Online Course Production and Educational Design and Engagement are hosting three events as part of the University’s first Digital Skills Festival. Digital Skills and Training are hosting a programme of online digital skills events. These are free to attend for all University staff and students. The festival takes place during the week of Monday 24 […]

The written word is a powerful communication tool. For short online courses, it is how we share learning materials, build community, and create instructor presence. Online courses use a mixture of reading and listening coupled with more interactive learning like discussion forums, multiple choice quizzes, and reflective exercises. This means the learner’s overall experience is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Every July and December we have a full Learning, Teaching, and Web Services directorate meeting and I’m asked (along with the other section heads) to submit our top six achievements from the previous six months, so we can jointly celebrate the work of LTW. Well, it’s been an interesting year and the last six months […]

Today is my last day of work before I switch on my out of office notification and take a complete break from work for the next fortnight.  It’s been a long, hard year for many or us, and for some more so than most, so its been wonderful to see the year out on a […]

We held our first Learning Technology Community meeting this week; a new group but a very well-established idea. Fifty-eight colleagues, who identify their work in some way as relating to learning technology, attended to hear presentations from Karen Howie, James Bradshaw, Sharon Boyd, and Alex Burford, on their work and experience relating to preparing for […]

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 […]

During a year where we’ve seen a switch to a new way of working, I attended the User Centred Design (UCD) online conference, covering all aspects of user-centred design and looking at research from various speakers and industries around the world. User experience and design is somewhat integrated within my role and I was looking […]