Course Production at the Open University

Jim Ellis

Head of

Interactive

Media

Agenda• Open University background

• Learning & Teaching Solutions (LTS)

• Course production

• Learning technology

• Learning design

• ‘People’ issues

• The future 

The Open University“Open to people, places, methods and ideas. It promotes educational

opportunity and social justice by providing high quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambition and fulfil their potential.”

• Over 2m students and 325,000 degrees since 1971

• Currently 220,000 students

• 4,500 staff at Milton Keynes + 8,000 Associate Lecturers

• 580 courses, 200 different awards. Most popular (2004):

– Introduction to social science (9,222 students)

– Introduction to the humanities (7,048)

– Understanding health and social care (5,429)

Learning & Teaching Solutions• LTS works with academic faculties to generate and support course

materials and services

• Course materials production (print, CD, DVD, online, OpenLearn)

• Learning and teaching systems and services (e.g. VLE)

• Intellectual property, co-publishing, set books

• Storage and distribution

• Student computing helpdesk

• Project planning, management, finance, quality, testing, resourcing, outsourcing, recruitment, staff development

Learning & Teaching Solutions• 500 staff, €40m turnover

• 8 academic faculties:

– Arts - Business school– Education & languages - Health & social care– Maths & computing - Science– Social sciences - Technology

• 9 Account Managers & 23 Project Managers

• Approx 50 editors, 25 programmers, 20 graphics, 30 media assistants, project support, testing, secretarial, etc

Courseteam

LTSteam

coursemanager

copublishing procurement

sound & vision

rights

software

academic team

media project manager

graphicsediting

course chair

tech testing

media account manager

associate dean

comp servs

library disabilities examsIET student servs

media assist

learning design?

ProjectManagement

ProjectManagement

• Clarity – define as much as we can as early as we can

• Consistency – common terms, systems, methods

• Control – of risks through checkpoints and sign-offs

Technology

How does this impact on “supported open & distance learning”?

Three major projects• Structured Authoring

• Enterprise Content Management

• Virtual Learning Environment

PRESENTPRODUCEPREPARE

PDF

Word

HTML

SCORM

IMS

OU VLESchema

Struct Auth

XMetaL

Web Form

EXE

etc, etc

XSLT

ECMDigital Asset Management

VLE• OU VLE 1.0 (23 Jan 07) based on Moodle 1.7

• Additional 1.8 functionality and accessibility being added

• Basic course web sites (text, graphics, resource links, course calendar, etc)

• Moodle quiz and OpenMark eAssessment

• Blogs and wikis

• Simple ePortfolio

• Federated search tool

Open UniversityLearning & Teaching Solutions

VLE challenges to date• General code base

• Integration with existing OU systems

• Accessibility

• Roles and permissions

• Internal communications

– VLE Developers’ Wiki

– Other LTS developers

– Academics

OU paradoxes• We want to be consulted

– Everything takes too long

• ‘Leading the learning revolution’

– Move to greater templating & reuse

• Content-light, online, learning objects

– Academics and students like textbooks

• Social constructivism

– Are all students ready to participate in Web 2.0?

The future?

Student activities and needs&

Learning outcomes

Not technology