Visit from the OU (UK)

Yesterday and the day before, Niall Sclater - programme manager of the UK Open University's VLE - visited the Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL). Next week, the OUNL management will be spending a week at the Dagstuhl castle to discuss implementation issues of the OUNL's future strategy, especially with regard to its educational model and the ICT instrumentation to support that model. Therefore it was good to have Niall over, and hear his take on the OU-UK's choice for Moodle, and the experiences with it so far.

We had some pretty good discussions and a nice dinner and Niall was nice enough to give two presentations to a select group of stakeholders within the OUNL, some of whom will be present at the strategy week. Even though our educational models are somewhat different, we have a lot of issues and problems in common. We have decided to take these issues as a starting point for a further close collaboration. So in the coming weeks, you will find a list of issues emerging on the elo2b weblog at edublogs. Kathleen (our Programme Manager), Henry (my fellow project leader) and myself will contribute to that list, and discuss the issues.
After the strategic week, we can see how we can extend our collaboration.