Professor Maggi Savin-Baden

National Teaching Fellow 2009 Maggi Savin-Baden was educated at the University of Brunel and the University of London and has worked in both pre and post 1992 universities over the course of her career. Now Director of the Learning Innovation Group at Coventry University, she is leading a team of researchers, PhD students and innovators. The focus of Learning Innovation is to improve learning in new spaces such as immersive virtual worlds and diverse types of problem-based learning and she has gained funding from the JISC and the Leverhulme Trust to support this. Over the last 20 years she has pioneered work on the use of problem-based learning nationally and internationally and continues to stimulate debate in this area. She is a popular keynote speaker who is said to be someone who 'always prompts debate' because she interrupts and challenges current practice in a desire to improve, develop and move things on. Maggi also has a passion for getting students to think critically and to catch her enthusiasm, at whatever level they are learning. One first year student said to her "the research module was challenging at times ... "but I found your sessions inspirational because you encouraged us not to view research as a difficult topic". Having discovered she enjoyed writing she has become rather more prolific than she expected. To date she has published six books on problem-based learning, her seventh book entitled 'Learning Spaces' was published in December 2007 and her eighth 'A practical guide to qualitative research synthesis' will be published in December 2009. The two books she is currently writing have emerged from an interest in for providing a forum for debate about new approaches to qualitative research and in ways of helping students use immersive virtual worlds for learning and teaching. Maggi describes herself not only as a serial writer but also serial learner: in her spare time she is doing an MSc in e-Iearning and learning to snowboard.