Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This…

Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to…

This paper presents a case study based on the experiences surrounding a distance-learning module in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that includes a creative multimedia component as an integral part of its teaching and assessment. The module requires that students engage in multimedia production to articulate their…

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

Professional development for distance tutors is traditionally delivered through texts or websites, supplemented by face to face workshops. However, one of the major challenges is to ensure that they engage with the materials and carry away something which is of value to their practice. At the Open University (UK) our 8000 tutors work from home,…

Research into tutoring at a distance has a fairly long history and the functions of tutors in distance education institutions are well understood. Over the past 20 years research into online tutoring has advanced significantly as such institutions have "gone electronic": in this paper we cite published research from the UK Open…

The Open University, an open distance learning institution, is increasingly using a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that requires internet access. This paper investigates how the move to a VLE has affected one group of students who do not have internet access--offender learners studying in prison. Members of the armed forces and secure hospital…

The United Kingdom Open University has experimented with a range of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support learners and foster the development of learning communities, including online resources, email, e-messages, SMS messaging, and Second Life. The initial creation of information and resources to support study has been…