 It's a challenge of creating a high-quality open access blog, and I'd like to introduce our presenters Paul Catriona. Hi, I'm Paul Astolls, a learning designer at the Open University in the STEM faculty. And hello everyone, I am Catriona Matthews, a learning designer at the Open University, and I'm also based in the STEM faculty. Now, before we start, we just wanted to acknowledge that the session is being recorded, and just if you are in the session with us today, and the slides look a little bit small, you can go into full screen mode and the button's just at the top right, it looks like a square. We also invite you to use the chat tab, which you can find by clicking on the chat and activity button on the lower right of your screen, and Paul and I have both already put a little hello in there. If you have any questions during the talk, please pop any questions in there as we go along. We won't be able to engage with the chat during the talk, but once we finish, we'll go back through and we'll try to answer any questions that you might have. And then if we don't have time, we'll carry on the conversation afterwards in Discord. So, with all of that admin out of the way, welcome to our online presentation. Read all about it, the benefits and challenges of creating a high quality open access blog. Before we get into the presentation, we wanted to give you a heads up that there is some audience participation at the start of our talk. All you need to do is have your phone or smart device ready to scan some QR codes, which will guide you to. And if the audience interaction fails spectacularly, do not worry. It's only a bit of fun. Anyway, note, if you are not watching this talk live with us, the question element will no longer be functional, but fear not. You can still engage with some QR codes at various points in the talk and whether you are live with us now or watching the recording later. So learning design at the Open University is made up of three service areas and these are evidence based designing experiences and working together. Each of these service areas is broken down into a series of well defined services. So for example, within designing experiences, we support colleagues with student journey planning sessions. In short, this is a way to storyboard the design intention of the experience that a student may have within their learning journey. This student journey process helps to provide opportunities to explore where specific support in the design process may be required. Another purpose of the service model is to help us evaluate and continually develop our approaches. The services also help to provide a network of peer support for LD colleagues so they can in turn provide world class design support for our colleagues and stakeholders. Now, welcome to those that have just joined as I've seen the numbers shoot up a couple. This is your audience participation warning. If you're watching this with us live, then please get your devices ready as we're about to ask you a couple of questions. And for those of you who are actually watching the recording of the session, hello, you might be able to engage in this section of audience participation, but you can just enjoy the next few moments because it'll either work really well or not at all. But if you wanted to, you could pause the video, skip ahead a few minutes and you'll find a QR code that links you to our blog site. And if you scan that and keep it safe, you can then come back here and pick up the talk from where you left off. So just like we do with our own blog posts, we're going to ask you the audience to consider and reflect on some questions to promote some engagement interaction, hopefully. So with your devices, you can either scan the QR code on the screen or join us by going to menti.com and entering the code 74381264, which is also at the top of the screen. There are going to be two questions. And once we've finished the first question, keep your device with you because we will then guide you to the next one. And we can allow up to two minutes per question for you to answer. So take some time and consider what your response is going to be. Paul's going to put a timer on the screen to show how long is left. And while you are thinking about your responses, we'll read out the questions and we'll also provide some of our own experiences as an answer as well. And that's great to see that someone's already managed to get in and provide an answer to. I'll just give you a few minutes to have a think about the first question, which is, have you ever adapted your practice after reading a blog post? So I was actually thinking about my response to this when Paul and I came up with these questions the other day. And I think I mostly fall into the intend category because often I find blog posts inspire me to look further into areas which I'm interested in or maybe don't know much about. And they're normally like a catalyst for a process of change. So normally I find that I blog posts are kind of an introduction to things as they're often published a bit quicker than scholarship work. And they'll kind of be a bit of an introduction and then I'll do a bit of a deep dive into more research or speak to colleagues. So they're usually kind of a point of inspiration, which leads to further development, but it can sometimes be quite a lot further down the line rather than happening immediately. And I definitely remember that when I first started out in HE blog posts were a bit of a lifesaver, especially when I started facilitating because they often