Our short courses catalogue, which launched in May of this year, continues to grow, attracting visitors and over 1,800 enrolments to courses from engaged learners looking to learn something new, upskill or enhance their knowledge.
In the month of July there were over 800 enrolments to courses, an increase of 5% compared to June. Active users to the catalogue also increased by 68% month on month, with 58% more views to pages than in the month of June.
With both organic and paid-for campaigns in place we expect to see this this trend of increasing web traffic and bookings over the coming months. We would encourage colleagues to share the short courses catalogue through their networks, mailing lists, on websites and social media channels.
The Short Courses Platform Service team are working with colleagues to add more courses whilst also continuing to refine and optimise the catalogue based on user feedback. Some enhancements over the next few weeks and months will include a new and improved dynamic filter experience, enhanced course options table and cosmetic changes. This will ensure that the site continues to meet the needs of our users providing them with the best possible user experience when booking on to a course.
another lovely slide theme created for me by the LTW Graphic Design team.
I was delighted to be invited as to National College of Ireland to speak as part of their ‘Assuring Quality in Fully Online Programme Delivery’ event last week. A lovely excuse to visit Dublin again.
I chose a gardening theme which enabled me to talk about the time it takes to grow online learning and the investments we make in ensuring that there are good growing conditions and that native plants can thrive.
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow
-Audrey Hepburn
Using the right platform for your learning activity
We’ve created an infographic which we hope helps explain the collection of platforms available for University of Edinburgh colleagues to use, the strategy for each and which should be used for different learning/teaching activities. The graphic talks through the benefits of using each platform. Each platform is designed with a particular use in mind, providing features to suit the specific use-case/audience. We hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions, please contact us via the IS Helpline.
Now it is time to wave goodbye to University of Oxford’s WebLearn. There is a celebratory event this week to remember our time working with WebLearn and all the support and innovations we shared in running and using the system.
The Leeds and Oxford teams met in Oxford in 2005 to discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system (Blackboard) for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai Learning Management System, deploying it as WebLearn in 2008.
WebLearn Sakai was first installed at University of Oxford in March 2007 and I joined from University of Leeds in 2008, when it was just a baby.
Working with really talented open source development teams. Adam, Mathew, Colin, Roger and Colin taught me most of what I learned about open source and the potential for using technologies in unusual ways. I attended several Sakai conferences with them over the years and there always seemed to be people who really cared about the systems they built and the community involved in developing the product. The nice thing for me about WebLearn was that it was flexible enough to not be built on the same assumption as the large proprietary systems. Oxford at the time was not driven by a module catalogue which rolled over and refreshed every term. It was based around the teaching which was done by colleagues over many years and with different students groups. The starting place- that one goes to Oxford to ‘study with’ -puts the academic colleague at the centre of the teaching and builds the online spaces around them. Some colleagues at Oxford chose to have a place in the VLE for all their teaching, with resources for first years, third years, post graduates etc grouped within that. I was pleased that we were able to build that for them. It was nice that we were not in a ‘technology says no’ conversation’.
The Sakai Community was for me, a place to meet some very interesting colleagues and researchers, some of whom I still count amongst my friends (looking at you Nynke, Michael and Alannah). It was also a place with some big personalities, Fun evenings with Michael, Ian, Nathan and Dr Chuck.
I was also pleased in LTG and OUCS to have talented researchers who worked closely with as the WebLearn team to think about what we could discover about how VLEs and OER could support student learning. Liz, Joanna and Jill really were ahead of their time in bringing a bit of academic rigour to what we were doing.
The WebLearn training and support teams made sure our VLE met users needs and Fawei continued to promote and celebrate each use in departments and colleges. Adam has been continuously blogging it since 2009 2009 September | WebLearn Blog and projects using WebLearn regularly featured in the OxTALENT awards.
In recent years, after I left in 2014 to join University of Edinburgh, Oxford changed VLE again and opted for Canvas. People sometimes forget that when we move to a new VLE the learning technology teams still have to run the old one for several years to enable course to be taught-out and keep access to any materials which staff and students might need for archives, assessment or appeals.
After several years of running in parallel with the University’s new virtual learning environment (Canvas), WebLearn was finally closed in 2022 and decommissioned in mid-November 2024. At its peak WebLearn at Oxford had 47,000 users and hosted 101,000 separate sites.
Our new Short Courses Platform has met its first major milestone.
We have 18 early adopter courses and over 250 learners enrolled and using the new learning environment.
This allowed us to establish and test the basic platform configuration including notifications, basic learner/course set up, as well as the courses templates, training and guidance.
This is the first step in moving the University’s extensive credit short courses portfolio to the new Short Courses Platform.
The learners on our new platform will not have access to our closed Library collections, so all the courses will use open access materials on their resources and reading lists.
University of Edinburgh has been publishing MOOCs as open educational resources for 10 years. Huge thanks go to all the academic teams who choose this route to share the knowledge they have created with learners all over the world.
