“Around the world” podcast

Episode 3- Jo Stroud, University College London (UCL), UK

Alexandra Mihai
The Educationalist
Published in
3 min readSep 27, 2021

Welcome to a new episode of the “Educationalist: Around the World” podcast. As we are moving into a still uncertain new Academic Year, it’s useful to look at how different universities have adapted during the pandemic and what lessons we could apply in the near future in order to provide a high quality teaching and learning experience, regardless of the environment or mode it takes place in.

This is why I am very happy to have Jo Stroud as my guest for this episode. Jo is Head of Online Learning in the Digital Education Team at University College London (UCL). She has a cross-institutional responsibility for online and distance education in its many forms, providing guidance relating to online pedagogies and learning design alongside course development processes. She also leads on development of online short courses, acting as service owner for the public-facing learning environment, UCLeXtend, and managing UCL’s relationship with free online course and MOOC provider, FutureLearn. She has co-ordinated the strategic, pedagogic, and developmental components of UCL’s move to online teaching as part of its COVID-19 response. You can find Jo on Twitter at @JoStroud.

It was a real pleasure to hear about Jo’s work at UCL, in an interesting position that was put into the spotlight by the Covid-19 pandemic. We talked about her approach to educational development, that starts with a thorough needs-analysis and is based on dialogue and flexibility. We also discussed UCL response to the pandemic, which included designing (in an emergency mode) an online staff development course and setting up a faculty support network throughout the different faculties, which proved extremely successful and has become permanent. It was great to hear about some positive aspects in terms of pandemic legacy, such as UCL’s increased interest in new online and blended learning programmes and an openness to new types of qualifications (e.g. micro-credentials), in an attempt to prioritise flexibility and focus on lifelong learning.

If you are curious to find out more, I kindly invite you to listen to the podcast.

“Around the world” podcast: Episode 3: Jo Stroud (35:19 min)

This post is part of the “Around the world” series on faculty development. Watch this space in the coming months for more inspiration on professional development approaches in Higher Education from around the globe.

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Written by Alexandra Mihai

Assistant Professor of Innovation in Higher Education @MaastrichtU. Passionate about designing new learning spaces. My newsletter: educationalist.substack.com

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