on making better informed design decisions based on knowledge about student performance and preferences

 

Another strategic driver was a major cost review triggered by the ELQ (Equivalent or lower qualifications) funding rules which phased out funding for the majority of students in England studying for a qualification that was equivalent to, or lower than, a qualification that they had already achieved (the purpose being to divert funding to support those who were entering higher education for the first time). This had a major impact on the OU as many of its students (possible a third or more) wanted to study in order to change direction or they may have done some higher education 20 years ago and now wanted to study for something that is more professionally related. All this led to a strategic initiative to look at costs and explore efficiencies. In addition, the OU recognised the need to start focusing on recruitment to qualifications rather than individual modules, due to likely future changes in funding rules, however, the institution’s modular structure has resulted in many students studying for small numbers of modules and not necessarily progressing through to qualifications. All this led to two things: one was ‘How can we better understand the design of a whole student journey through a qualification instead of these modular chunks that we’ve been used to thinking about?’ and secondly, ‘What could we do to improve retention and progression?’

 

All this background led the OU to focus on the learner experience and look to improve quality enhancement processes. Thus the Curriculum Business Model initiative led to the Learning Design (OULDI) initiative with a focus on representing designs and understanding the different aspects of performance in relation to those designs and to be then able to manipulate aspects of the design to improve performance e.g. in terms of cost and student outcome. In the past, QA was built into course design (in theory), however in practice, the OU was not able to capture effectively and routinely what the designs were, the intentions of the course teams and how they put the designs into operation.

 

The OULDI project has therefore helped the university to address a series of challenges; first of all, how to operationalise the university’s learning and teaching strategy and secondly, how to support the Curriculum Business Models project (which was absolutely crucial to the university reengineering itself for the future) and thirdly, the move to qualifications-based funding and recruitment. All of this has led to the Student Experience Programme and an Academic Design project, which is part of how the OU responds to the new qualifications based funding environment.

 

“A course over in the Technology Faculty would have a good reputation and we knew that students did well on it, but actually getting under the bonnet and finding out what it was that made that course work so well with students was really tricky.”

 

“The learning and teaching strategy for the university, which has gone through a couple of revisions recently, makes specific reference to Learning Design and to Curriculum Business Models. So people are directed to the outputs from these projects and a set of templates, tools, guidance documents are now being made available to all staff in the university from those projects.”

 

Impact on staff culture and capabilities

The project has helped the OU to describe the use of e-learning alongside more traditional delivery and support mechanisms in design terms, particularly in relation to balancing the greater use of e-learning with face-to-face contact and physical content delivery, both of which are valued by students. However, there are differences in staff teams – some are very innovative whereas others try to hold onto traditional methods and are nervous about more innovative approaches. Having a way of being able to represent designs enables discussions amongst staff to happen. In this way, the OU is gradually developing an innovations culture and not only finding ways of cutting unnecessary costs and increasing efficiencies but also finding new ways of putting courses together e.g. by solely using OERs and web content, where schematics would show how students would move between different pieces of content.

 

As an output of the project (and the Curriculum Business Models project), the institution has created a series of staff development activities across all faculties in order to embed the thinking into the personal and professional skills of academic teams and to use the design tools (e.g. the course map, module map and pedagogy profile).

 

“The project is really providing the means to undertake this major review of our teaching approach and the systems that underpin that approach, in order to strengthen what we’re offering at qualification level.”

 

“Interestingly, I think if we hadn’t had these challenges, which were really a result of external higher education funding changes, my guess is the whole learning design initiative would have remained of interest only to a group of enthusiasts. I think it suddenly came into its own because we had these challenges and we didn’t really have a language for addressing them.”

 

Impact on the student journey

The project is providing a common framework for expressing a wider repertoire of teaching designs with core elements being strengthened. This is crucial for OU students as the institution has to consider scalability: for example, some of the big Level 1 modules have 14,000 students on them, therefore they have to be extremely robust. In other words, the core approach is solid and well understood across the institution and must underpin different types of teaching design. All this has to have a major impact on recruitment, progression and retention.

