Aggregating High Quality Online Educational Resources for FE

The current global pandemic has exposed issues and enforced changes across many sectors of the UK economy and society including within education. Within an extremely short amount of time educational institutions including FE Colleges across the UK have incorporated online teaching into their offerings. Teaching online obviously is very different to teaching face to face. Matching the affordances of internet based technology to sound pedagogy which enhances student learning experiences is not easy.

Our 50+ years of distance teaching experience at the OU has taught us that a key success factor for online education is founded on the use of high quality teaching resources. Clear educational texts, short informative videos and interactive elements such as the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality can dramatically enhance student engagement and improve learning outcomes overall.

Creating high quality online teaching resources requires substantial effort though, typically involving, in addition to subject matter experts, professionals in many areas including video production, webcasting, online pedagogy and web interaction. The sheer cost and the fact that many FE colleges lack the capacity to create a comprehensive library of online teaching resources lead us to the conclusion that supporting teaching material re-use through an accessible aggregation or library would be of great benefit to the sector.

To this end the VocTeach FE Symposium will kickstart a broad community around this issue related to supporting the aggregation of high quality learning resources for online FE education. Specifically, we will bring together FE educational experts and practitioners, EdTech experts, awarding organisations and other stakeholders to begin to agree next steps.

The event will be opened by Prof. Ian Fribbance, Exec Dean Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the OU and will be comprised of: a number of short talks from the community outlined above, an interactive panel and finally a virtual roundtable session. Within the VocTeach project we have developed a prototype platform to address the above issue and will be demoing this to stimulate dialogue at our event.

Watch the Replay