Voices from Kyangwali refugee settlement, Western Uganda: Young refugees’ experiences of sexual and reproductive health and rights

Audio clips made by young refugee peer researchers, after we finished a research project together. You can find out more about the project by downloading the full report here.

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Audio clip 8

Don’t do as I do, do as I say: Learning outcomes for my Writing for Production course

I’ve been running courses to support colleagues to develop their skills as distance educators for ten years now, and over the last couple of years I have scaled up and systematised this work into six ninety-minute workshops that have now been studied by ~190 colleagues across the OU.

The idea of the course is that it supplements more formal pedagogic schemes, such as HEA fellowships and the OU’s Masters in Online Teaching, by offering opportunities to develop the craft skills of producing learning resources at the OU, focusing especially on writing skills. The workshops take a strength-based approach which support participants to identify the similarities and differences between forms of writing with which they are already familiar and the forms of writing needed for creating OU learning resources. I do three main things within the sessions. Firstly, I try to create a supportive and respectful atmosphere where participants feel safe to express uncertainties, worries and lack of knowledge. Secondly, I explain some of the pedagogic principles underlying the design of distance learning materials, and contextualise current practice in relation to face-to-face teaching, past practice and current direction of travel at the OU. Thirdly, I support participants to critically analyse examples of different types of text from their own discipline and articulate key principles themselves, drawing on my own research training as a discourse and narrative analyst. My role is not so much to tell participants how to write for production at the OU, but to offer analytical tools and frameworks to help them articulate for themselves the appropriate approach for the particular modules and disciplines they work on.

One of the pedagogic principles that I bang on about, is constructive alignment, the first step of which is usually said to be defining your learning outcomes. But did I have learning outcomes for my course?! I did not! In my defence, I don’t think this meant that the course was not constructively aligned, it was just an artefact of the way the course was developed in the corners of my time over many years. In the last six months, a couple of colleagues have been helping me to facilitate the groups, and that gave me the headspace to finally generate some learning outcomes, also with their input.

Overall course learning outcomes 

At the end of the course you will: 

• Be able to articulate differences between writing for production and other forms of professional writing, especially writing for academic journals. 
• Have reflected on your personal experiences of writing for production and explored how to improve your writing of effective module materials. 
• Have explored and learned from comparisons between your personal experiences of writing and those of your peers. 
• Understand where to find further resources and support around production at the OU. 

Introductory session 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Articulated your own existing writing skills and strengths, and made connections between these and the skills needed for writing for production. 
• Reflected on your own experiences of online training and education, and considered ways in which these might and might not be generalisable to the experiences of OU students. 
• Understood the focus of this course, and the production-related topics that are not within scope. 

Activities 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Understood the significance of Activities for active learning in a distance context. 
• Articulated some of the challenges of encouraging students to undertake Activities, and some potential solutions to these challenges. 
• Explored the purpose and use of the Learning Design Activity types taxonomy, and understood the need for Activity types other than Assimilative ones. 
• Reflected on some of the challenges and benefits of designing communicative and collaborative Activities at the OU. 

Writing voice 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Considered some of the characteristics of an appropriate writing voice for module materials at different academic levels, with particular reference to tone, vocabulary, citations and sentence length. 
• Understood the idea of ‘the teacher in the text’ and the implications this has for a distinctive writing voice. 
• Recognised the need for a degree of consistency in writing voice across authors, in order to reduce the cognitive load for students.  
• Understood the role of the Module Team Chair and Editor in harmonising writing voices. 

Structure and integrating theory 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Explored why a clear and visible structure is important in distance education. 
• Understood the particular significance of constructive alignment for distance education, and the importance of clearly scaffolding that alignment to students. 
• Recognised the significance of distinguishing between theory and example/case study, especially for more novice students, and the benefits of starting with concrete examples rather than theoretical overviews. 

Writing for Inclusion 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Understood the diversity of the OU student body, and the critical importance of writing inclusively to the OU’s mission. 
• Discussed the purpose and use of the Inclusive Curriculum Tool. 
• Articulated some ways in which materials can be more inclusive in the ways they are designed. 
• Understood where to find further support and resources around accessibility and inclusion in module design. 

