contextual

Contextual statement

I am Professor of Digital Learning in a university education department. As such my role includes normal professorial responsibilities, namely leading, managing and undertaking research. I supervise and examine PhD, MRes, EdD etc in digital learning; lead a digital learning research cluster; developed our REF Impact Case Studies, strategy and outputs for digital learning; mentor colleagues and host post-doc and overseas visitors. I bid for research income in digital learning, mostly Erasmus, Newton Fund and comparable miscellaneous funders; I lead or partner in projects from similar sources, all in digital learning.

I am also UNESCO Chair in Innovative Informal Digital Learning in Disadvantaged and Development Contexts.

Current and recent successes include developing mobile learning for community health education to combat Zika in Brazil, modernising language teaching in universities in Palestine with digital technologies, supporting the development of edtech horizon scanning methods for NHS, developing the pedagogies for shared interactive courseware and evaluating MOOC provision for refugees in Europe.

Much of this does now seem to be ‘research management’ in the broadest sense, through my role in the Education Observatory namely worrying about people, contracts, resources, meetings, reports and support but all of it around some aspect of digital learning, and the people that do it and the people that need it – incidentally, ‘digital learning’ was chosen against ‘TEL’, ‘learning technology’, ‘e-learning’, ‘online learning’ etc, as coming with less history, baggage and pre-conceptions. Likewise, I try to avoid ‘mobile learning’ except when referring to a specific research and practitioner community.

I contribute to EdD research methods as a lecturer but this and regular seminars and guest lectures are my only teaching.