I posted my first sketch in the Sketch-A-Day app after weeks of marvelling at the talent on display every day and losing the nerve to get started. Finally, I decided to contribute to the day’s subject: Pigeon. My pigeon has had a wobbly landing and is balancing on one leg, symbolic of my own wobbly […]

As we have adapted to home working over the past twelve months, many of our ‘traditional’ work practices have had to change along the way. As an Instructional Designer, a big part of my role is planning courses with teams through learning design workshops. These workshops are a hands-on, practical exercise in which the teams […]

In these strange lockdown times, it feels like extra effort to keep our mental health on a high, and I’m sure it’s even more challenging to be upbeat while juggling work, family and the general devastation that the virus has caused. With all that going on, what if you are having a rough time at […]

Discussion is a powerful tool for online learning. It can help foster a sense of community and encourage peer to peer interaction and improve learner engagement. Discussion can take the form of debate or reflective sharing, giving learners the opportunity to expand upon and clarify their understanding of key ideas. It moves beyond more passive […]

In order to mark five years of Open Education Resources (OER) at the University of Edinburgh and to coincide with […]

We’ve been creating free short online courses since 2012, and have created more than 80 courses hosted on three partner platforms, Coursera, edX and FutureLearn. We’re fairly sure that we’re the only UK university to partner with all three of these major online course platforms! These partners and their websites are huge marketing machines, taking […]

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 […]

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, within training sessions and through support calls regarding Turnitin, that have really opened my eyes to the misunderstanding of the tool – that it’s being used as a plagiarism checker with no thought of what the generated similarity score really means.   The kind of fear that a […]

This is a transcript of a keynote I gave at the Open University H818 The Networked Practitioner conference.  The principles of open education were outlined in the 2008 Cape Town Declaration, one of the first initiatives to lay the foundations of what it referred to as the “emerging open education movement”. The Declaration advocates that […]

Did you know that hiring for digital marketing roles has been growing nearly 33% year-over-year? As an MSc Marketing student at the University of Edinburgh, I found it no surprise that Linkedin has listed digital marketing as one of the fastest growing sectors in 2021 (source: CNBC). While the world has already been gradually leaving traditional media for digital over time, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the process. Many marketers immediately scrambled to reach consumers through the […]