I’m co-tutor and co-designer of this course with Jen Ross.
I’m a senior lecturer in the School of Education at Edinburgh University, and also co-director of the MSc in E-learning programme. There’s more on my web site, but in summary I’m interested in the ways in which technology asks us to re-think how education works in a fundamental sense.
The design of this course moves away from the model of enclosed, ’safe’ VLE space, to a more public mode which explores the idea of what it means to learn in an open classroom. The assessment is trying deliberately to experiment with new ideas about how we can ‘capture’ and mark the outcome and process of learning, while trying to take account of the idea that digitally active learning is spread across the web in new and volatile ways. These present a real challenge to conventional assessment methods, a challenge we are trying to approach head-on.
MSc in E-learning students are usually up for exploring and experimenting, so it’s going to be an interesting semester and one both Jen and I are really looking forward to!