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Looking globally: the future of education
Looking globally: the future of education

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Activities and tools

This free course, Looking globally: the future of education, uses a variety of interactive tools to help you develop your ideas. The following pages of this guidance section should provide you with all the information you need to use these tools and approaches effectively. You may prefer not to read through all at once, but to refer back to it as necessary while you work through the course.

The main ways you will participate in this course are:

  • ‘Think about’ points, in which we ask questions designed to help you reflect on the ideas discussed in the course. You may find it useful to take notes about these reflections, as the ideas you have at these points will feed into later activities. It is up to you whether you take these notes on paper or as a digital file. You will not need to share these notes but they will help you when drafting our course forum posts. They will also be useful to refer to when you answer the quiz questions.
  • A course forum [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   in which you will respond to set tasks and be able to read the responses of other members of the course. Reading others’ contributions will help you think further about the ideas raised in this course, especially when the responses are from people of different backgrounds and nationalities to you. Documents, such as mind maps and photos, can be uploaded as part of your responses. For the forum activities we will sometimes ask you to post a response and then refer to at least two other participants’ responses. This may require coming back to the discussion board on more than one occasion, as posts will appear over time. You can find more information on how to use the course forum in Using the forum.

You will also be invited to engage in the following activities to help you develop your ideas and articulate your thinking:

  • Interactive activities in Week 2 where you will be asked to order and group a set of statements according to certain ideas and principles.
  • Mind mapping to help you brainstorm ideas and connect them with one another. Again this can be on paper or digitally – such as using the online tool Mindmup.com. These mind maps will be for personal reference. Later, when you have gained more ideas and posted ideas and read others’ comments, you will be asked to update your mind map and share it on the course forum either as a screenshot or as an image/photograph/scan.
  • ‘Working wall’ tasks in Weeks 1 and 4, where you can put up a virtual sticky note on which you have made concise points. This note can be seen by all course participants and you can position your note alongside other people's contributions if you think there is a shared theme or connection of some kind. Read more about how to do this in Using the working wall.
  • A gallery task in Week 5 using our OpenStudio platform, where you can upload images as a visual response to an issue. Further guidance on this is available in Using OpenStudio.

The course is continuously open but is designed to take about six weeks of study. You may experience that some fellow learners will join or leave the interactive and collaborative areas while you are studying. However, a tutor will be moderating the site and you will always be able to interact with a group of other participants.