About
Coming from a background in research in electronic publishing and image analysis I joined the Institute of Educational Technology in 2001 as a Research Fellow, and have been working in my current role as a Learning and Teaching Development Manager since 2006. I work on range of research and development projects, often focusing on learning design and the student and staff experience of learning and teaching, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Biography
Andrew Brasher works in the Learning and Teaching Development team in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. He is involved in a wide variety of research and development projects, with the aim of determining new tools and practices which will benefit the university's teaching and learning strategies.
Current and recent projects include:
- Students Experience of Feedback Assessment and Revision 2 (SEFAR2)
A revised version of the 2015 SEFAR study of assessment experience).
- Creating an Online Dimension for University Rankings (CODUR).
CODUR examined the potential for including indicators of e-learning quality within university ranking systems. Andrew's work focused on considerations of the nature of quality and reflections on if and how attempts to rank e-learning quality could benefit students and universities.
Past work includes
LACE (Learning Analytics Community Exchange)
Worked on a study of Visions of the Future in learning analytics, informed by experts' views and perceptions of what is desirable, what is feasible and the obstacles to making what is desirable happen
HOME (Higher education Online: MOOCs the European way), which developed and strengthened a European network of organisations interested in cooperating about open education in general, and MOOCs in particular.
Metis (Meeting teachers' co-design needs by means of Integrated Learning Environments)
In this project Andrew worked with the Metis partners to produce and run a series of workshops on designing elearning activities. The first workshop on designing collaborative activities was held at the OU on October 24th 2013.
Maseltov "Mobile Assistance for Social Inclusion and Empowerment of Immigrants with Persuasive Learning Technologies and Social Network Services"
Andrew's 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. He edited and co-wrote Deliverable D7.1.1 "Incidental Learning Framework".
- Work 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 practicioner research". Most of Andrew's work within this initiative has focused on the development of CompendiumLD a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface.
- 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, Andrew 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 technical development work). - Bridge to Success
Andrew 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.
Other stuff
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 Simon Cross have just started a study 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
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 work in this area includes semi-automatic generation of audio versions of learning content which built on investigations into issues concerning metadata (e.g. the paper "A Model For The Creation Of Human-Generated Metadata Within Communities") but it also covers a variety of topics including schema design and vocabulary selection.