Keynote title: “Educators collaborating to innovate: The roles digital technologies can play”

As blended learning is now becoming a significant part of higher education, there is a great deal of work to be done to develop these new opportunities for learning and teaching. Teachers are best placed to do this: they are at the front line of development of these new methods because they are with their learners every day, able to discover what works, and what does not. But they cannot do innovation on this scale alone. The keynote will demonstrate why it is important that educators, professional development staff and researchers can now design blended learning by collaborating on sharing and testing new digital pedagogies. It will show how the phases of the design process can be articulated in the the Learning Designer, a free, open and online design tool, available for all. For example, it can model some of the classic pedagogies reworked for blended and online modes. Users can also share their designs for peer review, and for collaboration on innovative versions. The aim is to recreate the community knowledge-building mechanism of scholarly journal articles, but in a way that suits the nature of experimental pedagogy. Orchestrating this process to enable further learning and collaboration can then make use of MOOC platforms, as the talk will illustrate.

Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technology at UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London. Formerly: Head of the e-Learning Strategy Unit at the government’s Department for Education and Skills; Pro-Vice-Chancellor Learning Technology and Teaching at the Open University. Supervising masters and doctoral students working on educational technology. Researching: ‘The Transformational Potential of MOOCs’ (Centre for Global HE, UCL-IOE); ‘Future Education’ (RELIEF Centre, UCL-IGP); the Learning Designer tool. Leading the Blended and Online Learning Design course, free and open to all; adaptive games for low numeracy . Recent book: Teaching as a Design Science, Routledge.