Critical reading and writing in teams 

At the end of this session you will have: 

• Understood the significance of the critical reading process to quality assurance at the OU. 
• Understood the role of critical reading in increasing the inclusivity and accessibility of our materials. 
• Reflected on your personal challenges in receiving critical feedback on work, and your self-management strategies to respond to such feedback productively. 
• Identified principles for giving feedback to colleagues constructively and in ways that are more likely to be effective. 

I am pleased with these as a description of what we actually cover in each of the sessions, and hope they will increase the constructive alignment of the course for the next cohort (starting soon).

Reflecting on academic reading

A colleague is doing some research about academic reading practices, and I recently took part in some of the pilot fieldwork. It was absolutely fascinating, I articulated stuff I hadn’t realised, and I want to change my practices.

I’ve spent years honing my academic writing practices, and by now have a set of practices that work pretty well for me. But I’ve hardly thought at all about my academic reading, which is ridiculous when it’s so fundamental to writing academic papers, and indeed to being an academic at all.

https://pixabay.com/photos/book-reflection-table-books-heart-4944519/

I identified that I usually only read instrumentally – most often, I skim to find a paper to cite in relation to something I’m writing myself. When I’ve found an article that’s relevant, I rarely read it all, I read the key sections (which these are depends on what I’m reading it for). I rarely read the whole article properly and I hardly ever read academic books, always articles and book chapters. Occasionally, I do a more structured search of the literature, to understand a new field, without any relationship to an immediate writing project, although there’s usually a nascent piece of writing in my mind. What I don’t do is read academic works out of curiosity, for pleasure, and for fun, even though I find academic ideas all of these things. This is in huge contrast to my non-academic reading, when I read all the time, mostly fiction, and it’s one my most significant lifelong pleasures.

I understand why I’m like this – the pressures of the modern neo-liberal university are all around writing, not reading, and these are all magnified for me with my particular life circumstances (part-time working for many years and now chronic fatigue), which mean I have to be super-efficient with my time. I recognise that the scholar reading in their book panelled room is a fantasy of academic life that bears little resemblance to modern academia, which is much better represented by me hopping between shared desks and tables at home and on campus, reading on my laptop.

But I don’t like only reading like this. I try to do ‘slow professor‘-ship to the extent that I can, and reading less instrumentally is part of that. It feels disrespectful to colleagues to always approach their work with my own agenda, rather than reading with curiosity to understand what they have to say on their own terms. I think it narrows my focus and prevents me making the kinds of connections between apparently unconnected concepts that are another of the enduring joys of my life.

I need practical ways of making this happen though, otherwise it won’t. I’ve started reviewing more journal articles than I used to in the last year or so, and that definitely helps – because there’s a deadline, I do actually do it. I also realised that I have an existing space in my work system that could help: I have the first hour of each day blocked out in my diary for ‘reading/writing’ (I start quite early, so this is before anyone expects me to be available). Originally this was just labelled ‘writing’ because I’ve realised I never write unless I do it first thing before I get distracted by everything else. But I added ‘reading’ when my health was too bad for writing, to give myself an easier option. Which I never, ever take up, I just skip the session and plunge into emails. So there’s a mechanism right there. I’ll still prioritise writing in that slot, but if I can’t, I’ll read. To make myself accountable, I’ll tweet about what I read.

Showing my workings: Part 8

Here’s the Activity I showed in Part 6 (where I took it from D1 to D2 stage), now at D3, as an example of how critical reading feedback and redrafting change learning materials.

Activity 12.1: Health care and wellbeing in adulthood

Timing: About 15 minutes

Q1       Have you ever had experiences of not being able to access health care, or having to wait a long time to access it? If you have had these kinds of experiences, how did they affect your wellbeing? Write a few sentences to describe what happened

Reveal discussion

Here’s what one person wrote:

I couldn’t get pregnant when I wanted to, and it took nearly two years to get through all the tests to try to find out what the problem was, because of waiting lists for the various procedures. I was really distressed about not being able to get pregnant anyway and having to wait so long before we could even start treatment made it so much harder.

Q2  [Interactive poll] Think of the last time you used a health care service yourself. If you can’t think of an occasion for yourself, think of someone you know quite well. How much did it improve your overall health and wellbeing (or the health and wellbeing of the person you are thinking of):

1. A lot
2. A little
3. It made no difference
4. It decreased my wellbeing

Click through to see what other students reported.

Q3       Why did you give the answer you did to Q3? Write a few sentences about the experience you were thinking about.           