give you really nice snippets of practice and the good as well as the bad and they can be a really good point to kind of sit and reflect on your own practice and what is working and what isn't. And we've got about 10 seconds left if anyone else is feeling whizzy and wants to get involved and put their response up. So thank you for the response to this. So it seems like we've got 100% response to the answer. Yes, which is really good to hear. And Paul just move the question on now to our second question or two. Thank you. So the second question is, have you ever discussed the content of a blog post with a colleague. And again, I'm going to just pop a little timer on the screen. I can go. We can have a maximum of two minutes for this and yeah, take some time to consider what your answer is. And again, so my response to this is yes as well. So the same as what's been answered on the screen and in my experience. So I have shared in a mentoring capacity. The contents of a blog post with a colleague. We were reflecting about reflection actually and sort of the best approaches or different approaches to reflecting on the quality of sessions that were being delivered. And so in thinking about how to articulate that and consider the impact of our actions and our sessions, we discussed the CPD as a daily activity blog post that's on the Open University Learning Design blog site and reflected on the Approaches discussed in that site and my colleague and I just kind of weighed up the best approach for them to use the Model at the end of the post and they went away and and and used it in their practice, which was great. And it led to further discussions around reflection and measuring impact and it was very rich discussion. So yeah, it was a really useful thing to be part of and to use in that context. So thank you to the response there. I am going to close the voting slightly early, I think, and that's okay. And we are going to move on to the next slide. So before we get into our talk, we are just popping this on the screen. So if you're interested in exploring the blog, whilst you listen along to the next section, you can go ahead and scan that QR code. It will take you to the site and you can click around at your leisure. And we'd love to hear about how you might use the content of our blog site to develop your practice. And at the end of the slides about presentation, there'll be another QR code, lots of QR codes today, that you can scan, which will link you to a form that prompts you to get to the site. And we'd love to give some feedback about this. So before we talk about the learning design blog specifically, we'll give a quick overview of what it is that makes a blog a blog. Baxter puts together the salient characteristics of a blog in the diagram we've recreated on this slide. And these characteristics are community driven, reflective dialogue, information sharing and management of content. The learning design blog, like other blog sites that exist, conform to these characteristics in some way. And throughout the presentation today, the way that we talk about the blog can be directly linked to this underpinning framework. So now we're going to take some time to properly introduce our learning design blog to you. And first of all, we'll look at the audience of our blog. We're going to provide you with a non exhaustive and purposely broad list of the people that make up the audience of our blog. Visitors and users of the blog and its resources can be teams supporting the design and production of modules at the OU. For example, our editorial colleagues who are both audience and contributors and a little later in the talk, we'll be exploring that group in a bit more detail within our communities of practice section. The audience is also made up of other learning designers, both within the Open University learning design team and external from our team. A little later, we'll be talking about some data from the OU Learning Design Twitter account as a way of contextualizing how our external audience is connected with. And finally, anyone interested in learning design and pedagogy. That's right, we're keen for our content and resources to be adopted and used by anyone interested in learning design and pedagogy. We share any of the resources that are on the site with a Creative Commons license so that they can be used freely. The authors of a blog post can be anyone in the OU Learning Design team. We actively encourage any member of the team to contribute to the blog. There is a backlog that's joined when a new blog author identifies their desire to contribute. And this provides time and space to create the post and reflect on the guidance provided to our authors and more on that a little later. We've also collaborated with other experts and colleagues outside of the team too. An example that we'll be exploring of this approach a little later relates to a blog post written by a colleague about working practices between learning design and editors at the OU. So a little bit about the platform the blog is hosted on. It's hosted on WordPress and we have our own server and the blog was established in 2018. And since then we've amassed blog posts and open access resources on a broad range of topics. We also use Twitter and Yammer to promote and share blog posts and these platforms help us to better connect with a wider audience of interested parties. The content and focus of the blog is to provide examples from our own practice, share overviews of current topics of interest and to update any of the open access