Helene Pulker

Profile

I have been a member of the Department of Languages at the Open University since June 2005. I was first employed as a Staff Tutor for the West Midlands region. In this role, I was responsible for the recruitment and training of a team of language tutors who deliver courses in that region.

Before joining the OU, I was a senior Lecturer in French at the University of Derby managing French courses on the undergraduate programmes. I was also responsible for the design and delivery of in-company training programmes in French, German and Spanish.

I am now a Lecturer in French, based in the central academics office at Milton Keynes. I have been working on the re-write of the new course Envol (French, upper-intermediate) and was course team chair of that course in its first year of presentation (Feb 2009). I am now the course team chair and author for the remake of the Beginners French course, Bon Départ. 

I am also a course team member on the intermediate French course L120 Ouverture and a member of the DoL Virtual Learning Environment Group.

Teaching Interests

As an author, I am particularly interested in looking at integrating the use of VLE tools in the languages OU courses. I am interested in the design of learning objects for synchronous and asynchronous online tutorials.

I have been teaching at the L211 residential school in Caen every year since I joined the OU, as a tutor for the first two years and as course director for the last two years.

Research Interests

My interests of research include the re-use of learning objects by language practitioners in online synchronous tutorials. I am also interested in issues related to Open Educational Resources (OER) and repositories.

Current Research

I am currently a member of the LORO project. Languages Open Resources Online is an internal repository which has been developed by the Department of Languages for OU tutors to access tutorial materials for all languages and all levels.

I am also working on a project looking at students' social interaction, collaboration and informal learning in the L211 tutor group forums.

Publications