开放大学

This flexible qualification offers four specialist routes – applied linguistics; inclusive practice; leadership and management; and learning and teaching. Your choice of route will enable you to engage with issues, concepts, and debates in an area that supports your professional development. Your investigative study will draw on your own and others’ experience and on appropriate literature and will develop your understanding of the role and the limitations of research in informing educational practice. It includes a dissertation module in which you will undertake a small-scale inquiry on a topic of your choice situated within your own educational practice. Alternatively, for all pathways, excluding applied linguistics, you will have the option of completing an extended literature review and research proposal relevant to your own educational professional interests and practice, if undertaking a small-scale inquiry is not possible in your setting.

Key features of the course

• Flexibility to suit your needs – allowing you to complete in three years or take up to six years.
• Leads to MA in Education (MA Ed) or Master of Education (MEd), with a rich diversity of modules to suit your interests.
• An emphasis on professional development through collaborative learning.
• Develops and consolidates advanced scholarship and independent learning in the context of your own practice.

Career relevance

Throughout the world there is an increasing demand for creative, innovative education professionals who have highly developed skills and a deep understanding of learning. In many countries a masters degree is becoming essential for career advancement in education, training and professional development settings.

This qualification is designed to enrich your knowledge and improve your professional practice. On completing your studies, you should be able to:

• demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems at a professional or equivalent level
• reflect critically and constructively, in the light of ideas and frameworks presented in the modules, on how these apply to your practice and organisational context.

You will also acquire qualities and transferable skills that are highly prized by employers within education and related fields, such as:

• exercising initiative and personal responsibility
• the ability to make decisions in complex and unpredictable situations
• the ability to draw on appropriate research and ethical understanding
• the production of reports/outputs for academic and professional purposes.

You will be guided through the materials on how you can recognise and acknowledge these additional skills.