Trialling multiple innovations; production, pedagogy and delivery on A329, the Making of Welsh History

• Project Team: Richard Marsden
• Subject Discipline: Arts and Humanities
• Theme: AssessmentEquality, diversity and inclusionOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Improves and enhance the learning experience of students
• Status: Complete
• Date: July 2018 to July 2019

Independent learning is usually envisaged as something that students do alone. But on ‘A329, The Making of Welsh History’, an online distance-learning dissertation module at the Open University, the situation is quite the reverse.

Launched in autumn 2017, A329 was in late 2018 the subject of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project supported by FASSTEST, the OU’s Scholarship Centre for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. That project looked at the efficacy of various pedagogic innovations introduced on the module and found that the two most far-reaching of these new approaches, in terms of student experience and outcomes, were:

1. the embedding of external found content directly into online module materials to promote independent study habits, and
2. the frequent use of online research activities through which students form a tight-knit community of learners by offering constructive feedback on both formative and summative pieces of their peers’ work

These approaches represent a potential paradigm shift, not only in how online distance learners study, but also in terms of how they develop broad academic and subject-specific skills. They may therefore be of relevance to anyone teaching Humanities or Social Science subjects online.