The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and its members organised a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) earlier in 2013 to help managers and teachers use technology in Higher Education.
The Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL) address the challenges many educators face of not knowing exactly how to make the best use of various technologies, which often leads to a drain of time and money.
This also means that they possibly miss out on finding innovative ways of teaching to address the present challenges of education. For as ocTEL project manager, David Jennings, notes “we face challenges in making education more accessible to a wider range of people on a more equitable basis at lower costs wherever possible and technology can make that happen”: see video.
The open course ran over an 8-week period and had about 1,200 students participating from all parts of the world. The project was funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education through the Innovation and Transformation Fund.
ocTEL also enabled participants to address innovation and change in education through working together online. They produced 683 blog posts, shared 291 bookmarks and put up 1352 forum posts.
The course was not designed by small groups of instructors, but rather by distributed teams, some of whom had never met. This approach meant ALT could drew on a broad community of expertise in course design and implementation.
The Open Educational Resource teaching materials are still available from ocTEL and ALT is in the process of planning a second ocTEL for 2014.
Register for notification of the next ocTEL course in 2014.
