Measuring the Impact of Learning Design and Course Creation (LDCC) Workshops

Project leader(s): Tom Olney
Theme: Other
Faculty: STEM
Status: Current
Dates: October 2019 to October 2022

This project aims to measure the impact that professional development provided by the OU, in ‘Learning Design and Course Creation’ (LDCC), has had on:

(a) six Belarussian HEIs and staff who participated in the BELL Project (phase 1)

(b) a range of Chinese OU staff and their institutions (phase 2 & 3)

This has the potential to inform:

how the OU improves the student learning experience through the design and delivery of professional development in learning design and module development to its own staff
the development of international engagement strategies.

Between 2017 and 2019, several of the project members presented a series of workshops at three Open Universities in China – Shanghai OU (Nov 2017, Sept 2018, June 2019), Guangdong OU (Dec/Jan 2018) and Jiangsu OU (July 2019). Roughly 250 staff altogether from these institutions participated in the workshops. The workshops were developed to fit a 3-day programme and were aimed at academics and others in academic-related roles.

The LDCC workshops are based on educational principles that are relatively well established in the STEM Faculty – collaborative and student-focused module design, constructive alignment, learning outcomes, online activity building, and assessment of and for learning. Their deployment in China raises the question of how transferable such pedagogical approaches are across different institutional contexts and cultures. Not much is known about how these principles are viewed, and what their impact might be in Chinese educational institutions that each have their own well-established approach to education, particularly ODL.

To achieve our overall aims, we would like to use measurement of the impact of the LDCC workshops to address two questions:

How robust and transferable are the educational approaches currently being practised at the OU?
How effective are the workshops as a time-limited professional development activity within the context of a developing longitudinal relationship with overseas HEIs that could include e.g. lengthy scholarship exchanges and experience-sharing visits?