Previous projects: The Knowledge Network

OU Knowledge Network

- A University-wide professional development service that supports communities of practice. Devised to enable OU staff to explore and share knowledge of teaching and learning.

- I was Director of the Knowledge Network 2002-6. My team was responsible for all aspects, including commissioning and developing resources, courses and technologies.

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it."

Samuel Johnson

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

Aldous Huxley

Awards

- The Knowledge Network won the Open University the 2004 International Information Award for innovation in knowledge management.

- Also presented with an OU Teaching Award by the Vice-Chancellor in 2003.

- Finalist in the 2002 European Academic Software Awards.

- A description of the principles behind this work is available in:
McAndrew, P., Clow, D., Taylor, J. & Aczel, J. (2004) "The evolutionary design of a Knowledge Network to support knowledge management and sharing for lifelong learning", British Journal of Educational Technology, 35, 6, 739-746, ISSN: 0007-1013

- More about the Knowledge Network

Content: Providing access to what the OU knows about teaching and learning

Indexes thousands of webpages and documents...

• case studies and evaluations of teaching innovations;
• results of student surveys;
• reports on student recruitment, retention and progression;
• outputs from projects on a range of topics, such as  widening participation, course models, assessment, and electronic conferencing;
• professional development activities and discussions;
• educational research reports;
• news items about Higher Education.

Includes full-text search, meta-data browsing, "What's related", commenting, and email subscription.

Sharing: Enabling the learning organisation

The OU's Knowledge Network enables any member of OU staff (and project partners) to share their knowledge and experience of teaching and learning. This can be systematic research, an example of a teaching innovation, a challenging issue faced by a course team, or simply a personal reflection on some aspect of teaching or learning.

All staff can create collaborative websites without specialist skills.

They can also publish documents and video clips easily

Communities: Powering collaborative websites

In addition to powering the OU Knowledge Network, IET's KN technology enables projects teams researching or developing teaching to create collaborative websites.

These websites can be private or public, and provide automatic navigation, discussions, bulletin boards, forms, search, access statistics, chat, audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, news, and subscriptions.

Members of project teams can publish and discuss their work, and then disseminate to a wider audience. The team has full control over the look-and-feel of their website, and can change the visual design and structure of all the pages with a few clicks.

KN technology also powers the websites of many University groups and projects focused on improving teaching and learning, including IET Student Statistics, ITLO, Accessible Educational Media (AEM) and the Widening Participation Project.

R&D: Supporting educational research

KN technology is supporting a wider research & development agenda into the use of community tools for educators:

• It is the platform selected by the University of Cambridge and MIT for the forthcoming national Knowledge Resource Network.
• It powers RESL, the national library to support good practice in the re-use of educational software, developed by IET and the OU Library.
• It powers HAN, the humanities higher education network, with members in over 170 institutions from over 20 countries.
• It is being used on external research projects with topics including IMS Learning Design, retention and academic literacies.

This page last modified : 21 July 2006