I work as Digital Education Librarian for King's College London's Library Service, providing support and expertise in building and developing our presence in various online spaces e.g. the Moodle-based VLE we use at King's. I joined my team in 2014 where I had a primarily teaching role, with 'digital' being what we then called a functional responsibility, i.e. a minor 'add-on' to the main job of teaching information literacy. We had a very small online presence, mostly Library Guides (specialised webpages) and our VLE presence was entirely focused on maintaining University-wide suite of practice Turnitin modules. We were printing paper workbooks!
To support our team moving to a flipped-classroom model I led on several initiatives to deepen and develop our approach to digital education, such as:Â
identifying and adopting different elearning authoring tools.
leading on the creation of a flagship suite of elearning, and its continued development.
leading on the Library's first online course supporting researchers completing Systematic Review.
developing methods of enmeshing our learning content into existing academic modules.
developing policies and guidance to help others in the Library engage with digital education in a way that promotes good pedagogy.
Over time the functional responsibility grew into a distinct role in its own right - in 2019 I took on the Digital Education Librarian role (analogous to a Learning Technologist elsewhere in KCL) I inhabit today.
I'm completing the CMALT for a few reasons. I would like to 'have something to show' for the last seven years of my working life, professionalising my relatively vocational path into this role, and to gain a qualification to recognise how I've developed and how I've contributed to the Library's success in engaging with online teaching. Being a part of the LT community is more than delivering content to consumers, I want to be able to adopt and adapt to new ideas and technologies with peers, rather than as a lone individual.
My ambition is to live and work, ideally as a Learning Technologist, in Canada. Relevant qualifications are required to a much higher degree than in the UK (though my impression is this is changing) and achieving this accreditation will help me achieve this ambition.