Guests (2018/9)
Profiles of invited contributors to OKHE
Topic 1: Open practice
Dr Chrissi Nerantzi
Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) is a proud Global OER Graduate Network (GOGN) alumni and Principal Lecturer in Academic CPD in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is an open practitioner and researcher with an interest in open, creative and collaborative pedagogies. In her doctoral study she used phenomenography to develop an empirical collaborative open learning framework in cross-institutional academic development.
Chrissi has founded with many others a wide range of practitioner driven cross-institutional academic development initiatives for academics nationally and internationally. Through these, she proposes and experiments with alternative, more democratic and distributed models of academic CPD. The first one, which she organised in 2010, was used to connect PgCert students in Academic Practice/Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at different UK institutions to discuss assessment and feedback in facilitated Problem-Based Learning groups.
Among the open cross-institutional initiatives that followed are the TLC webinars, FDOL, BYOD4L, LTHEchat, FOS and #creativeHE. Chrissi is a volunteer UNESCO mentor supporting the global programme Open Education for a better world, collaborates regularly with colleagues from around the world in open educational projects and research and is part of a range of professional communities, networks and committees.
She has been invited to be the Programme Chair for the Open Education Global Conference (2019, Milan), a collaboration between the Open Education Consortium and Politecnico. Chrissi is a National Teaching Fellow (2015), was ALT Learning Technologist of the Year 2017 and won the GOGN Best Open Research Practice in 2018.
To find out more about Chrissi and her work, please visit her blog.
Cath Wasiuk
Cath took OKHE in 2017/8 and is returning to help deliver the first session. Last year, Cath shared thoughts on open CPD for staff development and whether open can enhance teaching quality.
Cath is a Learning Technologist at The University of Manchester. She has over 10 years’ worth of e-learning experience within various roles across the Higher Education sector in the UK.
She is the co-founder and online editor of the open access digital literacy project #1minuteCPD. This is an open educational resource aimed at improving staff digital literacies 1 minute at a time, 1 day at a time. It was developed as a response to declining attendance at TEL academic staff development sessions through removing time and location barriers to learning. Open practice has guided the creation of 1minuteCPD from the decision of which technologies to use to create the resource (WordPress, YouTube, Creative Commons images), how to manage the resource (Gmail, Google Drive) and to determine the contents of the resource (free and open technologies available to all).
In February 2019, Cath starts a new role at the University in the Integrated Interdisciplinary Innovations in Healthcare Science (I3HS) Hub in the School of Health Sciences. In this role, she will support healthcare professionals to develop reusable (open, CPD and credit-bearing resources), innovative, learner-centric and multi-discipline learning materials.
As well as the PG Cert in HE, Cath has a Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice, an MA in Electronic Communication and Publishing, and is a Fellow of the HEA.
Topic 2: Open teaching and learning
Dr Ang Davies
Ang took OKHE in 2016/7 and is returning to help deliver the first session. Last year, Ang shared thoughts on ‘positive openness’ and running a MOOC, and her second submission for the unit led to Times Higher Education blog on whether MOOCs generate a return on investment (NB: limited free access).
Ang Davies graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Bath, before completing a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Warwick. From here she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at AstraZeneca designing a high-throughput method for the expression and purification of proteins in mammalian cells.
Later she moved to Renovo, a biotech company in Manchester as Principal Scientist for the analytics Department within drug development; there, she was responsible for the analytical testing of drugs prior to their use in clinical trials. From 2010–14 she managed the Education and Training Team at Nowgen, a partnership between Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and The University of Manchester. During this time she was responsible for leading their training programme and designing many new training programmes in particular in the areas of personalised medicine and next generation sequencing.