Reveal discussion

Here is what one person wrote:

I had been feeling tired for years, I finally went to the doctor and had some blood tests, it showed I had some vitamin deficiencies, I changed my diet and started taking some supplements and within a few months I was feeling much better.

[Activity ends]

So this went from being two 15 minute Activities, one focused on healthcare and the other on wellbeing, to just one 15 minute activity focused on both. Generally I favour separating out distinct concepts (here ‘healthcare’ and ‘wellbeing’), which is why I originally wrote it as two Activities. However, feedback from critical readers suggested that these concepts should be quite familiar to students by this stage of the module, and I was desperately trying to shave words and study time from the learning guide. Critical reader comments also suggested that my two activities seemed like just memory exercises, with insufficient link to the impact of lack of access to health care, and this also led me to rethink the Activity quite substantially. I was a bit sad to lose the Word Cloud activity but it wasn’t really needed any more and it’s very important to be driven by the pedagogy, not the shiny interactive tools!

Showing my workings: Part 7

See earlier entries for explanations of what on earth this is.

I submitted my D2 a few weeks ago but haven’t had a moment to blog about it since. It took me about 16 days of working 3-4 hours a day to get from D1 to D2. That’s slightly less than I anticipated (10 full days) which is interesting to me to note because I felt as if it was taking me much longer than usual. Some of my feeling was down to frustration that I could only work 3-4 hours a day on it, for health reasons, when I prefer to work full days and get completely immersed. But it may be that it never takes me as long as it feels as if it does – empirical data for the win!

One of the tasks I always do at D2 stage is think very carefully about student workload. We pay a lot of attention to student workload because the temptation is always to add more and more interesting content but actually less is often better for students, and too high workload is a major reason for students dropping out. Here are some great summaries of why workload matters to students and more detail on how we go about mapping workload from my colleagues in Learning Design. As always, I ended up using a very high tech approach:

(For the avoidance of doubt, that was sarcasm. There are online tools to allow you to do this much more neatly, and I am quite a geeky person for a non-geek, but I just never seem to use them. I always end up with a scrawled-on piece of paper).

The numbers in squares are the four main sections of the Learning Guide (LG), and then the columns of figures are the estimate of how long it will take students to do each of the Activities I have designed. Crossings out show me cutting Activities or changing my estimate of how long it would take. There are norms for how long it takes students to read 1k words of different types of text, and it’s usual to allow for watching any AV through twice before doing something with it, but other Activities are more difficult to estimate study time and it’s definitely an art not a science. Critical Readers and Editors can be really helpful in checking your estimates. In addition to the time it takes students to do the Activities, you need to allow time for them to read your own teaching text, such as explanatory paragraphs and the instructions for Activities. There’s usually a total word limit for the LG because reading lots of text on screen is not good for most learners, and because most people learn better by doing things (Activities) than just by reading. For this module it is 10k, and my draft, at the time I was doing this calculation, was 9k (since then I’ve added a bit and it’s up to 9.5k. I’m hoping to chop some words later as I think it’s a bit reading-heavy at the moment). We estimate that 9k words will take students 3-4 hours to read, so by adding together 8h 20 and 3-4 hours, we get a total guided study time of about 11h 20 – 12h 20 for this week, which is about right for this module (students are also expected to do independent study in addition to this guided study time).

As a result of calculating workload, I realised that I did indeed have far too much content, as my spider sense had told me back at D1, even though the numbers looked okay at that point. I think this was because at D1 I had overestimated how much time students would be spending on Activities, and underestimated the time they would need to spend reading explanatory text from me. I’m not surprised that I erred this way (I am all about the Activities), but slightly chagrined to have made such a rookie error! I had to cut out some of the topics I was hoping to cover, including LGBTQ parenting, which I am quite sad about but fairly confident is the right decision given the overall learning outcomes of the LG. One of the remaining consequences of this initial error, though, is that my final section is much longer than the others (that’s what ‘bottom heavy’ refers to on the photograph). I think everything in this section is good, there’s a lovely progression between the parts, and it doesn’t really split well into two parts, so I can’t see how to reduce it, although I have flagged it to critical readers as an issue I would welcome suggestions to improve. Ultimately I think it’s probably okay if it remains a bit unbalanced, as students are given an overview of the likely study time for each section at the beginning of each week, so will know that this section is longer than the others at the beginning of the week.

