1. What’s new in digital learning environments?
OU set up in 1969
Around 263,000 students worldwide
7,000 associate lecturers
470 undergraduate and 160 postgraduate modules
Consistently in top 3 highest ranked UK Universities in the National Student Survey
More and more of the student experience is going online so robust systems are essential
Niall Sclater
Director of Learning Innovation
ALT webinar, 28th June 2011

2. So what are these latest developments?
Gartner recently identified the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011
The top two are cloud computing and mobile applications and media tablets – both of which provide tremendous opportunities for learners.
Predictions are that by 2014 more people will access the Internet from a mobile device than from a PC, and as you can see here 1.2 billion people are carrying handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce – which means they’re also capable of rich mobile learning.
Meanwhile the provision of IT services is increasingly moving to the Cloud so that users can access their data and applications using simple web browsers and move away increasingly from complicated operating systems on PCs.

3. The future is……

4. Interactive

5. Doing maths this way students can:
get immediate feedback in a way that they can’t with paper
try again if they get it wrong
work at their own pace

10. The future is……

11. Mobile

12. The study planner shows what students need to do each week and is at the heart of the online experience.
All the module resources and activities are accessible from here
Students can see information pulled in from various systems such as assignment scores and tutor contact details
Our learning websites are currently being re-engineered so that they’re formatted appropriately for mobile devices

16. The future is……

17. Social

18. There’s been a phenomenal growth in the use of Facebook

19. People on More than 500 million active users
Facebook 50% of our active users log onto Facebook in any given day
Average user has 130 friends
Activity on Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
Facebook Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
Platform More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than
180 countries
More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook platform
More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook
platform
Mobile There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing
Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active
on Facebook than non-mobile users.

20. Do OU students want to involve Facebook in their study experience?
“Facebook has… been more useful by far than the forums provided through StudentHome, which are pretty much dead of activity”. Sean Norman Level 1 Social Science
“I would rather keep them separate. Friends at Facebook, study at OU web At OU most of us are working and studying with little time for anything else” Anon, Level 1 Arts
So can we build on the phenomenal success of Facebook and use it with our students for teaching and learning purposes?
We carried out a survey with the help of Caroline Jarrett which had nearly 1,000 responses.
The majority were clear that they didn’t want to use Facebook in their studies.
However most of those rejecting Facebook were non-users of Facebook. Of those who are frequent users about half would like to use it in their studies
There were some very positive comments from students.
And some extremely negative ones.
From this our conclusion was that we should consider providing services through Facebook but certainly not make them compulsory.

24. The future is……

25. Personal

27. sclater.com/blog
twitter.com/sclater