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Q&A with Jenni Bozec

21 March 2016

Jenni Boztec

Jenni Bozec is the marketing and communications coordinator in UCL Life Learning. The team supports UCL staff with advice, best practice guidance and practical help on short courses and continuing professional development (CPD).

What are you working on at the moment?

Last summer, UCL Life Learning launched its inaugural round of investment funding to help new UCL short courses get off the ground and existing courses to be further developed. As a result, we are funding eight projects from across UCL and I am assisting the course leads with: identifying their audiences; understanding what differentiates their course (their unique selling proposition); ideas for promoting to a professional audience; and messaging for their marketing materials. I’m really enjoying the diversity of subject areas and working with different people from across the university.

We’re also getting ready to host our first alumni event as part of the UCL Connect programme run through the UCL Development and Alumni Relations office. We have representatives attending from every faculty to showcase their short courses - it’s a great opportunity for departments to promote their CPD activity.

What advice would you give to someone looking to develop the way they teach?

I am not directly involved in teaching, but in relation to short courses, knowing who you want to teach and what the benefits are for them is essential. The professional development market is a complicated and competitive landscape with learners regularly bombarded with potential training opportunities. Professionals (whether they are clinicians, translators or architects) have limited time and budgets for professional development. We need to ensure we develop courses that fit their requirements, in the format they need, and give them a real, tangible benefit for their career or business. 

If your learning design can encompass this, you have a higher chance of your course succeeding.

What piece of technology do you find invaluable in your teaching?

A valuable piece of technology in our area is the online learning platform UCLeXtend. Using this to produce high quality and engaging online courses has helped us to access global markets.

How do you expect higher education to change in the next five years?

In terms of universities developing and delivering short courses and CPD, I expect that the number of courses offered will increase and the format in which they are delivered will change.

To meet the demands of a workforce who might want to change career or need to update their skills we will need to become more flexible and able to fit alongside people’s increasingly busy lives. Online learning is a way to meet this but we need to go further.

Higher education institutions will also need to demonstrate an increased return on investment (ROI) to organisations sending employees on our courses. What effect does our training have on their day-to-day business? What is the impact of our teaching on their employees and business? How can that be measured?

Within Life Learning I am encouraging academics at UCL to become solution-focused in promoting their short courses. Instead of trying to ‘sell’ courses, demonstrate that the course provides a solution to their business needs and that the knowledge gained on can improve their business.

What achievement are you most proud of?

I led a project in Life Learning to create an online resource to help staff in the planning, developing, marketing and evaluating of short courses. It’s a clear and extensive set of guides and toolkits linked up with other resources across UCL.In conjunction with this, I have created an infographic to help people find what they might need.

I’m really proud of what we have achieved with this and the feedback from staff who have used some of the resources so far has been really positive. Some of the tools I have developed to help people identify their audiences, or do their marketing and planning, have proved to be very useful so I’m pleased we can make a difference.

Professor Hugh Starkey (UCL Institute of Education) asks: "What advice do you have about using your time most efficiently in teaching and assessment?"

From a Life Learning perspective, 'authentic learning' can be very valuable - enabling learners to work with their peers and UCL experts on relevant issues and problems can help them to take practical solutions straight back into the workplace. 

What questions would you like to pose to the next subject?

“If you could build closer ties with your relevant industries through professional development, what tangible benefits could that bring to your departments’ other education programmes?”

Do you work at UCL? Would you like to be featured here? Email: teaching.learning@ucl.ac.uk