Evaluating the level 1 engineering tutors resource

Project leader(s): Anne-Marie GallenClare Reger
Theme: Supporting students
Faculty: STEM
Status: Archived
Dates: March 2019 to October 2019

Reusability is a key concept for educators. For many of the associate lectures at the Open University, the group tuition policy has resulted in repetition of tutorial structure and delivery with ALs across clusters giving similar tutorials on the same topics at similar times. Some of the current literature around developing open educational resources has been highlighting flexible and pragmatic principles for content development for reuse which have helped to inform our evaluation of a shared set of resources delivered through and across the level 1 engineering tutors. Designed and maintained by the ALs themselves these resources are shared using a blog platform within the current Moodle VLE structure. Guidance around the resource asks contributors and users to highlight clear learning outcomes and reusable resources which be used in a way that address their own learner’s needs, and then generalised to be hypothetical cases of reuse by others.

These reusable resources also offer the opportunity for (re)users to contribute to the metadata, for instance, by cataloguing the variety of real cases in which context can be wrapped around pre-existing resources, or can be versioned for particular groups of learners as well as following principles for accessibility which can be useful for designing resources that can be reused by users with different needs.

During this evaluation of these level 1 engineering tutors shared resources, 83% of respondents had heard of the Tutor Shared Resources website, and 77% of these had visited the site and 93% had found the site easy to navigate. Issues around the design and use of the site were also highlighted.