Centre for Bioscience

After completing my PhD in Chemical Engineering at UMIST I took a 10 (!) year break to bring up my two children. I was then lucky enough to secure a Daphne Jackson Fellowship at Leeds University with Dr Jerry Knapp. This Fellowship is designed to help women who have taken a career break to up-date their skills and return to the workforce. I have been working non-stop ever since!

After 3 years in the labs, working on the microbial biodegradation of polycyclic aromatics, I took a change in direction and moved into e-learning. This started with the development of a brewing web-site designed to complement some 1st year microbiology modules, but also to show students how to ‘look out of the box’ and give them an idea of what fundamental research consists of. Since then I have been developing teaching modules, in conjunction with many departments within the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Leeds, most of which have been developed in Articulate. We have devised a series of ‘Virtual Labs’ which show students equipment, techniques and theories of a practical before they actually enter a laboratory. These have all been delivered via our VLE. The student responses have been fantastic, and I hope to continue creating more interactive, engaging materials in the future.

At the University of Leeds we have a long tradition of producing e-learning resources for delivery through our VLE. These are very well received by our students and seemed ideal for submission onto JorumOpen, as they were partially built already and just needed some ‘minor(!)’ tweaking to make them suitable for submission to an OER.

These units were thought to be most appropriate for submission as core knowledge is unlikely to change significantly over time, and so would remain a sustainable resource which would not need much amending following submission.

To support these units we chose to submit a range of Questionmark Perception files which provide the ‘testing’ aspect of the knowledge units we provided. Hopefully this should (theoretically!) enable any end user to find not only the core information to teach microbiology, but a question bank that could be used alongside the teaching materials.