Online Learning

Meet the Online Learning team.

The Online Learning team is led by Joanna Stroud and offers learning and instructional design services, consultancy for use of learning technologies, and project management support for course development. It additionally manages a number of platforms to support online degree programmes, short courses for CPD and executive education purposes, and MOOCs.

Joanna Stroud

Head of Online Learning

@JoStroud

Jo joined UCL Digital Education in 2017, having held learning technology positions at both research intensive and teaching-focused higher education institutions, including LSHTM, LSE, and Sheffield Hallam University.

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.

Jo holds a master's degree in Education from the IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, is a Fellow of the HEA and CMALT assessor, and has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Her primary interests in the field of digital education are, as you might expect, fully online teaching and learning, professional education, and open educational practices.

Vicky Devaney

Senior Learning Technologist

Vicky started working at UCL in 2023 as a Senior Learning Technologist. Before this she worked at the University of London for 15 years in a number of roles, most recently as a Senior Learning Designer where she developed online only degree courses and MOOCs for scale learning.

Vicky is an avid learner and an advocate for online learning, having completed her Masters in Online and Distance Education in 2021 at the Open University. She is now enrolled on an online doctoral programme at Lancaster University in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning and hopes to complete her PhD in 2026.

Antonella Veccia

Learning Designer (Online Learning)

Antonella joined UCL In March 2021. She is a Learning Designer with over 15 years’ experience in the educational, commercial and charity sector. During this time, she has advised a very diverse range of clients in digital learning best practice and supported the development and use of digital technologies to harness learner-centred practices.

Antonella’s academic background is in Politics and Modern Languages; she spent more than a decade as a tutor of Italian in many establishments including Oxford Brookes University, Oxford University Language Centre and the UCL Language Centre (CLIE).

Matt O'Rourke

Learning Designer (Online Learning)

Matt first became involved with education in the FE sector as an English language lecturer in the mid 1990’s. He then went on to work abroad for 17 years, both in linguistics and in technology enhanced learning. The majority of overseas postings were with the British Council, but Matt also worked for other organisations including the United Nations and also UCL at their Foundation school in Kazakhstan during this time.

For the past few years, Matt has been working nearer to home as an on-line learning consultant for the HE sector. Recent clients have included The University of Oxford and Imperial College.

Matt has a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He is interested in photography and video making. He also enjoys creating MOOCs and also working with colleagues who are looking to incorporate innovative technology into their teaching.

Dr. George Lekeas

Senior Learning Technologist

George has been working in the field of Digital Education for almost two decades on both the technology and the academic side. He supports all Digital Education technologies with a particular interest in learning design, synchronous/asynchronous teaching, blogging and e-portfolio tools for student work assessment, e-portfolios, professional reflection and dialog, showcasing, online and distance learning and MOOCS. He is particularly interested in the technical aspects and how different technologies can come together to create the best experience for students and tutors in blended pedagogies.

Oliver Vas

Course Delivery Manager

Oliver started working at UCL in 2019 as a Teaching and Learning Administrator and has worked in both the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Department of Economics. Before this he was a student at UCL where he completed his Master’s Degree in Chemistry. As the coordinator for the Online Learning Team, Oliver plans and administers the team’s course development work and is responsible for organising various aspects of the course design cycle.

Dionysis Dimakopoulos

Online Learning Advisor

Dionysis joined UCL Digital Education in 2021 after more than 10 years of managing face-to-face and blended short courses and with over 20 years teaching experience of IT subjects. He is leading digital education support across online programmes, short courses and modules. He is responsible for UCL's public-facing learning environment UCL Extend, as well as the service operations manager of other services including FutureLearn and the Learning Designer app. He splits his time between the Online Learning team and the Education Design product team.

He is the creator and main developer of the Learning Designer tool, on which he has been working since 2009 through multiple roles at Birkbeck and Institute of Education, based in the London Knowledge Lab.

Dionysis is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Birkbeck, University of London, working on improving the way the Learning Designer tool can help teachers create, discover, adopt and adapt designs, in order to help them deliver outstanding learning experiences to their students.

Tim Otway

Online Learning Content Developer

Tim joined UCL in June 2022 with seven years of experience in the education sector. He previously worked at Pearson Education, where he created and edited print and digital content on market-leading ESL (English as a Second Language) titles. Before this, he was based in Madrid where he worked as an ESL teacher and teacher trainer, as well as Content Lead for a digital B2B magazine. Tim obtained a BA in History from the University of Warwick and has a keen interest in applied linguistics and communication within teaching.