With the first phase of the Early Adopter Project complete for the new Short Courses Platform, we attended our first Canvas User Group at the University of Birmingham. We spent the day finding out the latest updates to the learning platform, and discussed challenges and good practice for tackling some of the key areas involved […]

The Instructional Design Team have just completed a project with the OER (Open Educational Resources) Service which, as all good projects do, started with a mysterious old dusty spreadsheet. It was a record of legacy MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that had been developed over the years; MOOCs that hadn’t been through the robust processes […]

Have you ever heard a Japanese shakuhachi flute? Or the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle? Do you know how the saxophone was invented? Or why the piano has become so popular? Did you know St Cecilia’s wasn’t always a museum? We have just completed a fantastic project that showcases St Cecilia’s Hall and its impressive and intriguing […]

The Open Education Global 2021 (OEGlobal) conference kicks off on Monday 27 September! The 5-day online event celebrates all things open education and, this year, my proposal was accepted to present as part of their video sessions, where attendees can view presentations, share resources, and discuss ideas. Throughout the week, there are also webinars, interactive […]

It’s hard to believe that it has been a year since the pandemic began, but here we are! In April 2020, we created the short online course, COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application, to meet the pressing needs of healthcare workers around the globe. I worked closely with the team to build the course on […]

ABC Learning Design is a hands-on, collaborative workshop in which academic teams map out learning sequences of content to create a storyboard for their course. Originally developed at UCL, it is used across the University and beyond, and has been key in the redesign and development of on-campus courses for hybrid teaching and learning. With […]

We heard some fantastic news last week – Graham Nimmo, Programme Director of the MSc Critical Care, has been awarded the Principal’s Medal for Exceptional Contribution 2020, together with David Griffith. I have worked closely with Graham since March on the (very!) rapid build, launch and three runs of the COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and […]

At the UCD Gathering conference last week, Laura Yarrow’s talk on rebellious creativity was a definite highlight for me. She talked about what we can learn from children’s rule-ignoring, rebellion-embracing ways to improve our ideas, creativity and ways of working. A story about her 5-year-old son summed it up well. When frantically searching for an […]

In his talk at the UCD Gathering event last week, Spencer Turner summed up the universal complaints he’s heard repeatedly throughout his career about meetings and workshops. I think we’re probably all familiar with problems like focus getting lost and conversations wandering off topic, calendars full of mysterious meetings we’re not sure why we’ve been […]