Evaluating courses' impact on diverse stakeholders can be immensely valuable as a means of identifying ways in which curriculum can better support learners' personal and professional development and achieve wider societal aims. Yet, few empirical evaluation studies exist exploring the impact of microcredentials. This article reports a study…

Declining levels of state provision of free legal advice and representation have led to increased demand for support from legal charities. This study evaluates a co-designed Open Educational Resource providing education and training for support workers volunteering for the UK legal charity Support Through Court. Addressing issues of domestic abuse…

A small preliminary PhD research project used OpenEssayist, a web based automated writing evaluation (AWE) system designed to provide immediate formative feedback to students, to gain insights into how students use such systems. One of the themes which emerged from the data analysis was that most of the students on the module did not make use of…

This paper describes a work-in-progress action research project to investigate how technology-enabled learning networks may achieve practical organisational improvement outcomes in the author's own institution, a UK distance learning higher education (HE) context. Collaborative learning technology, typically used for academic learning or…

Recent technological advances have led to tremendous capacities for collecting, storing and analyzing data being created at an ever-increasing speed from diverse sources. Academic institutions which offer open and distance learning programs, such as the Hellenic Open University, can benefit from big data relating to its students' information and…

UK higher education data has shown persistent differences in degree outcomes for specific student groups. Consequently, the Office for Students (the UK government's higher education regulator) are funding 17 projects to address these inequalities. Building on its expertise, our institution is leading the IncSTEM project alongside colleagues from…

The adoption of open, online, flexible and technology-enhanced modes of learning (in short: of OOFAT) differs by higher education institution, despite the general cries of revolution and disruption due to digitalisation. This paper presents a new conceptual model for framing difference in three key educational processes (content, delivery and…

Throughout 2020, and into 2021, national governments were forced at different times to impose 'lockdown' on traditional approaches to education to cope with the impact of COVID-19. Higher education institutions (HEI) with face-to-face models scrambled to 'pivot' to distance and online learning. Whilst originally conceived as a temporary measure,…

Studies about effective practice in Higher Education (HE), student retention, progression and attainment suggest that student engagement is a major factor in success. A sense of belonging to a community of students and academics is seen as key to creating effective engagement. Such studies have identified interventions that have proved successful…

OEPS is a cross-sector project led by the Open University in Scotland (OUiS) and funded by the Scottish Funding Council. The project began in late spring 2014 and runs until the end of July 2017. It has its origins in OER projects carried out by the OUiS over the preceding four years. In most cases these involved close partnership between the…

There is an urgent need to develop an evidence-based framework for learning analytics whereby stakeholders can manage, evaluate, and make decisions about which types of interventions work well and under which conditions. In this article, we will work towards developing a foundation of an Analytics4Action Evaluation Framework (A4AEF) that is…

Online learning is now achieving recognition as offering a way for learning to scale. However we need to learn from the experiences in distance learning institutions. The Open University was established over 40 years ago and offers a unique experience in building a distance learning organisation on innovative use of media, originally through…

The UK Open University has a large, highly distributed workforce, particularly within its part-time teaching staff who work mainly from home and who live across the UK and Ireland. In these circumstances it is a challenge to provide professional development which allows for situated learning, peer interaction and community building. In this paper…

At the Open University in Scotland "openness" is part of our sense of self; our engagement with Open Educational Resources and Practices (OER/OEP) seems obvious. In this paper we explore some of those obvious aspects and using our partnership with a third sector organisation explore some of the less apparent aspects of openness. In…

The nature of openness in education has transformed from just relating to open access to encompass a wide range of interpretations. This paper explores the concept of an "open scholar" whose practice is shaped by digital and networked technologies. It is argued that openness represents an effective working method in this environment, and…