Ang currently holds the post of Senior Lecturer In the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at The University of Manchester and is Programme Director of the Clinical Sciences (Bioinformatics) masters programme at Manchester, contracted by Health Education England. This programme provides education to develop the UK healthcare scientist workforce in order to realise the benefits to patients of initiatives such as the 100,000 genomes project. In addition she holds a Leadership position in her Faculty having responsibility for their portfolio of genomics, bioinformatics and biotechnology related masters programmes. She also has an interest in the development of pedagogy in the areas of clinical bioinformatics and genomics and in particular co-Led the development and delivery of a massive online open course (MOOC) in Clinical Bioinformatics. Ang also holds the post of Faculty Lead for developing continuing professional development (CPD) for healthcare and the biotech sector.
Dr Robin DeRosa
Adapted from Robin’s bio, Robin DeRosa, CC BY 4.0.
Robin has kindly agreed to contribute virtually to OKHE. We will be screening one of Robin’s videos in the session and facilitating discussion around it.
Robin is the Director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University. The Open CoLab is a dynamic site of pedagogical praxis dedicated to innovative teaching and learning and a community-driven approach to academic professional development; focused on instructional design, open education, interdisciplinary learning, and increasing the public impact of the academy. She is also an editor for Hybrid Pedagogy, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and new media in education.
Robin grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. After doing a dual degree in English and Women’s Studies at Brown and teaching high school for a year, she went to Tufts to do my Ph.D. in English, with a focus on early America. In 2015, Robin produced a tourbook focused on women’s history for Bodie State Historic Park in California, and more recently, she has enjoyed teaching at Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Digital Pedagogy Lab, and working with graduate students as an Affiliate Faculty member at Prescott College in Arizona, a highly interdisciplinary school with integrated commitments to the environment, the liberal arts, and social justice. She was an English professor for fifteen years before moving into the field of Interdisciplinary Studies and helping to develop a radically student-centered pedagogy for Plymouth State’s customized major program.
Topic 3: Open research
Lucinda May
Lucinda took OKHE in its first year, and is a graduate of the University of Manchester PG Cert HE. While taking this unit, she wrote about opportunities for openness through partnership with university presses, and opportunities and challenges of social media use in academia.
Lucinda May is a Research Services Librarian at the University of Manchester Library. She works with researchers to facilitate open access at an individual level, and manages University processes to ensure institutional support. Lucinda is operational co-lead of the Open Access Service, specialising in Gold Open Access, and operational lead for the eThesis Support Service.
Lucinda’s expertise includes academic publishing strategy, OA funding, and funder compliance. As well as the PG Cert HE, Lucy has a Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Management from The Manchester Metropolitan University. She is active on Twitter, where she can be found tweeting about Open Access, scholarly publishing, and hygge.
Martin Eve
Adapted from Martin’s bio, Martin Paul Eve, CC BY 4.0.
Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. He specialises in contemporary American fiction (primarily the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, and David Foster Wallace), histories and philosophies of technology, evaluative cultures in the academy, and technological mutations in scholarly publishing. He is the author of four books with one currently under contract with Stanford University Press. From 2015–2020, Martin is a member of the UK English Association’s Higher Education committee.
In addition, Martin is well-known for his work on open access and HE policy, appearing before the UK House of Commons Select Committee BIS Inquiry into Open Access, writing for the British Academy Policy Series on the topic, being a steering-group member of the OAPEN-UK project, the Jisc National Monograph Strategy Group, the SCONUL Strategy Group on Academic Content and Communications, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Access Steering Group, the Jisc Scholarly Communications Advisory Group, the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation advisory board, the California Digital Library/University of California Press’s Humanities Book Infrastructure advisory board, and the HEFCE Open Access Monographs Expert Reference Panel (2014), the Universities UK OA Monographs Working Group (2016-), an Executive Board Officer for Punctum Books, and founding the Open Library of Humanities.
As a result of this policy work, Martin was named as one of the Guardian’s five finalists for higher education’s most inspiring leader 2017, alongside the Vice Chancellors of Cambridge, Liverpool, and Sheffield Hallam Universities, and an Oxford philosophy professor.
In 2018, Martin was awarded the KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences and alongside co-contributors and the editor won the Electronic Literature Organization’s N. Katherine Hayles Award for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature.
Martin is also the developer of several digital humanities/computational projects.