_______________________
The Edinburgh online learning portfolio currently includes 80 fully online distance-learning Masters courses drawn from all disciplines, and 90 massive online open short courses (MOOCs) and micro credentials across 3 global platforms. University of Edinburgh reaches 4.5 million learners across every country in the world. Each of the 21 academic schools and deaneries have either a Masters or a MOOC online, and many have both. The services online students receive are excellent. E-learning students at Edinburgh currently report higher levels of satisfaction and ‘sense of belonging’ than their peers on campus. In 2023 University of Edinburgh is celebrating 10 years of return on investment in MOOCs.
When we began making massive open online courses (MOOCs) at Edinburgh our strategic position was to experiment with new ways of teaching online, to research the kind of learning and courses which could be achieved, and to have fun. We were never in it for the money. Although it was undeniably expensive at the start, the last ten years of this activity have brought considerable return on that investment in terms of what we have learned, the places we have reached and the impact we have had (inside and outwith our own institution).
As Assistant Principal for Online and Open Learning I have taken care to ensure that our online course portfolio is closely aligned with the university mission, values, civic responsibility and aspirations for the future.
Working with three global platform partners ( Coursera, Edx and Futurelearn) has given us unique insight into the business of scaling short courses online and a rich set of data about our materials and our learners. Each of the platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses and the pedagogical tools offered on each have changed rapidly during the ten years. Their business models have changed too and it has been useful to have an institutional platform strategy to help us target the right content on the right platform, for the right audience. The advice and support available in the platform teams has been useful in understanding what works well. We have been privileged to be so able to rigorously test our courses, to translate our content into multiple languages and to release significant proportions of it as open educational resources.
Making MOOCs has given us the opportunity to bring a wide range of our university community together. The many research groups, cultural organisations and charities who have developed content with us for the Edinburgh MOOCs have ensured that we have gained a diverse set of voices in discussions about how and why a university can and should make courses freely available online. The MOOCs have offered a rapid channel for knowledge translation and dissemination, public engagement with research, global reach, and a place for discussion and debate with an informed citizenry at times of major geo-political change. In ten years we have found 4.5 million people who choose to learn online from University of Edinburgh, an even though many might say the markets are hot for data skills and cyber-security, our consistently most popular course is one in Philosophy.
The value of these experiments in online learning can also be seen in the capacity building and up-skilling of colleagues. In making and delivering these courses more than 200 academic colleagues, media producers, learning designers and learning technologists cut their teeth and honed their skills for online learning. I am sure that this contributed to our ability to deliver in a crisis and develop resources to help others to do so too. Even during the years of the covid pandemic which closed our campus, our online courses and MOOCs continued to grow and some rapid-response effort from a teams across the university produced a short-course about emergency respiratory healthcare which was studied by 50,000 front-line workers the week it was launched.
Top tips for delivering free short online courses
Don’t be afraid to try something new, digital education is an evolving field and you never know where your experiments might lead
Get institutional buy-in by aligning your courses with your university’s strategic goals
If you have more than one learning platform, develop a platform strategy to ensure that you are using the right platform for the right audience.
Work closely with vendor and platform partners to get the most out of your partnership; ensure you can access any data they provide to evidence the reach your platforms deliver.
Pay attention to the licensing of all your course content; sharing it appropriately can make it accessible to many more learners globally
I am honoured that the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia UK offered me Honorary Membership of Wikimedia UK.
This is in recognition of the significant contribution that I have made to the charity over a number of years, as a long standing champion for Wikimedia’s role in higher education. In particular, in establishing a Wikimedian in Residence role at the University of Edinburgh, and for the ongoing success and impact of this programme.
I was delighted to accept, of course, but a bit embarrassed as I am not a particularly good editor of Wikipedia and I often get a bit grumpy when my edits are reverted. I support Wikimedia UK because it is the right thing to do. Wikipedia is the largest open educational resource in the world and essential for staff and students in higher education.
But I edit as a pass time, hobby, for my own distraction and amusement.
I also invented the category for ‘muses‘ which I note now has 130 entries. I started it for Stella Cartwright.
After 2 years of keynoting from a comfy chair at home it was lovely to adventure again.
It was fun to be in Limerick, and the CONUL conference was both incredibly friendly and well organised. I was happy to have a chance to wear my space boots and stand up again in front of the slides Gill made for me.
if you were there and you would like a copy of the slides for the links, please email me.
One of the things which has happened as a result of events all being online is that there are now more talking head videos, interviews, webinars and panel sessions to watch and review.
It’s an award presented to an individual who has demonstrated significant leadership and longstanding involvement with Open Education. A person who has made significant and clear contributions to the furtherance of the Open Education movement, whose contributions to Open Education have spanned regions and/or had a global impact.
I have also successfully renewed my Senior CMALT to remain in good standing as a professional learning technologist. The assessor said it was
‘An impressive account of development activities and how they have influenced learning technology developments at Edinburgh.’ Which is very pleasing.
My CPD journey continues. I completed a microcredential Certificate in Decision Making from LSE before Christmas, and I’ve finally sent off my application for PFHEA.
