About me

What do I do?

I am the Faculty Learning Technology Lead (FLTL) for Social and Historical Sciences. My role is to advise academic colleagues on how digital technologies can be used effectively within teaching and learning, to liaise with the central Digital Education Teams, Arena and other departments across UCL to ensure colleagues are aware of centrally provided services, and to ensure local needs are understood and integrated appropriately into central planning. This includes all aspects of the student journey, including transition, belonging, assessment, co-curricular recording achievement, student digital development, and their outcomes.

I also have an interest in how the student experience is impacted by the implementation of digital technology as part of their academic journeys and have worked extensively with students as partners on various projects within the Faculty and beyond. This way of working is useful in gauging the reality of use as opposed to the theoretical expectation.

Background

I have been supporting the use of technology in education within higher education since 2005 working on projects and innovative ideas with students and staff. Prior to that, I was an IT lecturer in further education for six years. I am interested in how we record students’ development in a fair and useful way through open badges and portfolios. The development of everyone’s digital literacies skills has also been something that I have found has been integral in the success of using educational technologies and so has been a focus for me. My work with Students as champions at the University of Southampton was a great way of developing skills for staff and students in real-time as opposed to attending a course and having to learn abstract concepts.

My PhD research explored digital decisions in higher education, especially how the concerns of non-traditional students are taken into account.

I have worked with the Association for Learning Technology which was a real privilege (President 2017) and I maintain my interest in the work of ALT as well as many of the other associations that I have worked with. I have just stood down as a board member of the eAssessment Association (due to PhD commitments), but I have continued as a judge for their annual awards since 2020.