Rewarding outreach and awarding excellence: Education news from Imperial

Here’s a round up of education updates from across Imperial.

From an inspiring outreach programme aimed at young people of Black African and Black Caribbean heritage to a successful awards season for the Business School teaching team, here are some education highlights from the College.

STEMM Futures

The Student Recruitment and Outreach team is running a new series of online seminars aimed at young people of Black African and Black Caribbean heritage interested in a future in STEMM subjects.

STEMM Futures is a four-part webinar series for students in years 7–13 who want to find out more about studying at university and their future careers options. Black people are currently underrepresented in STEMM, making it harder for young Black people to understand what their next steps should be.

This webinars are an opportunity for young Black people to find out what it’s really like to study STEMM at Imperial, the steps needed to get to university, and the type of jobs it can lead to. The four seminars, ‘discover imperial’, ‘choose your future in STEMM’, ‘careers showcase’, and ‘goal setting and revision techniques’, aim to help them answer questions like ‘which subject is right for me?’ or ‘do people like me go into careers in STEMM?’.

Find out more about the STEMM Futures series

Learning Designer of the Year 

Angela Moreno Valero, Senior Online Learning Designer in the Business School, has won Learning Designer of the Year in the prestigious Learning Technologies Awards 2020.

The awards received hundreds of nominations from across the world. Against this stiff competition, Angela won the Gold Award. She impressed the judges with her skill at matching her designs both to user needs and to the different design environments she has worked in, as well as the clarity of her writing and presentation.

“For my application, I had to produce a video presentation and a written report to showcase my designs for online modules, and demonstrate the impact they’d had on the students’ learning, and how the E-Learning sequences I created were innovative and well-suited to user needs,” Angela explained. “In the EdTech Lab, we work really hard to design courses that have students at the centre, and to ensure that we innovate in our pedagogies and design practices with a rigorous evidence-based approach. It’s very rewarding when our designs and methodologies receive such recognition, and I feel honoured to have represented the team and the institution in these prestigious awards.”

Celebrating learning and teaching excellence

The Business School has recently celebrated the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Awards. These annual awards are voted for by students and recognise the outstanding contributions made by faculty, teaching assistants and professional staff.

“We know that the recent months have been challenging, and we want to thank our staff for their contributions to allowing students the best experience possible," said Dean of the Business School, Francisco Veloso.

The categories include online teaching, inclusive teaching and innovation. Read a full list of the winners and testimonials from students on the Business School’s website.