When: 17th December 2015, 12:30 to 13:30

Where: Ridley 2, Seminar Room 1.55

Dr Hamish Macleod, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and member of the teaching team of the MSc in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh.

The MSc in Digital Education (previously known as eLearning) at the University of Edinburgh is ten years old this year. The programme was in the vanguard of a major development of postgraduate online distance education at the University. We presently have over 60 programmes on offer, with about 2,500 students enrolled, and the development plan is that by 2025 we want to see around 10,000 students participating on over 100 programmes.

This seminar will focus on the experiences from the MSc in Digital Education, and the understanding of rigorous and supportive online education that we are developing with the help of our students. The programme teaching team have set out to reject the idea that online distance education should be considered as in any way deficient as compared with the ‘gold standard’ of the face-to-face campus learning experience. In order to stimulate debate about some of the important issues that we have faced we have formulated our ‘manifesto for teaching online’, which we are currently in the process of revising and updating. https://onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com/

Conceived to provoke controversy, the manifesto can form a focus of our discussion. We can also stray into the territory of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and the contributions which this novel and exploratory form of online educational offering can contribute to an institutions mainstream teaching and learning agenda.

To reserve a place please contact sarah.harvey@ncl.ac.uk.