A Design Guide for Open Online Courses

This guide is a comprehensive summary of how we went about creating Citizen Maths, an open online maths course and service. The guide shares our design principles and the techniques we used to put them into practice. Our aim is to provide – with the appropriate ‘translation’ – a resource that will be useful to to other teams who are developing online education initiatives.

How to merge courses via Skype™†? Lessons from an International Blended Learning Project‡

This study reports on an international project in which students taking the course Contemporary Issues in Turkish Politics in spring 2011 and fall 2011 at two institutions of higher education, ‘Gettysburg College’ in the United States and ‘Izmir University of Economics’ in Turkey, worked together in virtual learning environments to complete various tasks as part of their course work. The project employed a blend of traditional and technology-based teaching methods in order to introduce a technology like Skype in a bi-national learning environment in Turkey. Students collaborated and interacted with their international counterparts in two different virtual contexts. First, classrooms in the two countries were merged via Skype three times to conduct classroom-to-classroom discussion sessions on Turkish politics. Second, students were paired across locations to work on several assignments. In this paper, our goal is to present how Skype is used in a bi-national context as a blended teaching tool in an upper-level college course for instructors pursuing a similar exercise. In addition to outlining the process with a focus on Skype discussions and one-on-one student projects, we provide actual assignments and discussion questions. Students’ views elicited through surveys administered throughout the semester are presented alongside anecdotal evidence to reflect how the project was received.

Fostering postgraduate student engagement: online resources supporting self-directed learning in a diverse cohort

The research question for this study was: ‘Can the provision of online resources help to engage and motivate students to become self-directed learners?’ This study presents the results of an action research project to answer this question for a postgraduate module at a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom. The analysis of results from the study was conducted dividing the students according to their programme degree – Masters or PhD – and according to their language skills. The study indicated that the online resources embedded in the module were consistently used, and that the measures put in place to support self-directed learning (SDL) were both perceived and valued by the students, irrespective of their programme or native language. Nevertheless, a difference was observed in how students viewed SDL: doctoral students seemed to prefer the approach and were more receptive to it than students pursuing their Masters degree. Some students reported that the SDL activity helped them to achieve more independence than did traditional approaches to teaching. Students who engaged with the online resources were rewarded with higher marks and claimed that they were all the more motivated within the module. Despite the different learning experiences of the diverse cohort, the study found that the blended nature of the course and its resources in support of SDL created a learning environment which positively affected student learning.