Open Learning Network

The first OLnet Expert Fellow, Yannis Dimitriadis, has finished his fellowship and returned to work at the University of Valladolid, Spain. He worked with Grainne Conole on the way in which patterns can feed into designs for OER. In particular an approach is being piloted that takes established patterns for collaborative group work and uses this to generate new activities based on OER. This approach has been used as the basis for a series of workshops to communicate and test the ideas. Yannis was part funded by OLnet and part by University of Valladolid. Yannis logged his time at the OU in an openly available blog: http://titan.tel.uva.es/wikis/yannis/index.php/OUInitialPage.

Yannis Dimitriadis has given feedback on how the fellowship was useful to him now that he has returned to his own university:
 
“The fellowship experience was very interesting in several aspects:
 
(i) At a personal level, the joint work with the OLnet team (especially Grainne Conole, Patrick McAndrew and Elpida Makriyannis) allowed me to formulate the research question that connects design patterns, learning designs and OER. Thus, it was very helpful to join complementary expertise in these fields.
 
(ii) The work done during my stay was directly linked to Project 2: Learning Design, as it can be deduced by the main research question that was dealt during my stay, i.e. how established CSCL design patterns together with visual representations of learning design may contribute to repurpose existing OER for innovative collaborative learning. The design of the workshops held in different conferences and especially during the OU June 30 workshop allowed us to get initial evidence that supports our hypothesis. Also, this positive feedback encourages us to generate new f2f and virtual workshops on this topic.
 
The future workshops will be held both at my home institution (Valladolid, Spain) and in joint virtual workshops together with the OU during the current academic year. Also, I have planned a series of seminars in my research group and at the Spanish level on the OER-related issues, especially with respect to Learning Design.
 
Specific outputs correspond to the paper submitted to the Ascilite 2009 conference, as well as an invited chapter to be submitted in the following days.”
 
He also added: “The truth is that I am missing the "peace" of the visiting professor at the OU (this should be mentioned as a major contribution ...)”