CTE staff profiles_hidden Paolo Oprandi Our staff

Paolo Oprandi is a Senior Learning Designer. His work advances the University’s social justice mission of transforming lives through education, promoting an inclusive culture, and enabling fair outcomes for students. Through staff development and system design he blends in-person and online learning, uniting embodied and virtual learning experiences. By increasing the inclusivity of education, he believes his work transforms and enriches education, knowledge production, and the academic disciplines, through maximising the input of voices from diverse backgrounds. 

Paolo is central to the Active Learning Network, having been Chair and Co-Chair since 2019. The Active Learning Network is a community of academics, educational developers and learning technologists who meet regularly, share practice, organise CPD events, research and publish together in the field of active learning. 

Paolo is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Doctor of Higher Education Pedagogy. He combines pedagogy and technology to improve and enrich student experiences. He has been a product manager of several learning platforms and the head of a digital department in the charity sector. He has extensive experience in teaching technologies including learning management systems, having implemented and managed their operations in various contexts. In his spare time, he is a conservationist and nature enthusiast, Wikipedia editor, off-road cyclist, outdoor swimmer and paddleboarder.

Paolo has several publications, including most recently, The great equalizer: Learning in the outdoors, in which he makes a case for utilising outdoor spaces in teaching, Curriculum design that welcomes students into the discipline in which he describes the teaching that offers a supportive hand to students and encourages their contributions to build and Decolonising formative assessment in which Barbara and he describe how seemingly benign teaching processes can work to entrench white, male and heterosexual values into higher education teaching. Further to this, he is an editor of collective of works including, Outdoor learning in HE, 100 Ideas for Active Learning and Disrupting traditional pedagogy: active learning in practice.