Beverly Leeds

National Teaching Fellow 2012 Beverly Leeds has been at the forefront of e-learning developments at UCLan and has pioneered the use of the Adobe Connect web-conferencing software not only for live and recorded lectures but also for remote seminars and assessment feedback. She has also led the way in the use of blogs and e-portfolios for reflective and enquiry-based learning. Beverly has been described by one of her colleagues as a positive deviant who may not always follow the same course as others but for positive beneficial reasons. This is reflected in her teaching where she has relegated information-giving lectures to be online for anytime access, maximising classroom time for face to face discussion activities. It was Beverly's experience of using stories with graduate trainees in the IT industry that led her to ensure her teaching provides opportunities to build confidence in applying and using in-depth subject knowledge. Her stories enable students to learn about the 'narratives' and sense making that go into the subject discipline. Beverly believes that it is fundamental for learners to be engaged in order to experience effective learning and therefore all the modules she delivers have connections with real organisations. One of her most successful modules has been a client project module which has enabled over 200 final-year undergraduates to act as a consultant to over 200 organisations. These students have all been encouraged to tell their own stories through blogging so other students can learn from many organisational stories. Beverly's other passion is the development of open learning materials and the main focus of her funded work has been the development of over 100 re-usable Open Educational Resources (OERs) by a team of academics. These OERs are used by over 750 individuals nationally and internationally and are available to download from the project website, www.employability.org.uk and JORUM, (www.jorum.ac.uk), the JISC open repository. External funding of over £650,000 in the last eight years has enabled her to develop technology-enabled learning packages and supporting frameworks to enhance student employability and support work-based learning.