Mr Andrew Brasher

Profile

I work in the Learning and Teaching Development team in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. The purpose of the team is to help the Institute deliver on key University learning and teaching strategies, which means that we get involved in a wide variety of research and development projects. I have been in the team since January 2005, having previously worked in the Userlab.

My current projects include:

Design of learning activities

I am part of the team working on the OU learning design initiative the aim of which is "to develop and implement a methodology for learning design composed of tools, practice and other innovation that both builds upon, and contributes to, existing academic and practioner research". Most of my work within this initiative has focused on the development of CompendiumLD a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface.

 Recent work includes

• Maseltov  "Mobile Assistance for Social Inclusion and Empowerment of Immigrants with Persuasive Learning Technologies and Social Network Services"
  An EU funded project in which I work as a researcher for 6 months whilst someone was appointed to do the job full time  (congratulations Mark). My work included developing an initial version of  'Incidental learning framework' in collaboration with others here at the OU and partners from Spain and elsewhere in the UK. I edited and co-wrote Deliverable D7.1.1 "Incidental Learning Framework" which should be appearing on the project's web site soon.
• Pelagios "Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems'"
  A JISC funded project to help introduce Linked Open Data into online resources that refer to places in the Ancient World. Applying linked open data in this way will make lots of things possible, including new modes of discovery and visualization for scholars and the general public. Working with Liz  Fitzgerald and Juliette Culver I organised requirements gathering surveys and usability testing events to help develop some visualisation widgets, and reported on this in a series of blog posts. (Liz focused on the research aspects, and Juliette did all the tecchnical development work).
• Bridge to Success
  I wrote a review of literature related to teaching maths online, focusing on best practice, mechanisms to engender peer support, and mechanisms to deal with the anxiety that affects some people when they encounter maths in school or elsewhere.
   
• Structuring of content, description of content

I am interested in how content (e.g. web pages, Word™ or text files, images, movies, or any multimedia combination of these) may be structured so that it provides some form of added value for its users. Related to this is how content can be described in ways which add value for users. In particular, I am interested in the human factors affecting the design, creation, and exploitation of structures within educational resources and descriptions of educational resources. My recent work in this area has concerned semi-automatic generation of audio versions of learning content (and there's a journal paper about this that is in press). This work has built on  issues concerning metadata, for example the paper "A Model For The Creation Of Human-Generated Metadata Within Communities", but it covers a variety of topics including schema design and vocabulary selection.

Relevant projects: GUARDIANS, Mobilearn, Subtle.

Previous work

Roadmapping

In general the aim of a technology roadmap is to provide a consensus view or vision of the future landscape available to decision makers. I have worked on several roadmap studies aiming to define future research activities related to educational technology. The first of these aimed at creating a roadmap for research into e-learning relevant to Higher Education in Europe and is described in the paper "Determining Research Questions in e-learning" (McAndrew, Brasher, Hardy, 2004). In the Mobilearn project I led the development of the Mobilearn roadmap which considered ways that the lessons from MOBIlearn can inform future research and activity on mobile learning.

In 2005-2006 I worked on a roadmap for e-assessment (funded by the JISC e-Learning programme). This work has attempted to combine inputs such as governmental and organisational policies with the views and research outputs of domain experts into a coherent vision of the future of e-Assessment in the UK HE and FE sectors. My colleagues Denise Whhitelock and Simnon Cross have just started a studyu of the current state-of-art in e-assessment: it'll be interesting to see how (in)accurate our roadmap is even after such a short time has passed.

Relevant projects: eLearnTN, Mobilearn, JISC e-assessment roadmap

Before joing the OU

From 1989 until joining the Open University UserLab in 2001, I worked for Pira International the UK research and consultancy company for the packaging, paper, printing and publishing industries worldwide. There is more information about this work (on e.g. object-oriented and knowledge-based approaches to information management and publishing) here.

Research Interests

Research interests

Publications

Blog posts