Dr Jill Johnes

National Teaching Fellow 2011 Dr Jill Johnes is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Lancaster University, where she has been teaching both undergraduates and postgraduates for twenty-five years. Her main teaching areas include quantitative and mathematical methods in economics and, more recently, business economics. Her early research into the determinants of student achievement and non-completion sparked an interest in experimenting with teaching methods and assessments to stimulate student motivation. This inspired her pioneering use of electronic teaching resources, such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and on-line assessment, about which she has published. Jill has, throughout her career, been innovative in devising assessments which motivate the students, demonstrate the subject relevance, and hence lead to the achievement of desired learning outcomes. Her early work in this area earned her a Sir Alastair Pilkington University of Lancaster Teaching Award. Jill is also recognised for her research in the area of the economics of education and, in particular, into methods for assessing the efficiency of higher education institutions which has involved the estimation of production and cost functions for higher education institutions. As a consequence she has advised various government agencies including the Department for Education and Skills and the National Audit Office, Sweden on these issues. Jill has been director of the undergraduate programmes in the Department of Economics, and was recently appointed as director of a new cross-discipline postgraduate degree programme, the MSc in Quantitative Finance. Whilst in these roles she introduced new programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including work placement variants of the undergraduate degree schemes and the Graduate Diploma in Economics. She is married with three (almost) grown-up children. She has combined her career with family commitments by working on a part-time basis since the birth of her first child in 1991.