Some brief career highlights…. although starting out in my early career as a geotechnical engineer for a firm of civil engineering consultants, I have worked in education since the early 1990’s as a teacher of geography, history and science at Brooke Weston City Technology College where I was promoted to the role of Special Educational Needs Coordinator.
In 1998 was seconded to Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin University to work as a regional ICT advisor for the TescoSchoolnet2000 internet project, the first large-scale contributory web site for schools. In 2000 I joined Ultralab proper as a manager of online projects for the National College of School Leadership, providing online learning for headteachers and the wider school’s workforce.
In 2003, I was appointed the project director of Ultraversity, where I lead the development of a fully online honours degree programme that grew to have 300 full-time students, this remains my proudest achievement. Along side this work I spent time consulting around online education and this included work at Bournemouth University and in New Zealand working on projects for Core Education. The most significant of these being contributing to the development of an Online Delivery for Te Korowai Kohungahunga: Bachelor of Teaching Early Childhood for Te Wananga o Aotearoa Maori institution.
In 2007, I joined the Jisc-Cetis service in the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton. This work involved me in developing institutional wide curriculum frameworks as well as more technical work in developing institutional systems and applications, as well as writing analytical reports and papers on new educational developments and undertaking consultancy work for Further and Higher Education.
In September 2013, I was awarded my PhD and have supervised PhD students for the past 3 years as well as teaching on the Postgraduate Certificate in Education.
As well as this paid employment, I work as a School Governor chairing the Teaching and Learning sub committee at Norris Bank Primary School. In this work, my interest is in developing the practices of governors in relation to understanding teaching and assessment with a particular emphasis on school data.
Stephen Powell 