Established in 2007, the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards celebrate and reward excellent practice and outstanding achievement in the learning technology field, and aim to promote intelligent use of Learning Technology on a national scale. The Awards are open to individuals and teams based anywhere in the world.

ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards 2019 are proudly sponsored by Edina.

The expert panel of judges, chaired by Martin Weller, President of ALT, represented expertise from different sectors and countries, bringing together a wealth of experience in Learning Technology. 

Meet the Winners

Research Awards

Described by the judges as a very useful and interesting project that will help educators reflect and act upon student evaluation more effectively. It will be interesting to see further evaluation of this project and also linking to issues such as gender differences in educator evaluation. The Student Opinion Miner: statistical opinion mining to understand student evaluation of teaching was highly commended. 

Awarded second place in the Research category is the UCISA Technology Enhanced Learning Survey and Case Studies, a long running project that has been a valuable resource to the learning technology community. It is impressive how the project has developed a sustainable approach around a community of practice.

The winning research project 2019 is the SHEILA Project (Supporting Higher Education to Integrate Learning Analytics). THe judging panel found that this project was exemplary in a number of aspects. It provides a valuable resource to the higher education community who are coming to terms with a new technology. It also demonstrates how a new approach needs to take account of multiple perspectives, and incorporate ethical considerations. The methods of open practice and sharing were also a model for many other projects.

Individual Awards

This year only 1 individual award was made and this is a very special one. The winner is Lizzie Seymour,  Learning Technology Officer, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) in Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park.  The panel found that the enthusiasm and passion of this particular entrant was apparent. Their work demonstrates the importance of embedding a learning technologist in other sectors beyond higher education. 

Team Awards

The Team Awards attracted the largest number of entries this year and thus the judging panel found it appropriate to highly commend four team entries: 

First, the Online learning team, Edinburgh Business School (Heriot-Watt University), who the panel described as having worked exceedingly hard in a short period to completely revamp their online offering, including creating new courses, developing a new platform and engaging in staff development. The cultural shift the team have effected in developing an understanding of good online pedagogy is impressive.

Also, the Hong Kong based AIE-AR Team, who demonstrated an innovative approach to engaging with academic integrity has the potential to make quite a ‘dry’ subject more engaging for students. The use of students in the creation of the second phase of the project was admirable.

The OU Learning Design team – Curriculum Design Student Panel managers, also highly commended, focused on the significance of the student voice in course design is often acknowledged but not always acted upon. It can be particularly difficult to capture in online/distance education, so the approach of this project to incorporate a robust and representative student voice at the design stage offers a model for others to follow.

Working across multiple sites in the FE sector, the highly commended SERC TEL Pedagogy Mentoring Team have developed a robust mentoring approach which foregrounds the pedagogic possibility of TEL. The requests they have received to implement this model elsewhere are testament to its effectiveness.

In the fiercely contested team category, the judges awarded second place to the Online CPD team, STEM Learning. This team have developed a range of high quality MOOCs

over a short period of time. More significantly they have affected a cultural change to the value of online learning, which is having real impact across a broad network of STEM ambassadors.

The winner in the Team Awards is the University of Edinburgh Lecture Recording Team. Congratulating the team on the win, the panel described why the entry was chosen thus: although lecture capture is an area of interest to many universities, what was most impressive about this entry was that it provides an exemplar for the implementation of any learning technology. The careful consideration of the perspectives of educators and students, coupled with a practical and responsive implementation makes for an effective model. The open ethos and sharing approach of the project for the benefit of the wider sector is also excellent practice.

Community Choice Award

Community Choice Award, determined through an open voting process and receiving 593 votes in total, was awarded to the Online learning team, Edinburgh Business School (Heriot-Watt University).

Congratulations to all this year’s entries! Photos from the evening will shortly be available here.

Find out more

The expert panel of judges was chaired by Martin Weller, President of ALT. The panel represents expertise from different sectors and countries, bringing together a wealth of experience in Learning Technology. The 2019 judging panel were:

Learning Technologist of the Year (Team & individual)

• Dr Peter Bryant - Associate Dean (Education) and Associate Professor of Business at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia)

• Elizabeth Charles - Assistant Director of Library Services at Birkbeck, University of London

• Paul Driver -  Senior Learning Technologist - Anglia Ruskin University

• Dr Mark Glynn - Head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit - Dublin City University

• Dr Peter Shukie, Academic Lead in Digital Innovation in Teaching and Learning, University Centre Blackburn College

• Ros Walker, Learning Technologist, University of Stirling

Learning Technology Research Project of the Year

• Dr Matthew Barr - Lecturer (Computer Science), University of Glasgow

• Dr Liz Bennett - University Teach Fellow, University of Huddersfield

• Dr Jill Buban - Chief Academic Officer at Unizin

• Dr Michael Flavin - Head of Curriculum Innovation at King's College London

ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards 2019 are proudly sponsored by Edina.

Notes for Editors

1. ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) is a professional and scholarly association which brings together those with an interest in the use of learning technology. As the UK’s leading membership organisation in the Learning Technology field, we work to improve practice, promote research, and influence policy.

2. You can explore what we do via our strategy slides, download the full text in PDF or Google docs. Visual content is available on Flickr.

3. We have over 3,500 Members across education sectors in the UK and internationally.

4. If you are writing about, blogging or sharing images and videos about the Awards using tools that support tagging, please use the tag #altc.

5. Association for Learning Technology, Tel:  +44 (0)1865 819 009 URL: http://www.alt.ac.uk/

6. ALT is a Registered Charity in the UK, number: 1160039