Dr Debbie Holley

National Teaching Fellow 2014 Dr Debbie Holley combines her passion for both education and technology in her work as Associate Professor/Deputy Head of Centre for Excellence in Learning at Bournemouth University. Entering academia from industry, she quickly realised that students on her Transport course, with their patterns of shift working, had very limited opportunities to attend regular classes. These difficulties, not unique and indeed shared with other students, led to her research interests in overcoming challenges/barriers faced by students seeking to access learning outside the formal classroom. Seeking digital solutions to enable learning at a place and time of the learners' choice, her digital scholarship draws on a sustained body of pedagogic research. Her research exploring how learners interact with their technology has made a significant difference to education, nursing and social work students, when working away from their University base in practice and on professional placements. Debbie is committed to the use of open educational resources (OERs), and sees the sharing of these resources as making a significant difference in overcoming the educational digital divide through supporting and modelling best practice in availability, accessibility and acceptability. All her digital work is available via creative commons (CC) licensing, enabling free repurpose/reuse for educational purposes. An experienced biographic narrative researcher, and submitted to REF 2014, Debbie captures the lived experiences of students, feeding this work into developing supportive and enabling curricula, influencing and engaging students and the academic teams supporting them. Seeing mobile and 'bring your own device' (BYOD) technologies as an integral part of the student experience, Debbie has published extensively in this area. An award winning paper at ALT-C (with Bradley 2010) reported on student attitudes to learning using their mobile phones, and identified the student desire for leadership from academics to support them with accessing learning in both formal and informal contexts. Convening the Education, Technology and Computing Research Cluster at ARU, and chairing the Knowledge Centre Committee at the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT), Debbie retains her links with industry and recently completed an innovative 3D warehouse project with Clipper Logistics. She was awarded a prestigious HEA Principal Fellowship in 2013. An enthusiastic user of social media, she can be followed on twitter @debbieholley1.