IOE short course on Blended and Online Learning is award-winning

To date over 26,000 participants have enrolled on the course created by Professors Diana Laurillard and Eileen Kennedy, which is hosted on the FutureLearn platform. 

In an era of accelerating innovation in and deepening integration of technology and education, Professors Laurillard and Kennedy say that online learning is key to the future of teaching. 

The short course supports educators to develop the best pedagogies for blended and wholly online learning, and teaches them how to create and optimise their own teaching techniques and designs. 

The GMA awards celebrate excellence in the practice of technology-enhanced education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects. The awards evaluated the value of the course for providing inclusive and equitable education, lifelong learning and development, quality teaching and learning, and technological or digital innovation. 

Professor Laurillard (Emeritus Professor of Learning with Digital Technology) and Professor Kennedy (Professorial Research Fellow) developed the course during the Covid-19 pandemic in response to the pressing need for educators to pivot to an unfamiliar and often under-supported means of delivering education to their students.  

To develop the course, they collaborated with other UCL colleagues and teachers and lecturers in schools, colleges and other universities from previous collaborations. 

The course used the UCL Learning Designer tool to enable around 13,000 actively participating teachers, from all education sectors, and from over 100 countries worldwide, to share their perspectives of using digital technologies effectively. The tool enabled participants to collaborate with each other to redesign their teaching for purely online learning. 

“We tested a new way of supporting online discussions by inviting alumni of each course, who had completed all exercises and contributed discussions and peer reviews, to return as Mentors for later courses”, said Professor Laurillard. 

Initially the course was delivered in 12 successive runs and is now available on demand on FutureLearn. 

Professor Laurillard added: “Over the 12 runs, 42 alumni volunteered and many came back several times, adding to the richness of the exchanges of experience and ideas among all the highly knowledgeable professionals taking the course.” 

The award was presented in December 2024 at the annual Global MOOC and Online Education Conference at Queen Mary, University of London. The Global MOOC and Online Education Alliance was initiated by Tsinghua University in 2020 and co-founded in partnership with a number of international universities. The conference was attended by university leaders from China and the UK, and delegates from the Chinese Ministry of Education and UK Department for Education. 

In a brief speech given at the awards event, they expressed their gratitude to their alumni Mentors and other collaborators who contributed videos and ideas in the formation of the course content. 

Professors Kennedy and Laurillard document this research in their co-authored 2023 book, ‘Online Learning Futures: An Evidence-Based Vision for Global Professional Collaboration on Sustainability’, is published by Bloomsbury and available in paperback from May 2025. Their latest short course Understanding Education in Conflict and Crisis Settings, co-designed with displaced communities on the Thai Myanmar border, launched on FutureLearn on 6th January 2025.

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