Dr Cath Ellis

National Teaching Fellow 2010 Cath took up her post at Huddersfield having moved to the UK from Australia where she had taught at the University of Wollongong and the University of New England. In Australia her students were spread over vast geographic distances and she developed a wide range of strategies and skills in the use of online learning environments to support them. On coming to Huddersfield, which had recently opened two new campuses in the nearby towns of Barnsley and Oldham, Cath immediately saw the potential for teaching technologies to have an impact here as well. In the short time she's been at the University, Cath's enthusiasm for and expertise in the use of technologies to distribute teaching and learning to isolated cohorts of students has contributed significantly to the success of these two new campuses. She has led a TQEF project which has supported and inspired others to experiment with innovative approaches to teaching and learning, as a result of which videoconferences, screencasts and webinars are now used more widely across her school and the University. In her specialist subject area of postcolonial literature and theory, Cath's innovative use of an online teaching environment motivates students to identify and reflect upon their own relationship with Empire and then explore this through the scholarship of literary analysis. Combining a range of individual reflective and collaborative exercises, her students support each other through a journey of discovery into the past, present and future of colonialism in their lives. One student remarked: "The very fact that colonialism and its effects are still all around us and I hadn't noticed was a huge eye-opener." Cath's research into the use of e-learning has attracted the attention of the national press and in 2008 she was invited to give a conference keynote paper at a hybrid learning conference in Hong Kong.