Mr Richard Francis

National Teaching Fellow 2005 Richard is Head of e-Learning at Oxford Brookes University. He was instrumental in the adoption of Oxford Brookes' Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). In just over four years the University moved from no student users of WebCT to over 13,000. Through training and consultation Richard and his team enabled the great majority of staff to use it to embed e-learning into their teaching programmes. Training is delivered in many modes, including workshops, seminars, both face-to-face and online, drop-in sessions, formal training courses, online tutorials and, above all, individual consultations. Training is aimed not only at teaching staff but also at staff such as librarians, learning technologists and course administrators. Richard has used his funding to investigate how collaborative learning technologies, in particular wikis, can support communities of learning, research and professional practice at institutional and national levels. He has established a University-wide collaborative authoring platform based on the Confluence wiki system, which is tailored to the needs of a wide range of user groups, from undergraduates to postdoctoral researchers, national project teams to local special interest groups, academic schools and departments to student social communities. Evaluation of its impact is ongoing.