Student workload

It's a policy, it's a standard - look, it's Superman! I mean student workloads.

I've done a lot with workloads! It's a nice digestible Learning Designer staple. The Curriculum Management guidance sets out our internal policy on managing student workload (student workload should not exceed certain norms, there should be a delineation of module directed and student directed workload, etc). This combines with the ICEBERG principles which act as our design north star in a lot of respects. One of the biggest factors it identifies in influencing student retention is module directed workload. With so may of our students also juggling full or part time work, while still studying at full intensity, it's no surprise that an extra couple of hours study in a week can tip them over the edge. The baselines are derived from the The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education guidance on academic credit, which sets out a 1:10 ratio for credit to hours of study.

My role in helping academic authors manage workloads is to both help them manage them proactively in design, and to evaluate them during drafting (and occasionally once they hit live presentation). I've done a heck of a lot of this, through:

• Using our legacy and new Learning Design tools to map draft module content and activity workloads, across every module I've worked with over the last five years.

• Reported and visualised module workloads to module teams, identifying potential issues (most often activity or workload imbalances) and proposing mitigations (see evidence section for specific example)

• Helped to update the Curriculum Management guidance used across the university, drawing in new evidence and guidance. This guidance sets out the policy, rationale and expectations around student workload for module teams.

• Part of the coordinating group for the testing and rollout of the new Learning Design Tool Web-app.

• Created an asynchronous training unit to introduce authors and production staff to the concepts involved in workload mapping, and how to use the tools available to have a go themselves.

• Led flipped classroom and synchronous training sessions around mapping workload.

Accessibility standards

Accessibility is a big focus for the OU, both as an open institution with a high proportion of students with accessibility needs - and also as the foremost distance learning university in the UK. There's a comprehensive breakdown of our online accessibility in our accessibility statement. It's a legal requirement as well, but it feels crass to introduce it that way (because the OU was doing good stuff with accessibility before it was a legal requirement).

The statement itself is a requirement of the CDDO Accessibility Regulations for public and private bodies, which builds on the Equality Act legislation, and the full breakdown can be found in the W3C web content accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility is a bit of everyone's role, including my own. I've been mainly engaged in it by supporting module teams in proactive design thinking, particularly:

• Encouraging teams to design accessible alternatives to activities and tools that might disadvantage particular groups as part of the overall design - rather than later as a mop-up operation.

• Accessible assessment - Encouraging teams to look at their assessment designs, challenging accessibility challenges and exploring solutions (optionality is a real winner from both an inclusivity and accessibility perspective at the moment).

• Highlighting the accessibility quirks of tools and tech as part of their pros and cons.

• Using accessible resources and approaches within the internal content I produce and disseminate.

In the evidence section below, I've included an example of a slightly more hands-on accessibility project, where I was worked on our accessible Print Packs project, a blood curdlingly horrendous few months where amongst other things, I coordinated and supported the creation of offline, printed and accessible alternatives to the standard online offering for a few of our trickiest modules. See below for the grisly details.

Due to our student demographic (we have around 37,000 students with a declared disability, that's more than most universities have students) tackling accessibility challenges early means we're likelier to retain those students - and in turn improve our overall outcomes. I'll be linking up with our EDIA lead later this year to see if we can do anything in the Student Outcomes subteam to see if there's anything we can do to provide more focused support in this area.

I should also mention that in a previous role (as a Media Coordinator) I spent a lot of time getting our alternative print formats working, which are designed to meet our accessibility policies and requirements. This involved rendering out our usual content, letting it parse through the automatic alternative formats system, and then painstakingly picking apart error logs to work out where things had gone wrong, and why. Good times.

As a side note, if you're interacting with this portfolio through a screen reader (or are having a peep at the html) you should hopefully find it to be pretty accessible, with images marked as decorative or given alt-text as appropriate, and using an accessible Google Sites theme. If you do find any accessibility shortcomings please let me know!

Particularly in the first few years of my role in Learning Design, I really struggled with keeping all of the different frameworks, policies and design requirements in my head. Here's some of those I've needed to reference more recently:

• The QAA framework (which lines up with most of our internal levels frameworks)

• The OU Academic levels framework (an OU-ified version of the QAA framework, useful for a levels breakdown but less punchy to reference than the QAA framework

• The OU Employability framework (skills based framework for students, informs learning outcomes and maps against modules) 

• Digital literacy (info literacy skills, informs learning outcomes and maps against module activities)

• Inclusive curriculum (A tool, framework and philosophy to make our curriculum more inclusive and accessible)

• Decolonising the curriculum

• Accessibility

• ICEBERG Design principles

• Module directed workload guidance

• In-practice requirements (most commonly aligning to professional industry frameworks, and degree apprenticeships)

• Assessment requirements (so very many assessment rules)

And that's just a selection. While part of my role as a Learning Designer was to foreground many of these to make sure they're considered in design, it does often feel quite cruel to overwhelm folk with the barrage - especially when it feels it pulls focus away from putting brainpower in to building good teaching. Understanding that I wasn't alone in feeling overwhelmed by it all, and that the teams I was working with also found it a hellish milieux of requirements was an obvious lesson to learn, but weirdly one that took about two years. That's imposter syndrome for you.

Something I've tried to do in my practice more recently is help teams find their own ways of embedding these requirements in early design thinking - so that when the time comes to write they can be free up the headspace to focus on the teaching, confident that the considerations are already baked in to the outline / specification.

If I could go back and give young, naive, new Learning Designer Mike one tip, it would be to not stress assimilating all of the frameworks from the off. Employability and Digital Information literacy are monitored really well by other teams in the unit - and instead by really focusing in on the academic levels framework (derived from QAA) I'd have had a boring but solid base to ground arguments around activity, assessment, and learning outcomes design. That sweet earnest child.