One piece of AV turned out not to be suitable – the tone was too inflammatory and the angle on the issue was misleading. I decided to cut it out – luckily it’s relatively easy to cut something that has not been specially commissioned, especially before Handover. That saved me 20 minutes of Activity time. After discussion with the module chair, one of the study skills Activities I wrote was different from what we had initially planned, because it was tied to the next assessment, and this had changed. The other main difference between my D1 and my D2 is that everything is now written though properly in full sentences. One paragraph took me a whole 4 hours to write but it was an important paragraph, about a challenging topic, so it was a good investment of time.

At the moment, my D2 is with Critical Readers but in a few days it will come back to me and I will start writing the D3 version. I’m not actually sure on this module whether that is the same as the Handover version, or whether the module chair will review it and ask for further changes. I think that’s more likely and is certainly what I would advocate as good practice in most circumstances – the buck ultimately stops with the module chair and so it’s important that they have a chance to check that Critical Readers comments have actually been actioned.

Showing my workings: Part 6

See earlier entries for explanation about what this is all about.

I thought it might be useful to show the transition from a D1 to a D2 of some materials. So here is one sub-section as it existed at D1: (sorry it looks so terrible, it will look much nicer on the VLE)

Reflecting on your own experiences

Activity 12.1: Your own wellbeing in adulthood Timing: About 15 minutes

Part 1 (Productive) Reflective activity about their own experiences of wellbeing as an adult, and how that differs from memories of wellbeing as a child.

Part 2 (Communicative) Poll activity, aiming to get a sense of diversity among fellow students e.g. maybe ‘Overall, was your wellbeing greater when you were (option 1) a child or (option 2) an adult?’ Or possibly a word cloud: three words to describe the three most important things that support your wellbeing.

[teaching text in between to reiterate that health care is only one part of wellbeing]

Activity 12.2: Your own experiences of health care in adulthood Timing: About 15 minutes

Part 1 (Productive) Reflective activity about their own experiences of accessing health care as an adult, and how that differs from memories of accessing health care as a child.

Part 2 (Communicative) Poll activity, aiming to get a sense of diversity among fellow students e.g. maybe ‘The last time you went to your General Practitioner or family doctor, what was the main reason for your visit?’ (screening/pregnancy-related/chronic condition/acute illness/other) or maybe ‘Last time you saw your GP/fd, how much did that visit improve your wellbeing (lots, little, no difference, decreased my wellbeing’ Or both questions?

———————————

And here is how it looks now, after two hours’ work, which I think is pretty much okay for D2. I’m not perfectly happy that it is doing what I want it, and might tweak a little at D3, depending on the feedback I get, but this will do if I don’t have time to improve it. (Long experience is what gives me the confidence to say ‘this will do’ – I would have been much more perfectionist when I started out):

———————————–

Reflecting on personal experiences

Thinking about your own experiences of health care and wellbeing is an important part of studying them academically because your own experiences affect the ways you approach the topic. Acknowledging your own experiences and perspectives can help you to see beyond them, and understand perspectives and views which are very different from your own, which is an important part of becoming a critical and analytical thinker. For this reason, the next two Activities ask you to think about your own experiences and also to compare them to those of other students studying K119. However, if your own experiences of wellbeing or health care have been difficult recently or in the past, it may not be helpful for you to think about your own experiences. In that case, feel free to skip the next two Activities and move on to section 1.2.

Activity 12.1: Wellbeing in adulthood

Timing: About 20 minutes

Part 1

Write a few sentences reflecting on your wellbeing in adulthood so far. What are the main factors that have affected your wellbeing in adulthood? How has your wellbeing varied as an adult?

Part 2

Type three words in the boxes to describe the three most important things that support your wellbeing in adulthood. Then click on the link to the word cloud, which will show you the words that other students wrote. The larger the word, the more people chose this word. Were your words similar or different to the commonest words?

Part 3

Overall, was your wellbeing greater when you were (option 1) a child or (option 2) an adult? Click through to see what other students said.

Reveal discussion

Part 1 discussion:

Here’s what one person wrote:

The main factors affecting my wellbeing have been my personal relationships and my job. In the early days of my marriage I had a job I really enjoyed, and my wellbeing was really good. I had lots of energy, lots of fun and was pretty fit too. When my marriage broke up I was really unhappy and seemed to need all my energy just to keep going, with nothing left over for fun or exercise. But when I got my latest promotion at work I started to feel positive about myself again and recently I’ve started feeling like I’ve got a bit more time and energy to do things I enjoy.

