Accessibility and adaptability of learning objects: responding to metadata, learning patterns and profiles of needs and preferences

The case for learning patterns as a design method for accessible and adaptable learning objects is explored. Patterns and templates for the design of learning objects can be derived from successful existing learning resources. These patterns can then be reused in the design of new learning objects. We argue that by attending to criteria for reuse in the definition of these patterns and in the subsequent design of new learning objects, those new resources can be themselves reusable and also adaptable to different learning contexts. Finally, if the patterns identified can be implemented as templates for standard authoring tools, the design of effective, reusable and adaptable resources can be made available to those with limited skills in multimedia authoring and result in learning resources that are more widely accessible

The Making of a Social Object: Collaboration between Nike and Centre for Sustainable Fashion

Introduction: The Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) is a group of researchers, designers and communicators, brought together through shared ambitions around the possibility of fashion: a means to connect us to each other and with nature, and a means to make real our adaptability to time and place. It seeks ways for osmosis between human, ecological and technological elements to create a mixture that makes for better balance and a life well lived, as applied through fashion’s personal and collective practices. The centre’s work is situated in the cross referencing of research projects (often working with others outside of fashion), the development of innovative commercial practices (with large and small businesses), and the teaching and learning of design for sustainability (with undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students). We seek ways and places to connect and be adaptable as individuals, evolving a unique sense of who we are in the world, as communities, whether location or interest based, and in our governance and political identities and actions. For this reason, we find ourselves sometimes in the House of Lords, at other times in remote villages, and always looking for space to be reflexive in our work. Sustainability can be distinguished by its multidimensional, non-conformist, not readily acceptable range of change processes and practices. It can lead us to consider fundamental qualities and characteristics of life and challenge our current habits and practices in their respect. It can question us as individuals, communities, and organisations, and can seek in us the qualities of imagination, interaction and sensitivity, along with practical skills of creation and communication. Sustainability is about who we are and what we do and make. This framing means a radical shift in how we experience life, quite different from many of the more easily palatable forms of sustainability within current practices, where efficiencies in existing systems form the visible changes that take place. Designers are well placed to explore these questions and habits, especially when placed in the cross-frame of research, education and current practice. What might be deemed risk in one area can become experimentation opportunity in another. Just such a stretching was tested when Nike’s Sustainable Business Innovation team approached us with a question, charged with possibility, whilst challenged by current infrastructures of global business. ..

Engaging Opportunities: Connecting young people with contemporary research and researchers

This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnership between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance. Informed by action research, this four-year project was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed school-university engagement with research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. Through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students. We therefore introduced a flexible and adaptable framework of four types of activity—open lectures, open dialogues, open inquiry and open creativity—combined with an upstream approach to planning based on a set of six principles. A sub-set of these activities were evaluated through a combination of surveys, interviews and interventions. In conclusion, we argue that institutional and professional cultures can be resistant to the prospect of fully embedding school-university engagement with research in a structured, strategic and sustainable manner, and offer suggestions for how this context could and should be changed

Reusable e-learning development: Case studies, practices and issues of awareness for knowledge-based organisations

Reusable e-learning development (RED) is defined as the cloning, modification and customisation of existing files or source codes for developing another website or another web-based application. RED does not imply just copying and changing existing files or source codes but rather, it provides a practical technique for time-saving, improving efficiency and maximising utility of existing resources for creating another website or another web-based application. RED is particularly useful for a large-scale web development, where there is an extremely high degree of overlapping of information, resources and web designs. Therefore, RED has been widely adopted by many knowledge-based organisations (KBO). In order to investigate the impacts of RED on KBO, various case studies, practices and issues of awareness for KBO are presented and analysed. This paper particularly focuses on studies and recommended practices from the University of Cambridge. Results from these case studies reveal a number of outcomes

Extending, broadening and rethinking existing research on transfer of training

Research on transfer of training has a long history, with thousands of empirical studies since the 1950s investigating whether, and under which conditions, knowledge and skills acquired during training are subsequently used in the work environment (see reviews by Baldwin and Ford, 1988, Blume et al., 2010 and Burke and Hutchins, 2007). The generation of such an abundance of research can be linked to organisations’ fundamental and ongoing concern to ensure that their employees possess the necessary knowledge and skills from their employer to maintain a competitive advantage and thrive economically. Training and development is, however, extremely costly to organisations, which has created the need to determine the effectiveness of training, and the conditions under which transfer of training is optimal. A recent overview of “what really matters” for successful transfer of training (Grossman & Salas, 2011), aimed at a training and development readership, summarized the most influential variables emerging from this vast body of research. Based on the expectation that the list of factors which may contribute to influence transfer could always be extended and that it would be impractical to incorporate every single factor in research designs, the authors recommended a shift in future research towards deeper investigations of the conditions under which selected variables are more or less influential in their relationship with training. This Special Issue contributes to this important research agenda and extends it further through the inclusion of a diverse collection of conceptual contributions and reviews, from several scientific disciplines, a plurality of theoretical perspectives and a range of methodological approaches. Expanding the theoretical grounding underpinning empirical work on transfer of training and scrutinizing existing conceptualizations of the notion of transfer is timely in light of widespread concerns from organisations about minimal return on investment in training, and repeated evidence in the transfer of training literature of an enduring “transfer problem”. The aim of this article is to explore the value of extending, broadening and rethinking existing research on transfer of training. The benefits of extending research on transfer of training is considered first, through examining how the contributions of this Special Issue add to the existing literature on transfer of training, and the implications of the new insights for addressing the “transfer problem”. How transfer of training research could be broadened, thus enriched, through incorporating ideas from recent literature on transfer of learning is considered next. Finally, proposals to rethink transfer as boundary crossing from an activity theory perspective are scrutinized for their potential to better understand the learning that takes place at the boundaries of training and work environments. The article concludes by elaborating on the conceptual value of a refocus on ‘transfer of learning from training’ within a perspective of adaptive learning, and a call for cross-fertilisation with the extensive theory grounded literatures on transfer of learning and boundary crossing