DJALCHEMI

Round-up of recent and current work

In the four-minute video below, I describe how a small charity created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for over 1,000 people. This was the open course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL) which I managed from inception to completion of its first run. This is one of a set of films about projects that the Association for Learning Technology has recently published.

ocTEL is one of the major projects I've been working on over the past year. Here are some others.

• For Myscience, which runs the national Science Learning Centres and National STEM Centre, I co-wrote an Online Strategy for the continuing professional development which they provide to teachers. My company was the lead contractor for a team including Seb Schmoller, David Read, Dominic Tinley and Jonathan Drori. Having got approval to proceed the strategy from Myscience's stakeholders, we are now exploring how we might help with implementation.
• The work that I mentioned last year to provide support to support to learned societies considering the transition to Gold Open Access publishing is now available. The publishing businesses of learned societies operate in a complex ecosystems with a rich variety of disciplinary traditions and institutional histories. Being helpful is not always as easy as it might seem.
• Following last year's work for the Higher Education Academy — to reorient their online resources to make them more useful to teaching communities of practice — Knowledge Integration won a contract to implement a new repository and take forward some of the recommendations. I am helping them ensure that the implications of this for the user experience are borne in mind.
• My main current project involves the creation of another large-scale online course for adult learners. The Citizens' Maths project aims to develop free and open online maths course that could support hundreds of thousands of learners. The first run of the first part of the course is scheduled to be next summer. The project page has more details. I am the project manager.

Meanwhile, I had hoped to revamp this website this year, but it is now likely to be some time into 2014 before this happens. It still runs on the same Movable Type platform as it did ten years ago. If you know anyone who understands the details of making the transition to Wordpress (including maintaining old URLs so that inbound links here are not broken), please ask them to get in touch. I will pay well for the right kind of help. And once that transition is complete, more frequent blogging will follow.