[Activity box ends]

The word cloud and polls have given you some indication of how your own experiences of wellbeing as an adult compare with those of your fellow students. You probably found some common experiences and some where your experiences differed from those of other students. In the following Activity you will similarly compare your experiences but in relation to using health care services. In LG8 [insert hyperlink] you reflected on an encounter between a child or young person and a primary care professional. In Activity 12. 2 you will do something similar but thinking about your own experiences of accessing primary health care as an adult.

Activity 12.2: Health care in adulthood

Timing: About 15 minutes

Part 1

Q1       Think of the last time you used a primary health care service yourself. Where was it based?

1. Doctor’s surgery
2. Dentist’s surgery
3. Local pharmacy
4. Opticians
5. Mass vaccination centre

Now click through to see what other students reported.

Q2       Which of these options is closest to your reason for using these services?

1. Routine screening e.g. cervical smear, well man clinic
2. Routine check-up e.g. dentist or optician check-up
3. Vaccination
4. Pregnancy-related
5. Chronic condition or illness
6. Acute illness or sudden problem
7. Medication

Now click through to see what other students reported.

Q3       Thinking about that last visit, how much did it improve your overall wellbeing:

1. A lot
2. A little
3. It made no difference
4. It decreased my wellbeing

Click through to see what other students reported.

Part 2

Did anything surprise you in these quick polls among your fellow students? Noticing when things surprise you is a really good habit for thinking critically about your own assumptions. Make a few notes in the box below of anything you were surprised by, or anything else you thought was interesting.

Reveal discussion

Here is what one person wrote:

I was surprised to see dentists and opticians in the list of places because I don’t think of them as ‘primary care’ in the way I do doctors or nurses. Actually, the last service I used was the dentists because something always seems to be going wrong with my teeth at the moment. Getting my teeth fixed makes a really big contribution to my wellbeing because I love eating!

[Activity box ends]

Having timely and appropriate health care plays a vital role in overall wellbeing but, as you have been exploring throughout this module, wellbeing is about much more than access to health and social care services.

Showing my workings: Part 5

(See previous entries for explanation and Parts 1-4)

Today I have completed the bulk of the work on my D1 because although the deadline is not until Friday, I have other things I have to do later in the week. This is going to be the sketchiest D1 I have ever submitted, because I have had so so little time to work on it. My current running total is about three days, including today. I’ve never actually counted my days like this before but my feeling is that I usually spend 5 or 6 days to produce a D1, slightly more for a D2 and fewer on the D3. This time I will definitely need more like 10-12 days for the D2 because my D1 will be so under-developed. Since the deadline for the D2 is the end of January, writing this is making me realise I need to block that time out of my diary right now.

I was wondering whether my mental image for this stage is juggling, because there’s a lot of ‘if I change this, I have to change that’ but that feels a bit too stressful to describe how I experience it. I don’t find this stage particularly stressful, but more about moving lots of parts around, like a jigsaw (even though I loathe actual jigsaws):

Wikimedia Commons

I’ve got four main sections identified now, with approximate study times for each. Two are currently shorter – an initial one reflecting on their own experiences of wellbeing and health care as adults, and the final section on live kidney donation – and two are longer – becoming a parent and health inequalities. Absolutely ideally they’d be a bit more even, because Balanced workload helps students, so I’m looking particularly for ways to lengthen the first one and maybe shorten the longer ones.

Now that the AV is pinned down, I am concentrating on identifying the other existing resources I will be drawing on – academic readings, case studies and data sources/infographics. For the becoming a parent section, I’ve found a very suitable-looking article to send students to read themselves (clearly and simply written and usefully overviewing other research on why infertility is so challenging to wellbeing, from a life course perspective). I also had a lightbulb moment of realising I could use an activist newsletter I read to do some teaching about LGBTQ parenting, which is another of the topics I’m covering within this section. I’ve also found a lack-of-stats on what percentage of families have LGBTQ parents, which I can use to do some teaching about the distinction between L,G, B, T and Q, the difference between identities and behaviours, and the use of proxies when you can’t get the data you want (here, same sex couple families is the proxy). I’m still looking for something more general about how becoming a parent affects wellbeing. One obvious possibility is something on baby blues v. PPD, especially if I can find a source/infographic that talks about men getting it too. But I’m slightly reluctant because it seems so obvious. I will keep musing on this to try to discern whether my reluctance is justified or not.

