While in the OU library, I noticed the newly created area in the ground floor, the DIgiLab. From the website:

Digilab is a showcase for tools, technologies and resources illustrating how today’s technology can nurture tomorrow’s learners. The long term aim will be to provide visitors with guides explaining how engaging interactive materials achieve successful learning outcomes. It is hoped that exploration of Digilab will spark the creativity of the multi-disciplinary teams who develop our learning materials.

Digital art? Multidisciplinary projects? New technologies showcase? COOL! And KMi is part of it of course!

from BBC-news:

An OU spokesman said: “Just as there are different ways to dress, there are different ways to deliver education.”
He added: “As technology has changed, we have slowly phased out broadcasts of this course-related material. It’s a whole lot easier to send students DVDs or CDs than it is to get them to video programmes and watch them later. Now we have virtual learning environments and podcasts as well.”
Since its birth in January 1971, tens of thousands of course-related programmes have been shown, mainly at night. Initially 300 programmes were made with the BBC to cover four foundation courses for the new UK university.
Now, at the OU archives in Milton Keynes, some 92 metres worth of scripts are being kept for posterity.

The Open Universityâ€s commitment to broadening access to education is being taken to another level with the launch of OpenLearn, its major new open content initiative. The OpenLearn website will make educational resources freely available on the internet, with state of the art learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators.

This £5.65 million project, supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will cover a full range of subjects from arts and history to science and nature, at all study levels from access to postgraduate. Available to learners and educators throughout the UK and worldwide, the project will be of particular significance in The Open Universityâ€s efforts to open access to hard-to-reach groups and tackle educational disadvantage both within the developed and developing worlds.

I registered and browsed some of the learning resources, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff. The other cool thing is that resources are usefully organized within a pedagogical context (that is, specifying learning outcomes, keywords, and so on for each of them). Plus, the whole suit of KMi-learning-tools !

A course on the meaning of the analogue/digital dychotomy…

And a course on Hume’s philosophy…

By the way, it’s worth having a (long) look at our main rival, the MIT Open CourseWare …