MIKE COLLINS

SENIOR LEARNING DESIGNER - FLAT CAP OWNER

Hi, I’m Mike Collins – I’m a Senior Learning Designer, and I’ve been helping with the design and production of learning with The Open University (OU) for about eight years. Since the start of 2023 I've started leading a small team as Senior Learning Designer, focusing on Student Outcomes. I’m also a prolific podcaster, tinkerer and general maker of ‘stuff’.

I started my OU career as a Media Assistant in 2014, taking the Word document handovers from authors and editors and translating them in to Structured Content (XML) for print and online presentation to students. It was satisfying work, and was a great role to meet and form relationships with the wide variety of media, production and project specialists who help make our content media rich and engaging. It was also a position that offered a lot of room for development, as there were plenty of opportunities for non-standard tasks and problems, giving me chance to tinker with our tools and learn what they could and couldn’t do.

After about a year, the opportunity came up to become a Media Coordinator, one of the team leads who line manages and trains Media Assistants, and is responsible for the work in a particular area. A year of bodging together solutions to odd problems stood me in good stead, and I landed the job.

Being a Media Coordinator was a heck of a challenge for a lot of reasons, but was also probably one of the most professionally formative times in my life. Line managing a team was a huge responsibility, and despite a few challenges, very rewarding. I discovered a real love for training others and sharing my enthusiasm about the weird and wonderful things we could get the production tools and VLE to do. I was responsible for the non-standard corporate work which fell outside of our usual processes, tool capabilities and resourcing. It was often a struggle, but it pushed me to learn more. It went well, I got to work with some great folk, we solved some excellent problems and made some great stuff.

In 2017 I had the opportunity to move across to the OpenCreate team (still as a Media Coordinator), and support the development of the OpenCreate tool (RIP).  This was a welcome change of pace, and flipped my work to product development support, supporting the development, testing, training and communication around a new direct authoring system for the OU. It was creative, a little anarchic, and absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, development of the tool was paused just as it was hitting live production, and the project was shelved.

In 2018 I joined the Learning Design team as a Learning Designer. It’s a challenging role with a very broad reach and lots of potential for growth in to areas of interest. My core responsibilities included:

Supporting academic module teams with the Learning Design process, both from a facilitation perspective and as a consultant on the design itself

• Facilitating a learning design process with module teams

• Supporting evaluation activities in both design and presentation

• Training colleagues in use of the evaluation tools

• Supporting tool (Learning technology) selection in relation to activity design

• Supporting teams in managing student workloads

• Supporting teams in design good practice

• Identifying and disseminating good practice internally and externally

• and all manner of other weird bits and bobs

As of February 2023 I've started an eighteen month fixed term contract as a Senior Learning Designer, focusing on the Student Outcomes work and response to the Office For Students B3 conditions. Thus far the role has included:

• Oversight of Student Outcomes related activity and specific projects within the team.

• Liaising with colleagues across the univeristy to address Student Outcomes challenges, and OfS B3 conditions.

• Leading a small sub-team focusing on student outcomes

• Mapping and reporting on existing and evolving practice in relation to Student Outcomes across the unit, to escalate challenges and advocate for enablers.

• Developing our training service offering, to build level design capacity across the OU and support new academic author induction.

• Supporting the development of a module structure framework.

Learning Design as a practice is varied, and broad, with almost infinite scope across all aspects of learning and teaching. The diffusion of focus can drive me crazy at times, but I'm never bored - there's always something new and fabulous to learn - and I get to interact with and support some of the sharpest, brightest minds on the planet. Overall, it's pretty neat.