I’m also sketching in ideas for Activities, coding them using the Learning Design Activity Types framework, so that I can keep an eye on balance (bearing in mind that the module chair wants me to particularly design Productive types). I’m not writing them fully at this stage as that always takes me ages. I’m hoping the module team chair knows me well enough to trust me to do them properly later. I have far too many Activities at the moment – 15 where the aim is about 8. Tomorrow I will go through and kill off the weaker ones (my, what a violent metaphor!) Prune them out, so that the others have room to flourish, that’s a much better analogy.

At the moment, I can’t see ways of sewing (more images, sorry, I’m a visual thinker) the study skills activities my LG needs to deliver into the content. Study skills Activities work much better if they are not stand alone but integrated into the topics being studied but I’m not seeing a natural place to put them yet. I might have a section on being a student parent in the parenting section, which might enable a bit of a link for those students who are parents to the skill about responding to tutor feedback, but doesn’t make a link for those who aren’t. And also I’m worried about seeming to imply that getting tutor feedback is a challenge to wellbeing! I think that can probably be managed with careful wording though. And of course sometimes it absolutely is a challenge to wellbeing… I guess the study skill about writing a good essay could have a tenuous link to the article reading activity, via some commentary about different writing styles. Actually, that’s probably a good idea, now I write it here – I will add it.

Looking back at the other posts in this series has been really useful for remembering all the elements I want to include, so I think the hour or so I’m putting in to writing each post is actually saving some time. I’d forgotten the idea about offering students choice to investigate something they are interested it but now I can see that it might work well in the section that I had just called ‘Other health inequalities TBC’. I was struggling with what to put here because there are so many different health inequalities I could talk about, but letting students choose deals neatly with that problem. I need to find a suitable data source for them to use. Previously I’ve designed this kind of Activity with an encyclopedia, handbook or authoritative website on the topic, so students chose from the contents page/menu. But I’ve not yet found one of these for health inequalities.

My spider sense says I have too much content, even though I have done indicative timings and it adds up okay. I will probably just put a note in to observe this.

Showing my workings: Part 4

Explanation here, part 2 here and part 3 here. I’ve done another day or so’s work, and specified the audio-visual resources I will be using.

I found one cluster of resources, around Black maternal mortality, by simply thinking ‘hang on, this was all over the news a few years ago, I must be able to find AV around this’. This got me a couple of Radio 4 programmes which had featured this work, but were not listed on videofinder, as they weren’t made specially for the OU. However, we can usually get the Rights for BBC shows, especially radio, so I’m reasonably confident I’ll be able to use these (it’s not my responsibility to check Rights but I bear it in mind from bitter experience of building a whole complicated Activity around a supermarket advert and it then being too expensive to use). I’m particularly pleased to have identified a pedagogic arc between these two resources, an academic article and a study skills activity: the first piece of AV is from Woman’s Hour and introduces the importance of the topic, the second clip is from More or Less, and complicates the statistical picture and the expert says ‘we don’t have the evidence yet on X’, the academic article was published this year with this expert as the lead author, and provides the evidence. The data on which this article draws is particularly complete, so it would make a nice vehicle for teaching the Methods part of the PROMPT criteria. However, the article is quite technical and may be too difficult for Level 1, however much I edit and mediate it. If I conclude that, I’ve found an infographic that conveys similar information and will use that instead and do the PROMPT activity about a different article.

The other cluster is around live kidney donation, which I thought might be interesting to students as something they might not know about, and I found that thanks to a tip-off from our former Media Fellow, who I emailed to ask for suggestions. There’s a couple of extracts from Hospital, the BBC/OU co-production (so Rights will definitely be okay), that allow me to bring in life course perspectives, because there’s discussion of whether living donors should get preferential treatment if they later develop renal problems themselves. And then there’s an Open Learn resource ‘should kidneys be bought and sold?’ which debates this ethical issue and lends itself beautifully to a reflective Activity. One of my colleagues was involved in this, so I may get in touch and see if she would be willing to review my materials in this section.

The final piece of AV I’m going to use is something that was produced for another course (K310) but having consulted with that team, they don’t think it would be problematic for me to use part of it here. It’s about Black health inequalities, so lets me widen the focus from Black maternal mortality to wider health inequalities, which is something I wanted to cover as part of my focus on barriers to health care.