 

“What we’ve been able to do is start to identify more clearly where the problem areas are and explore some of the real reasons for student dissatisfaction, and when we’ve looked into it more carefully we’ve often found that it’s not to do with the fact of having more online activity, a lot of it’s been to do with the complexity that’s created if you don’t design things well online.”

 

“Students now don’t want to get to the end of their studies and not have some of their materials on their shelves – and that’s crude – but that’s quite a strong feeling expressed by some students. There’s also a feeling that there is perhaps too much time spent at the computer, especially if you’re someone whose job entails computers for most of the day.”

 

“It’s weighing up sort of innovation in pedagogy with what our students actually want. No longer can we say to students, ‘Well, this is how we do it, this is what you’re going to be doing… Take it or leave it’ – We have to be far more sensitive, I think, to arrangements that they find convenient, comfortable and doable; it’s changing the power in that relationship a little now.”

 

Impact on institutional efficiencies and effectiveness

The project is providing a common framework for expressing a wider repertoire of teaching designs with core elements being strengthened. This is crucial for OU students as the institution has to consider scalability: for example, some of the big Level 1 modules have 14,000 students on them, therefore they have to be extremely robust. In other words, the core approach is solid and well understood across the institution and must underpin different types of teaching design. All this has to have a major impact on recruitment, progression and retention.

 

“What we’ve been able to do is start to identify more clearly where the problem areas are and explore some of the real reasons for student dissatisfaction, and when we’ve looked into it more carefully we’ve often found that it’s not to do with the fact of having more online activity, a lot of it’s been to do with the complexity that’s created if you don’t design things well online.”

 

“Students now don’t want to get to the end of their studies and not have some of their materials on their shelves – and that’s crude – but that’s quite a strong feeling expressed by some students. There’s also a feeling that there is perhaps too much time spent at the computer, especially if you’re someone whose job entails computers for most of the day.”

 

“It’s weighing up sort of innovation in pedagogy with what our students actually want. No longer can we say to students, ‘Well, this is how we do it, this is what you’re going to be doing… Take it or leave it’ – We have to be far more sensitive, I think, to arrangements that they find convenient, comfortable and doable; it’s changing the power in that relationship a little now.”

 

Impact on institutional management and wider engagement

The project is providing a common framework for expressing a wider repertoire of teaching designs with core elements being strengthened. This is crucial for OU students as the institution has to consider scalability: for example, some of the big Level 1 modules have 14,000 students on them, therefore they have to be extremely robust. In other words, the core approach is solid and well understood across the institution and must underpin different types of teaching design. All this has to have a major impact on recruitment, progression and retention.

 

“What we’ve been able to do is start to identify more clearly where the problem areas are and explore some of the real reasons for student dissatisfaction, and when we’ve looked into it more carefully we’ve often found that it’s not to do with the fact of having more online activity, a lot of it’s been to do with the complexity that’s created if you don’t design things well online.”

 

“Students now don’t want to get to the end of their studies and not have some of their materials on their shelves – and that’s crude – but that’s quite a strong feeling expressed by some students. There’s also a feeling that there is perhaps too much time spent at the computer, especially if you’re someone whose job entails computers for most of the day.”

 

“It’s weighing up sort of innovation in pedagogy with what our students actually want. No longer can we say to students, ‘Well, this is how we do it, this is what you’re going to be doing… Take it or leave it’ – We have to be far more sensitive, I think, to arrangements that they find convenient, comfortable and doable; it’s changing the power in that relationship a little now.”

 

Overall reflections

The OU’s big challenges are operating teaching support and assessment at scale and at a distance. The institution’s most expensive elements are the people support for students and their assessment and it is looking for better use of online technologies and tools for doing this. The design of tools and systems to allow them to carry a rich pedagogic conversation whilst staying efficient is key to the university’s future.

 

“The fact that the same tools have been tried out with other institutions I think has been really valuable.”