Innovating Pedagogy Report 2014: The Open University

The OU have published their annual Innovating Pedagogy Report (http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/innovating/), which explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment to guide educators and policy makers. They "list ten topics which have the potential to provoke major shifts in practice" (OU 2014, pg 3). There is also significant interest in this annual report from the Elevate Team, as the majority of the ideas will be enhanced and facilitated through learning technologies, as well us disseminating the report and transferring the ideas into our own practice.

From my perspective the report is reassuring with respect to to what we do. There are a number of innovations which are being championed at UCS with course teams, and some course teams are starting to redesign their curriculum to accommodate. This includes, the flipped classroom.

I am particularly interested in the emergence of the Learning to Learn innovation. The report suggests, "what we find difficult are learning what others want to teach us, and managing our learning in order to achieve particular goals and outcomes" (OU 2014, pg 4). Based on this, the innovation requires developing people to people able to be more effective learners. This dovetails really nicely with the innovations which are being piloted by Learning Services (of which Elevate is part), where we are trying to engaged with course teams to better support and develop digital literacies (study skills in old money) within their course timetables. The focus is from the board skills (developing reflective practice, search strategies, selecting the good stuff) to the specific (critical writing etc.,).

Another potential development (which I'd not thought about, although I do participate in and run !!) is event-based learning pedagogy. This offers synergies with our one off workshops. The synergies may develop further as we are looking at potential of gameifying our learning designs, and a number of wider team are running with lego serious play.

Again, a very thought provoking annual report ... Thanks to the OU Team :-)