Here you’ll find a narrative summary of my career up to December 2007 in reverse chronological order. Either scroll down or link straight to the sections that interest you. Look at 'Current Activity' to see what I'm doing now.
Director, Learning Development and Media Unit, University of Sheffield
Head of Section, (Training & Technical) CEGB Film & Video Unit
The unit was created in October 1999 to rationalise a number of disparate professional service units that had learning and teaching as their focus. I was appointed as its first director Over the seven years I ran the unit it employed variously 21-23 highly capable staff and had an annual turnover of close to £1m.
The unit had a dual focus, and one of my main missions was to integrate the two aspects. One of the foci was the educational development of staff involved in learning and teaching at Sheffield. This part of the unit ran a Higher Education Academy accredited initial professional development course, the Certificate in Learning and Teaching, which nearly all probationary lecturers were obliged to complete, as well as the Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education aimed mainly at Graduate Teaching Assistants. At the time of my leaving we were developing a framework for ongoing professional development based on the Higher Education Academy’s Professional Standards Framework. The educational developers also ran bespoke development sessions at the request of individual departments, and developed and championed the institution’s peer assessment of teaching system.
Another, and very important arm of learning and teaching development focus was evaluating the impact of the centrally funded learning and teaching development projects which were aimed at furthering the university’s learning, teaching and assessment strategy. Although not universally the case, most of these projects adopted some form of C&IT in their implementation. The evaluative approach we used was based on Theories of Change which was developed originally to assess the impact of large, community projects when measured against their original aims.
The second focus of the unit was the support of users (staff and students) of the institution’s managed learning environment, Blackboard (ex WebCT) Vista, and high level media production to support learning and teaching. Two and a half staff were allocated directly to user support of the MLE, while nine were involved in media production, including the important process of educational design. The media produced was interactive and often very sophisticated, and tailored closely to achieving module learning objectives, often in innovative ways. The material was delivered to students by any number of methods, including the MLE, free standing web sites, CD and DVD, video and audio streaming, and podcasts.
As Director, my role in the unit was to ensure co-ordinated and effective management of all its staff and resources, and to crystallise the unit’s mission to make sure all activities were pulling in the same direction and in a way that would further the institutional mission. In this regard I served on the major committees relating to the University’s learning, teaching and assessment strategy, as well as working strategically with senior managers, including the Pro-Vice Chancellor responsible for Learning and Teaching.
I left the unit and the University in December 2007.
See also e-learning benchmarking
e-learning accessibility
both of which I had a direct hand in.
Prior to becoming head of the learning Development and Media Unit I was the Director of Sheffield University Television which was an internal video production unit, the principal aim of which was to support learning and teaching in the university, though the unit did allocate about 20% of its resource to producing promotional material for the university and its departments. The unit had existed for many years prior to my joining and it had established a formidable reputation in educational video production, but due to a brief but not altogether successful commercial flirtation under previous management the unit required regrouping and refocusing. I was brought in in 1994 to do that, inheriting 11 staff.
One of my early moves was to align the unit unambiguously to learning and teaching, and working with others I introduced a peer-reviewed bidding systems whereby potential users were required to bid for production resources. The review panel scrutinised the bids to ensure that work was allocated to the most strategically important projects. This had the longer term effect of establishing the unit as a strategic entity in the development of learning and teaching.
One of the strengths of the unit was that it employed skilled producers who could work with academic colleagues at a professional level, meaning that the media design could be optimise to best meet students’ learning needs - academics had an understanding of their subject, we had an understanding of the media. Having come from an educational media background myself I was able to undertake a part-time producer role alongside being Director of the unit. During my time the unit won a plethora of international awards, some of which I can claim direct credit for. (See Production Awards.) The unit also sold a healthy number of its educational video titles in the UK and the USA, so helping with its funding.
The 90’s saw the rapid development of interactive multimedia and CD ROMS, and the television unit was not slow in gaining expertise in these areas. I undertook the production of the unit’s first interactive CD ROM, the contents of which have recently (i.e. 2007) been updated and transferred to the web by Queens University, Belfast.
When a large scale review of the central academic support areas was undertaken in 1999, Sheffield University Television was recognised as being a key player in learning and teaching and it was amalgamated with other units to form what was to become the Learning Development and Media Unit. I was appointed Director of the new unit.
In this period of my career I worked as a self employed writer/director/producer specialising in video for training and education, although actual commissions covered a wider brief, mainly promotional films
I was regularly hired by a number of well known London production companies including the Moving Picture Company and Hawkshead. Commissions included work for British Telecom, Credit Suisse, Laporte, the UK Government's Department of Energy, PowerGen, National Power, Nuclear Electric, the Institute of Physics, IBM, and Boots. In this period I also wrote and directed a 40 minute documentary for the Central Office of information's 'Perspective' series on bio-materials aimed at the overseas television market.