resources housed in the resources section. The OU Learning Design team are very active when it comes to scholarship. The blog site plays an important role in capturing and sharing process progress. That's the word with some of our scholarly outputs. This may be related to specific projects such as the update to the activity types taxonomy. It may be the blog post itself is the output of scholarship and such as the post related to using reflection as a daily CPD task. Now hopefully this brief introduction to the blog site has provided enough of an overview for you to better understand the purpose of the blog. And next we're going to start considering some of the benefits and challenges related to using an open access blog. But before we get into that we just wanted to remind you that at the end of the presentation there's an opportunity to navigate to and explore the blog site if you haven't already and its resources. So again we'll be encouraging you to connect with us about the content of the blog and how you might use it within your practice. And as we go through the next slides please consider if any of the content we mentioned piques your interest. And if so we encourage you to go and read the full article and consider how you might develop your practice as a result. And most importantly tell us what will work for you. Baxter also provides a useful framework to help approach the implementation of a blog. What you can see on the screen is an adaptation of the Baxter guidelines for implementing an organizational blog. And we follow this process to ensure the OU learning design team curates a high quality open access blog. Our approach is slightly adapted from the original process outlined by Baxter. And for us planning involves defining the purpose of a potential blog post and agreeing on a time scale for it to be produced. The support development and implementation of a blog post on the site is provided in various ways to the blog creators. And we'll be exploring what that looks like in our context in the next few slides. Keeping things current and posting regularly is a real challenge. On the slide are some of the ways that we attempt to tackle this. And one of the most valuable ways of keeping content flowing are informal blog champions within the LD team. They help to drive new content and keep an eye on the validity and authenticity of current information and resources. In order to ensure a level of quality control within the site we have a peer review process prior to publication of any blog post along with a template guide. This helps to ensure a consistency in approach. It allows content creators to ensure that their voice is unique in the narrative that they create whilst conforming to a style that allows each post to feel connected to the identity of the blog. We also have a system that ensures a single point of contact in charge of maintenance and uploads. This helps to reduce the chance of errors creeping in to how and when articles are published. When it comes to the resources we update this section on an as and when basis. We have at the time of creating this presentation 38 resources on the site. And these are present as a way of providing tools for our audience to use and adapt for their practice. As you can probably imagine it can be quite time consuming to ensure that they're updated so that visitors to the site are not accessing out of date content. Changes to resources can be driven by a range of factors. A specific example of this is when updates to the activity type taxonomy we use drove the need to update resources related to that taxonomy. So for example we had to create and upload an updated activity planner as an editable PDF which we've got a picture of on the screen. And we also had to archive some resources relating to the previous taxonomy updates to the resources are also driven by accessibility requirements. And as guidance changes we review resources to ensure that they meet the necessary guidelines. So we thought it would be useful to consider here what makes a community of practice before we talk you through some examples of how the blog helps to create communities of practice within the OU. As well as communities of shared interest external to the OU which are related to the topics that we post on the blog site. A community of practice has been defined as a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge or expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. The three factors which make a community of practice are on the right hand side of the screen and these are a domain of knowledge, community and practice. And it's the creation of resources and other additional actions by members of the community in this instance off the back of blog posts that make the blog a community of practice rather than simply a community of interest. Let's look at the first example of how internal communities of practice have been supported by blog engagement at the Open University. So this example outlines how the blog helped to initially spread the word about the pilot outcomes of a new way of working between learning designers and our digital development editor colleagues or LDs and DDE's. The blog was circulated and reflected on as the process of using the LD DD document was being rolled out. And this culminated in a reflective CPD event looking back at the success of the process. Built into the event in February 2023 was a review of the practice outlined in the blog and the blog post itself was directly linked back to and used as a springboard for discussion and