Learning and Teaching Day 2014

Developing Practice Based Arts Massive Open Online Learning Communities

  • Chris Follows: DIAL Project Manager, Digital Integration into arts Learning (DIAL), CLTAD

Brief description of session and activities

This presentation aims to explore and question the challenges, motivations and benefits of staff and students participating in massive open online learning communities, as a casual observer and/or as an active contributor. How important is being online as a learner and/or teacher to our careers and creative practice?

Chris Follows will draw from his experiences of the following online open educational practice, projects, interests and activities:

The agile development of process.arts.ac.uk The Arts Learning and Teaching projects ALTO & ALTO UK A year long Open University SCORE Fellowship
And the Digital Integration into Arts Learning (DIAL) project

Chris will summarise a broad selection of the key findings, issues and lessons learned from across these projects, interests and activities and relate these to the current technological and pedagogical challenges facing the HE sector today, including staff and student engagement and use of online technology for enhancing learning and teaching practice.

Chris will draw on Visitors and Residents principle: A new typology for online engagement
 by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu to highlight many of the evolving agile open online Innovation and activities here at UAL.

Chris will introduce and invite participation in a new initiative http://www.artsmooc.org: a new experimental social enterprise approach to integrating online open educational practice into practical face-to-face based arts subjects, bringing together a unique ‘hands on’ research and development network/consortium. Artsmooc focuses on addressing the digital/web literacies challenges based on the creative needs of its stakeholder groups by co-developing and creating new arts MOOCs Massive open online course/communities, learning environments and interest groups with and for its stakeholders.

How will students be involved in the session?

Updates from DIAL Student researchers and ambassadors will be included in the session. A student may be invited from the current Professional Online Identities Pilot Programme 2013/14

What will participants take away from the session?

New perspectives on open educational practice and the developing professional online identities.