Just as I prophesied last time, I came to realise that the issues I thought were problems in the audio-visual resources I was considering were not insurmountable. Some of them can be addressed by cutting the clips in the right place, and others are not as bad as I thought.

Here’s my current learning guide overview, I always need to produce something like this first off:

I was talking to a colleague yesterday who is interested in LGBTQ people’s experiences of conception and birth (as am I, although not professionally), and when I realised that would fit beautifully with the module chair’s suggested focus on motherhood as well as the Black maternal mortality materials, I laughed with joy. I freely admit to being a very sad (but happy) geek about making distance learning materials.

Showing my workings: Part 3

Part 3 of my very slow liveblog, chronicling how I go about designing a section of an Open University module. Context and explanation here and part 2 here. This week I’ve done a couple of half days’ work, so about a day in total.

I read more of the module documents (learning outcomes, assessment strategy, descriptions for all the other learning guides) and then had a really helpful chat with the module chair about what it would be most useful for my LG to focus on. She identified the life course as one of the module themes that could do with more development, which suits me down to the ground because it’s a theory I’m very familiar with and have used in both my own research and previous modules. I might even be able to reuse ideas for activities from a previous learning guide I wrote that focused on the life course (although that was level 3 and this is level 1, so will need to be made more straightforward). She also identified that more Productive activities would be useful, which I’m very happy to do.

I also found out some of the structural requirements (maximum word length, student study-time, number of activities wanted, Reader articles length, forum use) – I later discovered that most of these were written down in a handy document in the module Sharepoint site but I had failed to find them in the many other documents there, a familiar experience.

I attended another module team meeting, where I found out more about what is going on in other LGs. This includes the very relevant information that the LG before mine is probably going to talk about diabetes, so I should probably scratch that from my list of candidate very common health conditions. For study skills, we’ve agreed I and the author of the next learning guide will split up the PROMPT criteria between us, and noted that they already feature in other modules students are likely to have studied, and are mentioned in LG8 in this module, so my focus needs to be more applying than introducing. Some students, however, may not have encountered them beyond this module, so I need to link to more introductory materials too. For my study skills activity on ‘a good essay’ one possibility is to ask students to do this as a forum activity. The module preference is for forum activities to be linked to skills, so that students can see the point of taking part. For the skill around responding to tutor feedback, I now know that this is already mentioned in LG9, so will build on that.

This week in my writing-for-production groups we were discussing Writing For Inclusion, and that reminded me that a neat trick for increasing inclusion is to get students to generate their own case studies or examples in relation to a theory or concept. So I’m planning to include that. The learning guide after mine is going to focus on strength-based and personalised care, which links nicely with life course perspectives, so I will do some feeding forward.

In terms of topic focus, the module team chair identified a useful overarching question for my LG, which is ‘how can health care support wellbeing?’ So focused more on the role of health care in wellbeing than on the provision and nature of health services themselves. I am wondering about a focus on motherhood, because it’s a classic life course event that would nicely allow me to bring in the work of colleagues around racism and maternal deaths, as part of a focus on barriers to health care. I’m also wondering about something on wider reproductive and sexual health issues, because that would allow me to draw on work of other colleagues (but not HIV because that’s already earlier in the module).

I have spend most of the time, though, trying to find suitable already existing audio visual resources, since I have to specify those by the end of next week. I’ve mostly been searching on videofinder, the OU’s enormous archive of materials used in all our previous modules and on Open Learn, because it’s very unlikely there would be problems getting the rights to use these. I’ve been making heavy use of the ‘speed up playback’ button – 1.75 seems to be optimal for me – and transcripts and storyboards when they are present. These really speed up the initial screening for relevance. But I’m not having much luck. My search terms are either too big (‘health care’ gets me 100s of hits) or too small. And I have a horrible feeling of familiarity in this search: ‘this one is not quite right in relation to X, whereas this one is great for X but all wrong for Y’. I have been round this loop so many times before over the years, and the solution is nearly always that I come to realise that actually the problems with X (or Y) are not as major as I thought and they will work fine, but I don’t seem to be able to speed up that process. I do remember my previous advice to myself that if I haven’t found something in 2-3 attempts, I’m probably not going to. Maybe I will do one more searching session early next week, and then settle for what I’ve got on my current long list.