The most interesting work however came from the BBC Open University Production Centre where I was regularly invited to work as a freelance producer on radio, television and video cassettes for both Open University students and its general audiences.
It was during this period that I finally grew to realise that producing for education was my true interest in life, which is why I was attracted to apply for the post of head of the Television Service in Sheffield when it was advertised in early 1994. However, this period of self employment gave me a good grounding in client relations and remaining solvent in a competitive world.
I was recruited to the Central Electricity Generating Board's Film and Video unit to head-up a newly created section and to improve the standard of production of all training and so called 'technical programmes' within the organisation. This was my first experience of change management, and under my guidance the new unit moved towards producing a wide range of videos commissioned to raise internal awareness of company initiatives; to support technical training - some of the videos being incorporated into training packs produced by the National Training Centre; and as general information films and videos aimed at specialist, technical audiences.
The post involved managing the CEGB's in-house video unit which consisted of five staff. I regularly supplemented their numbers with freelances as a way of increasing throughput and providing on-the-job training, and where circumstances were justified I sometimes commissioned outside production companies to undertake complete productions. One such production, a cartoon animation on quality assurance procedures, won a Gold Camera Award at the U.S. Industrial Film and Video Festival.
This was a period of flux within the electricity supply industry. Privatisation was very much on the agenda, and as the proposals became more concrete it was clear that my career as a video producer would not necessarily be well served by remaining in the organisation. I therefore decided to leave and try my hand as a freelance.
When I joined BBC Open University Production Centre at Alexandra Palace The Open University was still relatively young and it was an exciting place to learn my craft. I started off as an Assistant Producer, but by August 1979 I was promoted to Producer. The use of media was central to the institution's approach to teaching and there was a real sense of innovation and experimentation behind the belief that students should have a rich learning experience despite the disadvantages (as they were perceived then) of distance. Also, Open University students did not need formal entry qualifications so there was an added requirement to work imaginatively with media to illustrate and explain concepts in non-traditional ways.
A key aspect of the work of the BBC producer was to forge close links with academic colleagues in the OU. The BBC was clear from the outset that it should work in true partnership with the OU, consequently producers were required to have academic credentials and to serve alongside academics on course teams. Not only were producers required to be fully confident with the content of their programmes, they needed intimate understanding of how their programmes related to other components of the course and how they should mesh with the overall teaching strategy adopted by the course team.
Another important aspect of the producer’s role was project management - managing budgets; contracts; detailed planning; working as part of a team; using resources effectively; managing and inspiring crews and performers; and most importantly, meeting deadlines with a high quality product.
While at the BBC I produced over 50 broadcast television programmes for OU courses, most of them in science and technology. Arising from the OU work a small team of us attached ourselves to what turned out to be a Nobel Prize winning high energy physics experiment at CERN in Geneva. The experiment became so high profile in the race to discover three sub-atomic particles, and our coverage of it so well conducted, that we produced “The Geneva Event” in 1983 for the BBC’s flagship science series ‘Horizon’. The film attracted the highest viewing figures of the season.
The period with the BBC indelibly shaped my future, but in 1987 - the year I left the BBC - I had been with the organisation for 10 years and new horizons beckoned.
I left school in 1967 with my quota of ‘A’ levels to join the Post Office as one of that year’s intake of Student Apprentices. This was at a time when telecoms and mail were still under one umbrella. I did a year’s general training with them to become familiarised with a broad cross section of the business before going on to the University of Swansea to read Electrical Engineering. Summer vacations were spent gaining further experience of Post Office business, including periods in the research laboratories and a visit to the Swedish PTT. I graduated in 1971 with 1st class honours.
I took a year out with Voluntary Service Overseas where I was sent to Nigeria to teach engineering, maths and general science in the technical college at Auchi. The college catered mainly for young oil industry employees. During this time I traveled extensively in Nigeria and the surrounding countries.
On return to the UK in 1972 I rejoined the Post Office in London, working as an Executive Engineer with the Postal Mechanisation Branch managing a number of security projects. A year later, frustrated with office work having only returned from adventures in Africa, I left to take up a Natural Environment Research Council sponsored studentship in the Department of Physical Oceanography at the University of Bangor. There I used my electronics background to work with a group that was designing and building a probe to investigate the microstructure in the upper ocean. I deployed the probe on a number of international scientific voyages and published a research paper in the process. My data was also used in another research paper authored by colleagues. (See Publications.)
The studentship came to an end in 1977 and I was fortunate enough to have a choice of jobs. One was in marine surveying, the other was with the BBC at the Open University. The latter job was awarded against stiff competition and my instincts directed me towards it, which subsequently led to my career in educational media. I had not completed writing up my PhD, but I thought I could easily do that in the evenings and week ends. So I accepted the job, but sadly for the PhD the write-up didn’t happen. However, in retrospect I see that as a price worth paying.