review. And the outcomes of this event will then feed into next steps for the continued engagement in the use of this form. Example number two, this is related to sustainability and how workers grown in this area following the publication of a blog post. In January 2023, a colleague created a post about sustainability challenging the readers to become engaged in the conversation on this subject. A Yammer post quickly followed to publicize the blog post within the Yammer community at the OU and this led to the formation of a sustainability working group and several networks being developed through contacts made as a result of engagement with the blog and the Yammer post. The working group which both myself and Katuna are part of have developed several resources which have led to conference submissions and a soon to be released blog post to act as an update and point of reflection to further support work within this community of practice. One of the other benefits of using an open access blog is being able to interact with an audience outside of the OU. As you can see from the screenshot on the slide, our learning design Twitter account engagement rate is consistently quite high. It's commonly accepted that an engagement rate in excess of 0.33% is quite high and you can see that it's over that on the screen here. We selected three examples to share on screen of Twitter engagement with posts relating to blog content and it's one of the main ways that we're able to share to a wider external audience. Now we don't consider this external engagement a community of practice just yet as we do not have the creation and collaboration on actions and resources needed. But this does provide a context for how we engage with and promote external communities of interest. However, we do get interaction in the form of comments on the blog on Twitter. So for example, not long after we tweeted about this very talk, we had a retweet that stated how much our blog is valued reflected on and indeed shared wider by our Twitter audience as part of specific reflective activities. Now in an ideal world, we'd also be sharing with you some data from engagement with our blog as well. Unfortunately, we've been having some issues with Google Analytics on the page, which we're still in the process of addressing. But we are able to acknowledge that our blog posts do garner community comments and these represent shared experiences of the blog posts content and how it relates to the readers lived experiences. It helps us to see how our audience interact with and digest the content. So we promote this type of interaction through the templates used for our blog posts. It encourages the author to ensure a key takeaway for the reader is present, challenging them to reflect on what they've read. Here we are sharing a series of benefits and challenges taken from the literature. They are represented here as they represent our experience. Also, these are not the only benefits and challenges by any means, but they do represent a useful place to start if you're considering the use of an open access blog in your own practice. And you can see a full reference list at the end of the slides. Benefits of using an open access blog include but are not limited to what you can see on the screen. And we have firsthand experiences of each of these factors and I've discussed aspects of them as well and previous slides, for example, about how we create opportunities for communities of practice within the OU and also how we connect with a wider external audience. The challenges that you can see on the screen are unfortunately also a shared experience. It is important to recognize that creating, using and maintaining an open access blog space is not always plain sailing. However, being aware of some of these challenges can help us to work towards negating the impact that they could have. So an example of a challenge that we in our team have overcome with our blog site is the recruitment of colleagues to create content. We've found that the best approach to overcoming this challenge is through the use of the informal blog champions that we spoke about a little bit earlier. If you are interested in exploring the blog, please follow the QR code that has the learning design logo in the middle of it. It's the one at the top of the screen next to the dark blue arrow that says scan. We'd love to hear more about how you may use the content of our blog site to develop your practice and if you're happy to provide us with some feedback, please use the QR code at the bottom of the screen. That's the one next to the orange arrow that says scan. Thank you for listening and engaging with our talk at this year's OER conference titled Read All About It, the Benefits and Challenges of Creating a High Quality Open Access Blog. I don't think we've had any questions in the chat while we've been speaking. But if you do have any questions, I think we might have a couple of minutes and we'd be able to answer them now or if not, we're active in the Discord channel and you can always chat to us there. But mostly we look forward to hearing about how you connect with and use our blog content. We'll pause here for a few minutes to give you a chance to scan the codes if you're thinking of doing that. And if you're watching the recording, you can always pause the video. We'll also pop the reference slides up in just a moment for the benefit of the recording too. That's great to hear, Anna, that you're planning to encourage your team to visit the blog, which would be very pleased to hear.