Less urgently I am looking for some kind of friendly-looking database related to health conditions and demographics, where students can vary these and also things like time-period and geographic location. What I really want is something like the Gapminder resources but UK-focused. Or maybe I could take a more global focus? I will have a look later. If not, then I will have a look at the ONS (but think those are presented numerically not graphically) and Statista.

My priority for next week is to pin down at least one and ideally two or three AV resources. Eeek.

Showing my workings: Part 2

The next exciting instalment of my very slow liveblog, chronicling how I go about designing a section of an Open University module. Context and explanation here.

This morning I attended my first module team meeting (online), so now have more idea about the place of my section (‘learning guide’ or LG = approximately a week’s directed study time for the students) within the whole course. I’ve understood the overall module structure better than I had, so it’s really clear to me which are the other LGs I need to pay particular attention to, and ensure my LG builds on. I now have access to the shared area where all the drafts are being stored, so I will be able to look at other people’s LGs when I get a moment.

We are lucky enough to have someone on the team who used to be one of the Faculty’s Open Media Fellows, so he was suggesting possible OU/BBC co-productions we could use as audio-visual resources throughout the meeting. So there’s a couple of leads to follow up later once I am clearer about topic focus. He suggested searching the transcripts of the episodes on Videofinder (OU database of AV resources) using keywords, which is a great idea that I am horrified to realise I have never thought of before! There is always more to learn…

I’ve also properly registered the two key study skills I need to develop in my LG – I was vaguely aware of these before the meeting but they feel much clearer to me now. One is about evaluating an example essay and the other is about responding to tutor feedback on your work. Both of these strike me as ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’ study skills, so my first action will be to look for existing resource that could be adapted. For evaluating an example essay, my first step will be to have a look at The Good Study Guide by Andy Northedge This book was part of the first module I ever worked on, back in 2005ish, so it’s quite old now but it is a total classic and I don’t know anything more recent that does a better job. I value this book so highly that when we all had to grab things from our offices at the beginning of the lockdowns, this was one of the shelf-full of books I brought home. For the skill about responding to tutor feedback, I’m planning to remind myself what’s in the current version of this module, where I know this is also a key study skill.

In terms of topic focus, I have identified the general description of what my learning guide covers. This is taken from the Rep 03 – the description of the module that is created for the Board of Studies to decide whether the module should go ahead or not:

LG12 Adults in healthcare
This learning guide will select exemplar health conditions drawn from the epidemiology of adult health and illness, as outlined in Learning Guide 10. The learning guide will consider how general pattern of adult illness contributes to primary and secondary healthcare’s treatment and service priorities. The learning guide will explore how in relation to these exemplars primary and secondary healthcare services work to promote the wellbeing of patients and service users. It will also consider the evidence of effectiveness of primary and secondary healthcare interventions in improving adult wellbeing. This can include looking at factors that have improved health and wellbeing which are unrelated to improved medical and nursing care.

One of the things that strikes me right now as I paste in this general description, is that it’s quite public health and health care services focused, compared to other LGs I have written, which have focused more on the experiences of adults in health care settings. The focus here on public health is not at all surprising, since I know the person who wrote the Rep 03 is the person who is in charge of the public health degree, in which this module features. However, since most of the students on this module will be studying one of our other qualifications, I will check with the module chair and the person who wrote the Rep 03 whether this focus is essential, or whether something more focused on the experiences of adults in health care would be acceptable.

My very early thoughts are that I will want to include some topic that is a very common experience (to address the focus on ‘general patterns’), so maybe something about diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure (mental health issues are covered in a different LG). I’d also like to include something about barriers to healthcare e.g. phoning people up for appointments even though their notes state they are hard of hearing/Deaf. This example is in my mind because it happens so regularly to my HoH/Deaf friends, but it could be other sorts of barriers, like language or encountering racism or homo/bi/transphobia in a health care setting. I’m also wondering about something about a specific less common health issue, partly because students often find that interesting and feel they have learned something new, which can be motivating.

In terms of logging my hours: I spent 90 minutes at the module team meeting (which doesn’t come out of my 20 days for writing, as I have additional days for module team meetings) and then an hour chatting to someone about my ideas and writing this. I am lucky enough to live with someone who understands OU production pretty well, and I have realised that talking to them about my ideas is a really important part of how I design. But writing this was also very useful too, in further developing the ideas in the conversation, and realising the issue about the public health flavour for the first time. What do you know, reflexive practice for the win again.