Sarah Montano is an experienced academic with a demonstrated 21-year history of working in the higher education industry and programme management. Sarah is currently Deputy Director of Education (Digital) for the College of Social Sciences where she leads in the use of digital education resources and the development of distance learning programmes. She has held several leadership positions, including Programme Director Business Management and School Director of Transnational Education and Senior Lecturer in Marketing.
Prior to working in academia, she worked in retail at a senior management level. As a first-generation student she is acutely aware of how she lacked social capital when at university. This inspired her to begin her pioneering work in digital pedagogy and much of her work in digital innovation has been to ensure equality of access for all students. She is particularly proud of being an early pioneer of distance learning and playing a significant role in gaining the award of the world’s first fully online MBA to receive AMBA accreditation.
Sarah’s teaching is heavily influenced by her industry practice and, through this, she delivers engaging industry-relevant teaching and authentic assessments via an experiential learning approach. Her work on authentic assessments has been widely published internationally and she supports others to develop their own authentic assessments. Sarah holds the award of Senior Fellow of Advance HE for her performance in teaching, design and leadership and her work on digital learning has been used to demonstrate the digital excellence internationally. Her pedagogical research interests are primarily around how industry practice can be reflected in assessments, digital education and graduate employability skill development.
Sarah’s academic area of research is retail and consumer behaviour. She is particularly interested in understanding the role of retail in creating community third places. She is an engaging and skilled communicator and regularly appears in the media on the subject of retail industry change. She is the BBC’s retail expert, writes for the College blog and the BBC website and often appears on the BBC news channel to talk about a range of retail subjects such as Cyber Monday.