This contextual statement was submitted in June 2016.
Since October 2014 I have been eLearning Project Manager in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. As part of a team of four I work across a number of projects within the School, and in particular lead the team's involvement in the 'CPEL' suite of Programmes. CPEL (Continuing Professional Education and Learning) comprises three postgraduate distance learning programmes for Social Workers in Wales; funded by the Care Council for Wales these professional programmes were introduced in 2014, with a focus on practice analysis, reflection and development within the workplace.
I previously spent eight years as e-Learning Manager in the School of Education, University of Birmingham. I had overall responsibility for the use of the institutional VLE within the School and advised colleagues and senior management on policy, procedures and best practice around Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) generally. I also led eLearning Team input into a number of programmes, modules, and other projects across a range of both campus and distance education courses, and coordinated support for over 100 academic staff and more than 2,500 students in using the VLE and learning technologies generally.
As such my current role and previous role differ significantly in terms of scope and scale; at the University of Birmingham I coordinated elearning elements for a whole school and a range of programmes and my remit was predominantly management, coordination and consultancy. At Cardiff, on the other hand, I am much more closely involved on a day-to-day basis in a small number of distance learning programmes, with a greater emphasis therefore on learning design, content creation, and general student administration and communications.
This adjustment, while at times challenging, has been a really instructive experience and has broaden my skill set as a Learning Technologist. Further more, part of my current remit is to find a role for the eLearning Team in the wider School of Social Sciences and to broaden our impact beyond the confines of our specific distance learning projects. In this I will of course be drawing on my previous experience in Birmingham, and it is interesting to draw parallels between the two roles in the context of what it means to be a learning technologist. As such this will be a core theme of this portfolio; I will provide a snapshot of the range of skills and experiences I have gained over the course of ten years and reflect on what I have learned in that time.
In terms of my career this is a good time to reflect on achievements thus far and membership of the Association of Learning Technology will help me to build on this, in particular in becoming a more active part of the wider learning technology community.