Mr Tom Olney

I am currently employed as a Senior Learning and Teaching Manager in the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) with specific responsibility for the adoption and development of learning design and learning analytics principles in STEM course creation. My work also includes project managing various initiatives to support the Associate Dean, Student Experience in improving the experience of STEM students.

Projects, past and present, generally involve delivering training opportunities and developing resources to support the professional development of OU academics, Staff Tutors, and Associate Lecturers as well as evaluating and then operationalising institutional research outputs into business as usual.

Examples of these projects include: Analytics for Action (2015-16), OU Learning Design (2016-18), Teaching Tricky Topics (2017), Predictive Learning Analytics (2017-18), Enhancement of Lifelong Learning in Belarus (2018), Learning Design in STEM (2021-2022), Learning Outcomes in STEM (2021-2022) & Learning Analytics in STEM (2022). 

However, my background is in face to face classroom teaching. Before joining the OU I was employed as a teacher and Humanities faculty lead in Melbourne, Australia, teaching English, International Relations and History for 10 years. I have worked as an examiner for Pearson Education and I hold a degree in History and Politics, and a Post -Grad Diploma in Education. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association (SFHEA) (2018). 

I have significant expertise in developing, interpreting, explaining and obtaining meaning from visualisations of both learning analytics and learning designs and am an experienced facilitator, drawing on my classroom practice and trained in consensus and group facilitation methodologies (2016). At the OU I regularly facilitate learning design workshops for module teams across the faculty. I am particuarly interested in the cross-cultural application of learning design and as such I have developed and delivered a range of workshop approaches for international and commercial audiences such as EDEN (2016 & 2019), the Independent Institute of Education (IIE) in Johannesburg, South Africa (2017), OU China, Jiangsu OU, Shanghai OU, Guangdong OU, Sichuan RTVU, Jiangxi RTVU, Hubei RTVU (2017-22), and as part of the Enhancement of Lifelong Learning in Belarus (BELL) project (2018). I am co-creator and co-faciliator of the Learning Design and Course Creation (LDCC) Workshop.